^
It definitely worked a lot better when he stopped trying so hard to be blokeishly funny and did stuff like levitating the stadium and demonstrating the domino principle. There probably weren't many, if any, performers at that time who could involve and engage 80,000+ people in a huge stadium in that apparently effortless way.
The only ones I tend to listen to all the way through are The Lamb and Abacab, the latter being my version that includes the Dodo trilogy. And even that will be very rarely. The rest of my Genesis-listening time will be even more rarely incomplete albums (as all bar the above two have tracks I don't like), live versions and odds & ends on the internet, or most frequently my compilations.
Father And Son and Moments In Time. Both pretty awful, I thought. As for I Can't Dance, I love it.
As for re-sequencing albums with extra tracks and changing the order of the songs, I've done it with a few Genesis albums but, as I never omit songs, I can't really put my suggested track lists here.
"Moments In Time"? Bloody hell. I never heard that one before. That's appalling. It sounds like one of those mood-muzak compilations. ICD has a nicely sparse, kind of gritty feel that I quite like.
Ah, go ahead and list your resequenced versions if you feel like it. I'd be intrigued to see them.
I don't ever remember reading that Mike wrote the lyrics to Inside And Out. Steve has recently confirmed it was Phil who wrote the lyrics to that song. Phil also wrote the lyrics to Match Of The Day which is on the same EP. Pigeons is by Mike.
Indeed, as SH was mentioning I&O, it didn't come across as his cracking a joke.
Re Pigeons, do you mean lyrics? I recall TB saying about that track that he wanted to see if he could "write a song with only one note in".
You could say the same about any open air gig if you're limiting your understanding of atmosphere simply to the lights.
Just because I mentioned lights it doesn't mean that's the "limit of my understanding of atmosphere". The song was, and is, atmospheric but as with any gig the atmosphere involves a combination of different factors (including the subdued lights) and I personally found the song had to battle against most of those factors and it didn't quite work for me, but hopefully it did for others.
At other open air gigs, I've found for various reasons it's not been a problem.
Probably Mama which started the shows on the Invisible Touch tour. It created such a strong atmosphere.
I saw just one show on that tour, London Wembley Stadium, so it was open air and in the middle of summer and the problem I had was the conflict between the atmospheric opening song, and it being bright and sunny, with the light show practically invisible. It just didn't feel right. Abacab perked things up a bit, and the theatrics of the lighting rig in The Brazilian helped, but it wasn't really until the Cage medley that I felt any atmosphere was established.
I always got the impression the timeline was:
Agreement to do a story album
Discussion of what story
The Little Prince vs The Lamb
The Lamb accepted
Accepted that PG writes the story and lyrics
They start making the album
During the making of the album, Friedkin contacts PG and the disagreement about him breaking off to do Friedkin's project occurs.
Thus, before the Friedkn intervention, PG had at least had a Lamb outline in order to make his initial pitch to the band. How far he'd got with the text and lyrics is another matter.
By the way, re Spike, it was the actor Denis Waterman who gave PC the book about the building of the railways in Britain. In case anyone's interested.
Speaking of PC's lyrics, at a Hackett gig last year, introducing Inside & Out SH said Collins wrote the lyrics, "before he started writing songs about ex-wives".
I can only speak for myself. I listen to prog music and read fantasy novels mostly. I was turned away from so called "good books" at school. We read Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass in our German course, Graham Greene in our English course and Albert Camus in our French course and analyzed the stuff beyond the point of what was bearable. As I always enjoyed reading, I moved over to sci-fi and fantasy, which I enjoyed very much without being forced to analyze the plot. Fantasy is a great genre, if you pick the right authors. There are not so many, who are great. My favourites are Tolkien, Donaldson, Rothfuss, Robin Hobb and Peter Brett. The Dark Tower novels by Stephen King are killer. Almost all his books are killer.
I combine certain books with certain albums. I got The Lord Of The Rings for christmas in 1979 together with the album Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. I read the whole book in the week after christmas and listened to Rumours constantly while reading. I read the book again exactly one year later and had Making Movies by Dire Straits on the whole time. So every time, I listen to one of these albums today, I get instant memories of certain scenes from the book.
