Posts by Backdrifter

Quote from Lazlor

Speaking of irrelevances : to think of what might have been had they had even a modicum of pride in their legacy

As it is/seems to be: cash grab and late years ego boost. Might as well have Ariana Kardashian or BeyonZ as guests while they're at it.

What makes you think they lack pride in their legacy?

I don't think they need or crave a cash or ego boost at this stage. From their description of the reasons for the tour I think they just genuinely feel like doing it, urged partly on by a youngster who probably wants to feel part of his dad's legacy, doing what he does very well (I gather). When you've existed as part of that sort of creative unit for so long it can be hard to completely cut yourself off from it despite, or maybe because, of long gaps.

Who knows, there's still time for Ariana or Bey, or Jarry Beiber/Hustin Styles, to be signed up as guests. Yay!

Quote from slowdancer

All you bog roll collectors show your faces....

Please tell me that last word isn't a deliberate comedy mis-spelling.

Quote from NedFlanders123

I meant Frank's nephew as noted Ziggy going to prison.

I think we assume he's gone into protection in return for giving information to the police about The Greek. We last see him looking out over the water then walking off.

Quote from Groucho

Decks Dark off Moon Shaped Pool.

Would have been a great Bond theme

By the way, of course they did do a Bond theme. Spectre is a beautiful song, a zillion times better than that bit of nothingness by Sam Smith they ended up using.

While another member of Radioactive was Geoffrey Perkins (sadly no longer with us), who produced The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy which has appropriately just turned 42.

Anyway, Invisible Touch.

Quote from NedFlanders123

Its gripping and the acting first class. Highlights the corruption at the top of police and local government and any empathy goes to those living without hope and emeshed into the spiral of drug taking and selling as the only way of life known. What happened to Frank's son at the end of season 2? Hope some loose ends are covered in next 2 seasons.

I couldn't put it better. It also emphasises how plodding the system is. In other shows and films, wiretaps and other law-enforcement actions seem to just happen instantaneously. The Wire depicts the administrative struggle involved at each step.

Some of the best characters I've ever seen on TV are from that one show - McNulty, Bubbles, Omar, Mouzone. Bubbles especially - in any other setting he'd be the shambling druggie making an occasional appearance. The Wire shows he's a real person, a human being trying to deal with his circumstances as best he can, just as we all do. His story continues throughout and for me is one of the lynchpins of the whole show.

Re Frank's son, you mean Ziggy? Spoiler alert for anyone intending to watch it - as I recall we last see him heading off to start his prison sentence for killing 'Double G'.

There are elements of continuity through the remaining seasons but don't expect every loose end to be tied up. I think this is a show that's forthright about life not always being that neat and tidy!

Everyone OK for toilet paper?

Quote from NedFlanders123

Finally taking time to watch The Wire. Just finished season 3. Superb TV

Oh man, good for you! It's remarkable isn't it.

I'm a huge devotee of season 2 but apparently I'm a bit out of step with most fans on that. But I don't care, I've done two complete 1 to 5 run-throughs and it's still the one that most gets me. The underrated Amy Ryan's performance as an emotional Beadie trying to get Frank to do the right thing - "You're better than the people you've fallen in with..." - heart rending.

Big shock in season 3 eh? Sadly I knew it beforehand as I read an interview that mentioned it, before I'd managed to get that far in the show. I was furious and actually tried to forget I'd read it!

Quote from StillCan'tDance

All self-penned, no doubt.

Ah mate, come on now! That's unwarranted.

I'm pretty sure I've splurged more than my own quota of irrelevance on to the pages of this forum myself...

^ Really glad to see the named track mentioned there and intrigued by the rest of the quote.

Quote from foxfeeder

I honestly thought I'd shared this with the forum, must've been the old one! Recorded by me off the radio during a repeat in the 1990's:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/…ollinsandgenesis.mp3/file

You'll have to download it first, I think. Getting mediafire links to work 1st time is a problem, if it doesn't work, let me know.

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Quote from foxfeeder

Well, I did say IMO...……………………….

Oh absolutely, I didn't think you were trying to be dogmatically definitive! I completely get that you were stating your O, just as anyone here are giving their Os and indeed in my reply I was just setting out my own O.

Quote from StillCan'tDance

Yes, John Peel once said a lot of things didn't he? Like calling Genesis and Roxy Music "the most promising bands" of the seventies. Unfortunately, he jumped ship once punk became the "in" thing.

Nice review, Backdrifter. They certainly were sunny days back in the mid eighties

I tend to take a softer view of Peel and perceive that he genuinely took to punk rather than that he was bandwagon-jumping, but do think it's a pity he then had to turn so dismissive on the rock and prog stuff he'd championed a few years earlier. I somehow managed to walk and chew gum at the same time, liking punk/new wave and rock/prog, all at once, simultaneously and everything. But Peel, who I admired, helped to bolster this absurd view that it absolutely had to be one or the other, and if you were in the prog camp then you were a hopelessly outdated square. (I think someone here said he actually played a track off ATTWT when it came out! I'd love to verify that and especially know which track).

