Posts by Blacksword

    I've always loved this album, but understand why it's so divisive.


    This was the first Genesis album I heard from beginning to end, and that may be why I regard it so affectionately. It was 1985, and I hired the cassette from the local library, having heard some Genesis on the Radio 1 Friday rock show. I had heard Dance on a Volcano, but I didn't have enough 'pocket money' to buy A Trick of the Tail. ATTWT was the only Genesis album they had in the library.


    Down and Out caught my attention straight away, which it's driving 5/4 back beat, heavy bass and rich melodies. Burning Rope and The Lady Lies were sufficiently proggy for me to enjoy and to relate to the stuff by Rush, Marillion and Yes that I'd recently heard. The softer songs like Undertow and Many too Many also pleased my ears, purely on the strength of the melodies and the emotional impact of the lyrics, notably for Undertow.


    It's a flawed album. I can appreciate that now, having explored all their albums repeatedly over many years, but it remains in my Genesis top 5 for personal reasons. We all have a 'soundtrack to our lives' and this is part of mine, as it meant so much to me in 1985. My father was terminally ill, and I just remember walking home from school on dark and cold afternoons, listening to ATTWT on my walkman. The music took me somewhere else, away from the trauma of what awaited me every day when I got home.

    Guy Garvey of Elbow is a big Geness fan, as is actor/comedian Rhys Thomas.


    You won't know Thomas unless you Google him, then you may recognise his face. He was in the Chris Morris sitcom Nathan Barley and was a writer on the Fast Show, among other things. I remember him on Nevermind the Buzzcocks once. Louis Walsh was on the other team. When Mark Lamar introduced Thomas as a Genesis fan, Walsh piped up with "But surely only with Peter Gabriel. That's the only real Genesis" to which Thomas remarked about the quality of the post Gabrel era band, a brief discusson ensued until Lammar raised his eyebrows and broke it up.. ^^ I can't fnd a clip on Youtube sadly.


    Rhys Thomas

    My collection (Part 1) 8)


    Disc 1:

    Behind the Lines

    Down & Out

    Dancing with the Moonlit Knight

    Mama

    Unquiet slumbers for the sleepers/In that Quiet earth

    Afterglow

    Mad Man Moon

    Can utility & the Coastliners

    Burning Rope

    The Knife


    Disc 2

    Watcher of the skies

    Dance on a volcano

    Firth of Fifth

    Seven Stones

    Undertow

    Ripples

    Silver Rainbow

    Horizons

    Suppers Ready


    Disc 3

    Eleventh Earl of Mar

    White Mountain

    Fly on a windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974

    Blood on the rooftops

    Deep in the motherlode

    Home by the sea/Second home by the sea

    The cinema show

    The Musical Box

    Me & Sarah Jane

    The Brazilian


    Disc 4

    Turn it on again

    One for the Vine

    Entangled

    Squonk

    In the Cage

    That's all

    Fading Lights

    Los Endos

    Silent sorrow in empty boats

    I was listening to RedBeard's show on Fragile this afternoon, featuring interviews with Jon and Rick, and RedBeard made a salient point about progressive rock and mainstream music and the conceit that the two did not make comfortable bedfellows. Albums such as Fragile proved that it was possible to be both progressive and popular, thus debunking the notion that so-called intelligent and complex music doesn't connect with the masses. One in the eye for the musical snobs.

    Yes, like Genesis were able to write accesable music that was also complex. That's a true skill in songwriting. Some prog rock is merely complex and devoid of anything for a mianstream music audience to latch on to; no obvious melody, ever changing time sigs for the sake of it etc..


    There's plenty of room in prog rock for al kinds of approaches to making music of course, that's the beauty of the genre, but yes, I agree there is plenty of accessable progressive rock out there, and people forget tha for a time the likes of Yes, ELP and Tull were huge bands with enormous followings, who did actually have hit singles as well as platinum selling albums.