Like you I loved reading but didn't get along with the analysis in literature classes at school. But soon after, I grew to love a broad range of stuff - classics, modern, fiction and non-fiction - on my own terms.
I tend to enjoy novels that play with the form, and take some kind of different approach from conventional narrative, some of my favourites being:
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Changing Places, David Lodge
The Damned United, David Peace
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
The Rain Before It Falls, Jonathan Coe
Accident, Nicholas Moseley
As well as sci-fi and fantasy another genre I never got along with was crime fiction, until I started on Ian Rankin's Rebus novels, to which I became addicted. I love the intelligent plots which are often rich with social and political aspects. Plus Edinburgh's my favourite city and I enjoy recognising the various locations.
Very true. It applies to me too.
It extends to things like, music being played in shops and restaurants etc, buskers - any scenario where music not of my choice is being inflicted on me.
Is there a connection between the types of music some members of this board listen to, and the kinds of books they read?
Even as a child, I never read Tolkien or Narnia books, they didn't interest me. Into adulthood, I've continued to struggle with sci-fi and fantasy literature. Various friends have lent me stuff but I've never got along with it. The closest I ever came was as a child I devoured the Dr Who novelisations, and in my teens enjoyed the Hitch Hikers books.
Recently I've been re-reading an excellent book of interviews with Michael Gambon, very entertaining on the subject of acting. I've also been reading another non-fiction one, The Highland Clearances by John Prebble.
I personally have to take some distance from songs or albums I over heard, to be able to enjoy them again but if doesn't bore you, more power to you. I wish I could listen to them relentlessly the way I used to.
I've thought about this and I reckon there's an element of 'having it played to me'. Partly because of its video, Sledgehammer has been played so much, it became one of those songs I kind of get fed up of hearing because it's not me deciding to play it, even though I do like it. I don't know if that makes sense! It must be something along those lines as obviously there are loads of songs I have played countless times but i don't get fed up of those. But I think you're saying something different above, ie that you do have to have a break even from playing them yourself.
Good to hear some appreciation for U2's No Line. I think it has some of their strongest songs for quite some time by that point. It was nice to read that Slowdancer also even got to like Zooropa. Daddy's Gonna Pay remains a real favourite for me, it's something you could play to many neutral listeners or non-fans who'd not realise it was U2. The live rendition of Dirty Day on the Zoo TV film is absolutely ferocious. I usually really appreciate when massively successful acts do a major right-angled turn like they did especially with Zooropa and more so the Passengers album. It's interesting to read in Brian Eno's diary that Original Soundtracks was always intended as an actual U2 album until their manager and the record company became very uneasy about how unrelated to their usual stuff it was, and feared they'd "confuse the fans". Eno was frustrated and commented in his diary, haven't hugely successful acts earned the right to go off the beaten path and do something different and challenging? Eventually the false band name was agreed as a compromise so it no longer seemed to be a U2 album and thus comforting the supposedly delicate and easily-baffled fans.
Another thing they rarely get credit for is how innovative and well-designed their live shows are. Peter Gabriel has said in interviews that he'll often see a U2 show several times per tour as he always marvels at how interesting they are. The first tour I saw them on after my 'conversion' was the Zoo TV one and having already had my head turned by their new music, I had to then admire how they'd changed the stadium rock experience. I saw it a second time so I could fully encompass everything that was going on. It remains one of the high points of all my gig-going. And in that second show, their performance of Mysterious Ways and Bono's theatrics during it, were an absolute joy. I know he gets a lot of flack and even he acknowledges he can be a complete prick but the plain fact is, he is a natural-born rock star.
My Madonna turning point came in about 1986, hearing Like A Virgin on the radio; obviously it was already out for 2-3 years before that and I'd heard it many times before, but hearing it that particular moment for some reason I suddenly tuned into what a good piece of pop music it is. Then I heard Express Yourself which I quite liked, and what finally did it was Live To Tell. From Like A Prayer onwards I became a firm fan and I agree that the 90s era, especially the albums you mentioned above OFTV, are her peak - she was producing some genuinely intelligent and interesting pop music by that point. After that she kind of cruised along and apart from another peak with the Confessions album (and a great tour behind it) her work has mainly been quite dull and way too in thrall to current R&B stars and styles, aside from the occasional good tune.