On a tangent, the twitter bot account John Peel Band Names is quite entertaining. It generates Peel-session type band names, so you get tweets like (imagining it in his voice) - "Something for the weekend, great band, great session, here's Diagonal Grandma".

(Thanks for the kind words)

A couple of supplementary thoughts. A great friend of mine Sean was a prog devotee and Genesis fan, and grew increasingly dismayed at their output. He was one who went wide-eyed and excited on hearing the album had "a 15-minute track on it!" Obviously it doesn't, I assume he meant Domino and its length gave him hope it might be about a battle or a homicidal plant or something.

I said to him at the time, the problem was he didn't like their new stuff but insisted on going to the gigs anyway, in the hope they'd do a load of 70s material. The poor guy must have felt tormented because the night before his gig, he was passing by Wembley Stadium and accosted a fan who'd just just left, asking her what it had been like. She said the worst thing possible and told him they'd done Supper's Ready (which obviously they hadn't). So of course he was walking on air all the way up to his gig the next night, and all through it he was getting keener with anticipation of the moment they launched into SR. Which they didn't. By that point he must have felt they had something against him personally. I have to admit I found all this highly amusing.

What I surmised had happened was that either she knew enough to know how to wind up a Genesis fan, or she was a newer fan who vaguely knew they did a long track called Supper's Ready and when Collins did his "and now some really old stuff" intro to the medley she assumed the near-20 minutes that followed was SR, and answered Sean's question innocently if mistakenly.

Another randomly remembered thing - some time in 86 BBC radio show Radioactive did a spoof of Sledgehammer, with Philip Pope impersonating PG singing "One thing I can't work out is this/I can't tell the difference between/Phil Collins and Genesis!" I just tried a cursory search for it but didn't find it.

It or indeed IT is one of the great divisive Genesis albums, the others being Lamb and Abacab. I think it's where many entered their Genesis fandom.

For me it was a sort of return to them. Duke was huge, the album behind my first Genesis gigs, and I was alone among my proggy friends in admiring their right-angled turn on Abacab. But after liking Mama I then didn't bother with the Shapes album and felt a bit detached from the band, partly as following a huge US tour they then threw in 5 gigs in one English arena to serve as their entire rest of the world shows. So no gigs for me, as a then impoverished student I couldn't even make the schlep over to Birmingham. I then pretty much stopped listening to them.

So So and Sledgehammer appeared 2 years later followed swiftly by IT and suddenly it seemed both PG and his former bandmates were going full-on radio-friendly. Having gone off in a bit of a huff after Mama I might well have just dismissed IT but the time felt right to give the new album a go. I was having a good spring and summer during my work placement year and I felt buoyed up enough to welcome this bright shiny new Genesis. I had a couple of misgivings, I've never much liked that clattery primary-colours type of 80s production and there was a fair bit of it here, though at least it didn't completely sound like someone rattling a cutlery drawer as so much 80s music does.

I immediately took to the darker feel of Tonight and the perfect pop of Throwing. An odd thing happened on my first listen, I had somehow genuinely not spotted The Brazilian on the track listing and in my head the album was ending with the TIAA fade-out, to the extent I actually got a start when the Brazilian began (and which ironically does sound a bit like a cutlery drawer). Partly because of this pleasant surprise and partly through its different feel to the rest of the album I came away liking it best.

It's a sort of all things to all people, all reasons to both like and dislike them kind of album. I do get why people who already didn't much like Genesis came to loathe them at this point. PC was attaining his ubiquitous phase, having huge solo success, appearing on TV a lot and generally being everywhere. Then his band immediately reappear, having multiple hit singles and now they seem to be inescapably everywhere. Meanwhile long-term prog-head fans sink further into despair as the band become more poppy and radio-friendly, though some desperately grabbed hold of the lifebelt of there being a 9-minute song and a 10-minute song that even had separately titled parts 1 and 2, as though progness is measured out in minutes and 'parts'. And some who always distantly perceived Genesis as this difficult prospect - as John Peel once said, "an A-levels band when you struggled enough with O-levels" - thought that actually they quite liked them and oh it's that nice Phil bloke, let's get the album and go to the show.

For all the above reasons, while it's not a favourite album of mine I do find it a very interesting one. On Duke and then more so Abacab they clearly were moving away from their established sound and this trajectory reached its peak with IT where I reckon they achieved a perfect blend of pop and prog rock.

Quote from foxfeeder

Sadly, I have to agree! I've given up going to Steve's shows, because I want to hear him do his stuff. But worse still, since GR2, and it's chart success, he has opted to tread a safe, and boring course. His last 3 albums are tedious. I am sure he COULD do better, but doesn't want to upset the apple cart.

Exactly. I too have stopped going to SH gigs. I've been to 2 or 3 of his Genesis ones and for the various reasons I won't drone on about again they just don't do it for me. I still regard him as a solo artist, not a tribute act for the band he was once in, and as such I want to see him doing tours based on his own material. He says he will return to this, though there's no sign of that yet. Trick 45th anniversary tour for 2021, anyone?!

