Posts by Backdrifter

Quote from StillCan'tDance

Playing stadiums was the only way of getting the most people to see them in one place. They could have done what they did in 92 where they performed an "encore tour" of smaller venues around Britain but Phil really didn't want to do any more than twenty European shows at the time they were planning dates for the tour.

There were sound reasons for the stadium shows, as you say. However, I do understand why some people dislike stadium gigs or the idea of them.

By the way, do we know if the WCD stage show was retained in its large-venue form for the UK theatre shows, only scaled down?

Quote from StillCan'tDance

I wonder why Gabriel messes up his lyrics so often? Not being a follower of his shows, I wasn't aware of this failing. You'd think he'd be able to remember the words to his own blinking songs. Reminds me of Iron Maiden's singer Bruce Dickinson berating singers who use auto-prompters on stage; people pay an arm and a leg for tickets these days so it's a bit poor when the singer can't make the effort to get the words right.

The thing is though, maybe he does make the effort! I recall his admittng he is very forgetful. That said, I've been to quite a few of his shows and don't recall any fluffed lines. It happens, but not as much as is perhaps being suggested.

Imagine if he couldn't remember a line during I Don't Remember. The universe might fold in on itself.

Quote from boredatwork

Doubtless the royalties will be welcome, but this version’s rather a listless, John-Lewis-Xmas-advert effort

I agree. For some reason there is a tendency in TV ads to feature limp underpowered cover versions by tired-sounding female singers. Which people unaccountably think are brilliant. About 12 years ago there was one, maybe for BT?, with a similarly de-energised cover of Thunderclap Newman's Something In The Air, sung by a woman who'd evidently only just woken up, which loads of people went nuts for. There have been quite a few in this lethargic mode.

Anyway, I generally hate car ads as much as I loathe Ikea ones.

Quote from OneForTheVine

He has a habit of making mistakes on this song live - I witnessed one of them!

I like that Stewart Copeland plays the hi-hat on this song (and, apparently, only the hi-hat - Peter is very particular). If my memory serves correctly, Stewart does actually play drums on one of the tracks left off of "So", Across The River. (It may have been recorded at sessions that weren't specifically for the album - I'm not sure. However, in any case, it was recorded at least around roughly the same time as the "So" sessions).

I like the song, and it sounds great live (even if Peter fluffs lyrics, etc.). I see why he played it on many tours.

PG is a general lyric fluffer, I didn't realise he's been more prone to it on this track though. Regardless of it being screwed up on occasions, the version played at the 03/04 shows was superb.

It's a good album opener and has a nice feel of turmoil and anxiety. I think it's about someone having a nightmare and I like the way the closing moments convey a sense of them waking up and the bad dream receding. My problem though is not with this song in itself, but with the album in that (as with ATTWT) the best track is right at the start, meaning the rest of the album doesn't measure up.

It strikes me that following two albums of his strict "no cymbals" rule he was making a statement with the very first sound on the album being a cymbal, and the rest of the track being quite splashy with cymbals.

And on the subject of the person playing that hi-hat, about Copeland and Across The River, I think it was recorded in 1982 and premiered at the first WOMAD festival that year. At one of the Secret World shows I was surprised this was resurrected and thought it was one of the highlights. I hadn't heard it was intended for So.

One track that is on So and pre-dates it by some years is Milgram. I saw them do it on the 1980 tour (pre-release of 3) and really liked it. It was creepy and atmospheric and I was disappointed it didn't appear on 3 or 4, and a little let down that when it did finally appear it had lost its sense of menace.

Line of Duty series 5, two episodes in and so far just as gripping as ever.

6 years late, I've finally started watching Broadchurch, series 1 on dvd. I can absolutely see why it was so talked about at the time, it's brilliant and for me could be David Tennant's finest hour.

Quote from Gaz

Peter Gabriels childhood home and his grandfather's home too - or is that too far away?