Having seen her on stage a few times and many times on TV for the more recent tours, I've always found she's at her best when all the spectacle (enjoyable as it can be) is stripped away and she's just standing and singing - ie when she becomes simply the frontwoman of a band. I've always wished she'd challenge herself by just doing a very basic tour without all the paraphernalia, but she's said before there's little chance of this, which is a shame.
It can't really be called WCD any more because it doesn't contain the ICD monstrosity. I call it "Fading Lights"
Wasn't the album's working title Father & Son? Could that be a possible contender for your non-non-dancing version?
Since being on these forums, it's really dawned on me that many fans really hate ICD. A "monstrosity" - my word! Me, I don't mind it.
I was massively irritated by U2 up to and including Rattle & Hum. From the moment I saw the video of The Fly premiered on TV, I knew some major shift had occurred. From then, I bought their albums through the 90s and caught up with the earlier stuff which I still didn't much like apart from the odd few, but now viewed through much more accepting eyes. The stuff where they are regarded as having gone somewhat off-piste by many fans - Zooropa, Passengers, some of Pop, No Line - is my favourite U2 work (even the band say they think No Line was a mistake, and since that tour they have never revisited it).
I had the rock fan's scepticism about Madonna for the first few years of her career, but gradually realised she was doing some very good-quality pop music and it re-activated my liking for pop.
There are probably other examples; as Witchwood said above, I couldn't honestly say I actually detested any of these acts as that would be a complete 180, but certainly I found U2 very annoying and was at best indifferent to, at worst dismissive of, Madonna.
Hmmm, never quite sure what to do with W&W in this respect as it's so low on my list and I only really like two or three tracks on the released version. But after mulling it over:
Eleventh Earl Of Mar
One For The Vine
Blood on the Rooftops
Pigeons
Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers
In That Quiet Earth
Afterglow
Inside & Out
Trick would be:
Dance
It's Yourself (the full second half minus the Los Endos intro bit)
Squonk
Entangled
Trick
Ripples
It's Yourself (part 1, segueing into)
Los Endos
- obviously some creative re-titling would need to be done for the two bits of IY.
(not taking the 'bands' bit literally):
Gnoomes
The Charlatans
Laura Veirs
Siouxsie & The Banshees
The Beatles
That link is very interesting, thanks for that. I'd often heard Firth referred to as Banks's first full solo composition, bar lyric contributions from MR, so was mildly surprised that Seven Stones and Time Table are suggested as solely his. That said, they do sound Banksy. Certainly I'd be unsurprised that someone who could write songs about mice and dinosaurs would write one about a wooden table.
I'd heard Phillips contributed to Musical Box, but not Barnard. How likely is it that despite the album credits, AP and MB received any income from sales?
I seem to remember reading that Hackett came up with the key change part at the end of Fly to lead into Broadway Melody. But I may be mis-remembering as I don't know where I got that from.
We had a few discussions like this on the old board (I think I tried to list writers for FGTR-SEBTP and someone else made a Lamb thread) - it would be interesting to see if there was a way to look through the old posts.
Thanks - I've incorporated your key-change comment and others' comments into an edited OP. Yeah I recall this discussion on the old board and this thread is my attempt to try recreating that, in the absence of accessing the defunct board.
Another favourite band of mine is Radiohead and on a fan forum years ago someone posted a comment that they'd seen publishing info which listed individual writers of Radiohead songs even though their albums credit all songs to all, PG-era Genesis style. I wonder if such info exists for the Genesis band-credited material. Other bands adopting a similar approach are U2 and Coldplay who credit all songs to all but by various accounts it seems it's either Bono and The Edge or just Bono in the case of U2, and Chris Martin for Coldplay. Side note to the latter - when Brian Eno produced one of Coldplay's albums, as is his method he initially observed them at work and decided Chris Martin was dominating proceedings too much and physically barred him from the studio for a while, to allow the other three to express themselves a bit more in writing and developing songs. It led to what is in my view by far their best album, Viva La Vida.
Returning to Genesis credits, I'd be very interested if anyone has any insights into credits for Trespass.