As you say, it could be argued that why would we want to see a solo-material tour when his recent output has been so dull? It'd be a fair point, but I believe there's an element of feeding off what you do. If he knew he was taking his new material on tour properly, ie not just one or two tracks bolted on to another Genesis-centred show, I think on some level that might spur him on to produce some new stuff more worthy of his career at its best moments, that he'd be eager and proud to take on the road. I always liked the distinctive aspects of his work but these last few albums have been generic and wishy-washy. The last decent gig of his I went to was around 2010-ish (?) at London Shepherd's Bush Empire and had a mix of some incendiary (then) new and mid-period stuff, a few old classics and a couple of Genesis numbers. That's the sort of show I want him to do, and I'd even be happy to lose the couple of Genesis ones.

But who knows, maybe he genuinely just has nothing left in the tank (I'm now pretty much convinced that's where PG is) although I want to believe your feeling that he's got it in him to be good again.

Anyway sorry everyone. So this Last Domino setlist, hmmm, yes (etc)

Quote from foxfeeder

Ray was indeed portrayed as a member of the band, why would they have done it differently? But he has never been a member in the same sense as the others, in that he never had any legal presence in related companies like Gelring Ltd, Fisher Lane Farm Ltd, etc.

At the time of Mayhew, Stewart, Barnard et all, it's doubtful there were any companies to be part of, it was (for the band) all so much simpler then, you joined the band and stayed, or left, no paper trail to be followed. But, once there's big bucks involved, the legal niceties take hold, and you soon discover who is in control, and who does as they're told.

It's no different in other bands, Patrick Moraz was portrayed as a member of the Moody Blues, but once he started acting up, the truth soon came out. He has never appeared in their company documents either. I'm sure there are similar stories in other bands, Yes being one likely example.

Whether you (Personally? Both of you? It's hard to tell from your posts! ) choose to accept the legal definition, or the management's claims, is up to you, and, for what it's worth, I liked Ray's input, and much of CAS better than some of the other stuff, but IMO (and, I suspect, Ray's) he was not a full permanent member of the band.

Ian

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I see what you're getting at but personally I take the view that they recruited him, and he was on an album and a tour. To me, he was a member of Genesis, regardless of those legal considerations you mentioned. I think band membership goes beyond those tangibles and whatever appeared or didn't appear on various dotted lines, the band and their management clearly regarded RW as a member of Genesis - I'll take that.

Quote from Groucho

Decks Dark off Moon Shaped Pool.

Would have been a great Bond theme

Ah, I love that song. It makes me chuckle as the lyric would confirm everything Radiohead haters think about them, being miserable and depressing etc - into your life comes a darkness, nowhere to hide, helpless to resist, in our darkest hour, etc - almost like they were playing to that image. Great song!

Quote from thewatcher

They have always seemed to shy away and apologize for what they are. They play it safe every time, and the opportunities for doing otherwise are dwindling rapidly.

Nothing wrong with fans expressing wish lists. Some interesting stuff in yours. But I'm surprised at the above comments. I think they have routinely done the opposite of shying away, apologising for what they are (when have they ever done that?), and playing it safe. Look at it from the band's perspective: more than any long-running band I can think of, they fully embraced who and what they are by focusing on their new work.

Sure, that approach immediately disappoints a portion of the audience but while I totally would always love to hear 70s stuff I respect their preference to mainly stick with what they've most recently done. That is what any self-respecting musician does. Look at Hackett - of course his Genesis-themed shows delight certain fans and I absolutely get that, but he fairly regularly releases new albums then proceeds to go on the road playing almost nothing from them, focusing instead on stuff he did 40 years ago. To me, that's the very definition of playing it safe, something Genesis didn't tend to do.

Where I think your thoughts intersect with mine is that this different line-up is an opportunity to mix things up a bit more. They don't have new material that we're aware of - yet, anyway - so can choose from their entire back catalogue. While I'd expect there to still be a trio-era focus simply because that represents the bulk of their career, I do share your hope that from across their canon they feel like doing some unexpected ones and I reckon there will be one or two of those at least.

Quote from StillCan'tDance

And if they had gone ahead with a documentary on The Lamb, chances are it would have tied-in with a re-release of the album in some sort of deluxe box-set affair, similar to the one that was rumoured to be released a few weeks back but seems to have been forgotten about in the flurry of activity since the annoucement of the new tour. As it stands, we got a partial retrospective on the band's career and the redundant R-Kive three disc set.

They can't get anything right can they!

Yes the documentary turned into neither one thing or another and RKive was a bit nothingy. But hopefully the rumoured super-duper deluxe boxset with its 10-dimensional remaster, pure lambswool cover, nugget of genuine Broadway tarmac, jar of actual sidewalk steam and preserved Headley Grange rat carcass, will indeed be issued despite being forgotten in all the hubbub/brouhaha of the tour.

Quote from StillCan'tDance

Yes, that's the one. Clearly I got confused!

Ah, I live in a near-permanent state of confusion these days.