Chobham is a good cycling distance from the other locations mentioned. With a well worked out route, it could make for a pleasant journey. Isn't Chobham also the location of what's accepted as the first paid Genesis gig? At Mrs Balmes's "dance" in their garden, her being described as "neighbours" of the Gabriels?

Farnham Maltings, now renovated into an arts centre, should be on the itinerary.

How about Send Barns? They rehearsed there before the Balmes Dance and according to the Genesis Archive wrote parts of The Musical Box there. And Anthony Phillips lived/recorded there during his solo work. It's on Send Barns Lane.

You can probably find locations of other early Genesis gigs in Surrey too. By the way, often mistakenly listed as "Surrey" (they're not) there are some venues near where I grew up that accommodated Genesis gigs. Two of them are also former workplaces of mine: Kingston Polytechnic (where I also studied) and St Mary's College, both now universities. One of the Kingston Polytechnic gigs features in a pic in the first edition of the Gallo book, showing one of the early appearances of the fox head mask. The hall where they and other bands played can still be seen facing on to Penrhyn Road, it's now a lecture hall above the cafeteria. I'm not sure where within St Mary's the venue would have been.

There was also the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, just by the A3 roundabout, but that's sadly long gone. The roll call of bands that played at these venues is astonishing, and it wasn't only during their early days. The Toby Jug played host to ELO, Quo, Tull, Yes, Zeppelin, John Mayall, Beefheart, Crimson, Earth Band - Bowie on the Ziggy tour! This, I remind you, was a pub. Genesis played there in January 1972 on the Nursery Cryme tour.

Quote from wembley6642

I was at the Lyceum on the 8th May, The Knife was played after the group returned to the stage a final time (the house lights didn't come on fully so we just waited and hollered and there they were.) Phil said "this is the only other one we know" and they went straight into it. I was pretty amazed, I'd seen them at Hammersmith on Tony's birthday and there was no hint of an extra encore. Daryl played lead. I was really close to the stage and managed to get this shot of Mike with my ancient Canon. The jostling made it impossible to take decent pics for almost the whole gig

The 1980 Lyceum gigs were 6 & 7 May, so if you mean 7 May (the one famously filmed by the BBC for Whistle Test) then you and I were at the same two gigs, as I also went to the Hammersmith Thu 27 March one. That was the first of 3 shows at Hammersmith, they did The Knife on the 3rd of those. But otherwise yes the only encore was IKWIL.

Quote from FeelItComing

I may not hear it the same way ever again now!

Sorry about that...

I know this sounds unlikely but it's true.

When this came out, my friend Chris was appalled when I said I liked it. When I asked why, he said "Well obviously, you know... it's disgusting." Disgusting??? I was now truly baffled. Even if he didn't like it, this seemed a melodramatic way to say so.

With a bit more querying from me we got to the bottom of his overreaction. It transpired that he was hearing the refrain "I'll hold ya like china" as something else entirely.

Given its about someone offering to relieve a girl (we assume) of her virginity maybe the

mis-hearing is intended.

Continuing the album threads. For those not yet acquainted with these, we already have threads on the following albums:

FGTR

Trespass

Nursery Cryme

Foxtrot

Selling England

ATTWT

CAS

For some reason the Nursery Cryme one is seriously lacking replies. Very few of us seem to want to discuss the first album to feature the "classic" line-up! The busiest of these threads so far is CAS, followed by FGTR. Interesting...

Anyway, to return to chronologically posting the album threads, we come now to The Lamb.

Could it be the most divisive Genesis album among fans? Possibly other than Abacab? If so, it says something about my own Genesis tastes as those are the two albums I like and listen to the most. When I first really got into Genesis in the late 70s, the most recent albums were W&W and Trick, and ATTWT was just coming out. But the album I listened to incessantly was The Lamb. I didn't think about it in any sort of analytical way, it was simply the Genesis music that I most liked. Now as a grown-up I do tend to analyse the crap out of stuff, and think of The Lamb as being a darker, edgier Genesis that I like very much - actually no, to hell with it, that I absolutely love.

And if The Lamb is possibly quite a contentious album among fans, I'd go further and say that the track that really caught my attention at the time and excited me was The Waiting Room. Again, I never thought "how strange they should do something like this", I simply knew that I loved it. The second half when it shifts into that fuzz-bass-based rock groove is still one of my absolute favourite pieces of rock music. It has a powerful atmosphere for me, there's something slightly skewed about it and it has a sort of dirtiness to it, yet it has unmistakable Genesis ingredients. In that sense, those couple of minutes sum up the album for me as that description can apply to the whole thing.

This is the one Genesis album on which I like every single track. There's no other that I can happily sit down and listen to all the way through. I'll do that with Abacab, and I like everything on it but it's weaker towards the end. That reminds me of something that fans and the band themselves have said, that the second half of The Lamb is weak. Yes I know they made it but they are wrong! In fact 'side 3' is for me the strongest part of the album and serves as an excellent representation of not only the album's scope, but of the range and depth and richness this band were capable of. How many other bands have ever produced whole albums, or even whole careers, with such breadth of texture and colour as that one side has?

The story inevitably comes up when discussing this album. I've never had any hang-up about it, in fact I don't especially care about it. Lyrics aren't a focus for me with any of the music I listen to, though I appreciate when there's a good one. Despite this being a story-based album, I don't find it necessary to pay attention to the story in order to enjoy the songs. From previous discussions I recognise that some here do find it necessary, which I'll never really get, but hey we all appreciate stuff in our own way. I read the story once, when I was about 15 or 16. What i got from it was, bloke who's a bit of a miscreant gets trapped in a fantasy world reflecting bits of his life and he discovers there's more to him and he's more caring than he/we thought, and oh by the way we're a bit hypocritical about sex. Beyond that I'm really not fussed and am not bothered if I've completely missed the point of the story, I just love the songs.

I've seen it said on this and the previous forum that if you "dare" to criticise The Lamb, its fans pile on. It has its critics here but I've never seen that pile-on happen; I'd certainly never do that and I absolutely get why some fans don't rank the album highly. It's very anomalous in the album sequence if you go two albums either side of it, and I've seen some here say that on its own puts them off it a bit. I get that if you like a band to have continuity, the Lamb being a bit of an anomaly might prevent you from warming to it. Personally, I usually like when bands go off on a tangential or right-angled path. If that's what Genesis did in order to produce this album, I just wish they'd done it more.

Quote from Nanunami

I have chose some rather unusual tracks - that I want to hear live. And I have included the EPs ...

The Conqueror

Stagnation

Seven Stones

Get'em Out By Friday

Firth Of Fifth

The Waiting Room

Mad Man Moon

Blood On The Rooftops

Inside And Out

Deep In The Motherlode

Heathaze

Like It Or Not

You Might Recall

Just A Job To Do

Tonight Tonight Tonight

Living Forever

The Dividing Line

Display More

There are a few I really dislike there but some good ones and major kudos for including The Waiting Room.

It's an interesting fantasy exercise but the idea of them playing the songs chronologically isn't good. My imaginary set list would mix them up as follows. Nic Collins doubles up on drums as appropriate and PC gets a bit of rest with a Wilson guest spot, an interval and an instrumental.

Motherlode

Abacab

Firth

Ripples

It's Gonna

There Must Be (guest appearance Ray Wilson)

Carpet Crawlers (RW briefly re-enters to take a verse then share final section)

(brief interval)

Watcher

Fading Lights

Brazilian

Musical Box

Duke's Travels

(segue as per TIOA tour)

Afterglow

encore: Knife

At the start of the Duke tour they were opening the shows with NYC. The 'heartbeat' lead-in for that remained when they made Motherlode the opener. NYC moved further down the setlist then got dropped but briefly reappeared near the end of the tour.

After this it became rare for them to resurrect unexpected older songs, which was a shame. It would've been a nice setlist policy to include one entire old song per tour. It would make a faithful section of the audience happy while not compromising the band's approach of focusing mainly on the last 2 or 3 albums. The Abacab tour resurrected FoF in its full length rendition for the final time (I think). In 82 they did all of SR and the Watcher edit. The Mama tour saw the one-off medley of bits & pieces and the Quiet Earth fragment, then in 86/87 we got the whole of it and on some dates the end of SR.

By the WCD tour they'd really minimised the old stuff, even the stalwart of Los Endos was gone, leaving just the medley of bits. I can't think of another band that was so unsentimental with their older material! I was conflicted on this as I would have loved to hear older stuff but also respected their approach.

Re the Six Of The Best gig it's the other way around in that it drew on recently performed tracks eg NYC, Moonlit Knight/Carpet Crawlers, SR.

Dear oh dear...

Quote from Schrottrocker

Pretty sure that was Daryl, Mike would play the bass as he always did on that song. I wonder why they shortened the song so much on that tour, there's basically no guitar solo left.

It was surprising enough they resurrected a Trespass track as it is, there was little chance they'd do the whole track. Plus I think it got added to the end of the set during the tour, they didn't drop any other tracks so wouldn't have wanted to extend the running time very much.

We've not mentioned Scott Walker so let me just do that now. He was a very interesting artist, having big hits in the 60s as part of the Walker Brothers and being something of a pop heart-throb. But he quickly grew uncomfortable with this and became reclusive, avoiding being seen in public - on one occasion disguising himself as a construction worker to avoid being recognised. He also did a series of solo albums that steered away from the pop format of the Walker Brothers and into more studied territory, including an album of Jacques Brel covers.

A Walker Brothers reunion in the 70s yielded the hit No Regrets but they were dropped by their record company when they started doing less commercial more challenging material. Scott's sinister track The Electrician hinted at the darker areas he'd later explore. This direction grew starker in the 80s with the one album he did that whole decade, on which some of the tracks had no titles as he thought it would "pin them down" too much. Though you could argue calling them e.g. Track Three is still giving it a title!

By the time he reappeared 10 years later he entered into a trio of albums over the course of nearly 20 years that were so bizarre and experimental that for some, they bordered on unlistenable. But they delighted some critics (some of whom I still believe found them hard going!) and cemented his "difficult genius" status. His reclusiveness only added to his enigmatic mystique. Although, that said, he was also known to be a regular at his local pub in Vauxhall where he'd often be seen having a quiet pint and enjoying a game of darts.

I like him a lot. Yes his later stuff grew increasingly difficult and sometimes baffling but I think you need figures like that to plough their own furrow. He was highly respected and a significant influence on many musicians. It's a sad loss and he leaves a distinctive legacy.

RIP Scott Walker.

It was the Nov 05 statement that most excited me at the time, that the album and tour would be very stripped-back with just him and a bassist and percussionist. I thought this sounded really intriguing.

Sigh...

Quote from DecomposingMan

Trivia: It's the very last Genesis song alphabetically!

I love stuff like this.

I'm guessing Abacab is first. Unless there's some obscure track called Aardvark or Aaaaaah! (Did Banks miss a trick there? All In An Aardvark's Night?)

Reheating of existing stuff is just about the only PG activity we can expect!

I'm not interested in tribute bands but as most here seem to be, and I couldn't see a thread on Genesis Legacy I thought some might be interested. It seems their thing is a focus on the solo careers, as well as Genesis material.

I came across them as they are playing at my local arts centre in June and saw a mention in the season programme. Even if I was inclined to go, I couldn't as I'll be in London seeing King Crimson that day.

They've got live dates throughout the year. More details on the Genesis Legacy website.