Posts by serpent

    Sure, will do. I know 100% sure is quite a statement but by that stage I was buying every new Genesis album and single on the day of release and know it hadn't come out when I saw them in Manchester on 6th October, I was hearing all the new material for the first time.

    The release date of 5th October is definitely wrong, 100% sure on that. I saw the band on the opening night of the Selling England UK tour in Manchester on the 6th and it wasn't out then, that was the first time I'd heard any of the new material. I bought it on the day of release and although I can't now remember the exact date it was certainly after the gig, but only by a week or two, so the 12th (which would be my best guess) or the 19th.


    1. When did you buy Selling England By The Pound (or have received it as a gift)?


    1973 on the day of release.



    2. How old were you when Selling England was released?


    Fifteen



    3. Was Selling England your first Genesis album? If not, how many Genesis albums did you own before getting Selling??


    All of them, so five at that time.



    4. If you had to rank all Genesis albums, where does Selling England stand?


    My least favourite of the Gabriel-era Charisma albums, but above anything that came later.



    5. Which track was your favourite when you bought the album?


    Probably Cinema Show. Was never that keen on the main song but the instrumental section really took off, especially live.



    6. Which track is your favourite today?


    Same.


    7. Which track do you think is the best track on the record despite your own taste?


    Cinema Show or Firth of Fifth. I have problems with all of the songs on the album to some extent, liking some bits of most of them but not finding any of them completely satisfying, but the instrumental sections in both FoF and CS tend to outweigh the issues I have with the remainder of them.



    8. How many versions of the album have you bought / owned? (Vinyl, CD, Remaster, Cassette, SACD etc)


    Original vinyl, Italian vinyl with gatefold sleeve, original CD issue and all subsequent remasters..






    cheers

    I've heard it but thankfully didn't waste my money on buying it, it's awful. Some really amateurish 'remastering', which essentially entails amplifying everything to within a inch of its life - it's brickwalled, too loud, too compressed and not a great listen, which is a shame because of course the source material is decent quality and didn't need any ham-fisted tweaking. Laughable packaging with a picture of the '76 touring line-up with Bruford as well and of course it's totally unofficial so nobody will be seeing any proceeds from it except the people who put it out.

    Don't necessarily accept what these grey market releases claim themselves to be. Many are described incorrectly as radio broadcasts to get around copyright loopholes in certain countries and give them some dubious legality so they can be sold through legitimate outlets. The 1982 reunion rehearsal is typical - it's a soundboard recording of a behind-closed-doors rehearsal in Hammersmith Odeon and was of course never broadcast. The CD claims it to be in front of a small audience at Hammersmit Palais which subsequently went out on the radio, how do they make up this crap? It's not even the full thing, dropping several tracks to fit it onto a single CD.


    I think it's very much a case of buyer beware with these kind of releases. The labels that put them out are rarely dilligent in searching out the best sources - the Ultimate Lyceum has tracks missing tracks, muddy sound and is mono, when there are several top quality versions in circulation that they could have easily downloaded instead of whatever source they used.


    These things are 100 % unauthorised and no royalties will ever find themselves to the band or their record label, so just download them off the Movement instead, at least you know what version you're getting.

    So, just a week from now. Just hope the sound quality is good enough and the booklet will have some nice & new content.


    Did somebody NOT preorder it? If so, why?

    Why? Because it's really disappointing that it's so incomplete. Once again an archive release from the band that you would think was impossible to get wrong but here we are again with something less than it should have been. I guess we'll never know if it was the band's decision to limit it to so few discs or maybe that was dictated by the record company if they deemed that demand wasn't sufficiently large for a more comprehensive package. To me it falls between two stools - too much for the casual fan and not enough for the more committed. So many interesting tracks not used like the Night Ride Stagnation with the completely different ending or the Sounds of the Seventies work-in-progress Musical Box. Maybe better to have released it in smaller and more complete chunks rather than one box set. As it stands it's a real let down for me and I won't be buying.

    None at all, it's 100% unofficial but got used widely on bootleg t-shirts, badges and patches in the 70s that were mainly sold through ads in the music weeklies. There was another one that used Salvador Dali's Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man around the same time. Again no connection at all to the band or their music but with the man emerging from the egg at least there was a very tenuous connection with the concept of Genesis I guess. The hair one I could never work out, maybe someone just liked the image.

    I've never seen Whitehead's work as particularly appealing, the ideas are good, but the execution is, indeed, a bit amateurish. (Better than I could do, but I'm not even an amateur!). I guess I'm spoilt though, having had Phil Travers covers for the Moody Blues and solo albums as a reference point.

    Some of his work can definitely look a bit amateurish, some of the perspective is, to say the least, a bit wonky, but some is quite well executed.


    I love the Trespass cover but could never understand how some of it was brilliantly done - namely the pen and ink work - while the rest was nothing like the same standard. When I found out why that was and where the pen and ink work had come from it made sense.


    Nursery Cryme is fantastic though, it really captures the whole mood and feel of the music but Foxtrot suffers from too many ideas that don't really come together as a whole, the theme is sound but he should have simplified it considerably, there's just too much going on.


    I think he did some of his best work was for Van der Graaf and Peter Hammill, Pawn Hearts in particular, which is fantastic.

    The artwork - This looks like it was done by an amateur. Why not dig into the archives of Paul Whitehead and use this?!

    Cost would be one contributing facor, I imagine Whitehead would want a pretty heavy price. Looking at what they're going with it seems a big artwork budget wasn't a conideration, it looks like something someone's knocked up in their tea break. The PG photo on the cover of CD1 isn't even from the same period as the recordings, very sloppy.


    Several members of the band have also made disparaging remarks about Whitehead's artwork in the past,, Foxtrot in particular which nobody seemed to like. I always felt they fitted the three albums perfectly, even if he did steal the vast majority of the Trespass artwork uncredited from another artist and then repeated the felony by stealing the cover of the first High Tide album from the same artist.

    This is clearly another grey market release, exploiting the 50 year copyright duration of broadcast material, in the UK at least. This is almost certainly a direct copy of existing bootleg material but as it exceeds the 50 year ruling it's legal for outlets like Burning Shed and Amazon to stock it as presumably nobody has bothered to renew the copyright, unlike for example Pink Floyd by putting all those 1972 boots up for streaming and download recently. Personally I'm a bit disappointed in Burning Shed selling releases like these which skirt around the borders of legality but essentially the labels involved are just companies making money out of material they don't own the rights to and have not paid to licence. Dubiously legal but a bootleg under any other name.

    Did Mayhew play much live with them though? I'd go with digitally recreating Phil if he played the material live more. May seem a bit insensitive since the bloke's still alive but he can't drum so I think it's excusable.

    Difficult to say with any degree of accuracy but I reckon somewhere between 75 and 80 gigs between Sept '69 and July '70.

    I would see no other reason to dress like the fox-headed woman on the album cover. :/

    The original idea of the fox head and red dress came from Charisma, either Paul Conroy or Glen Coulson, I can't remember which atm. They suggested that on the forthcoming tour someone - not one of the band - should appear on stage in costume to promote the new album. I can't help thinking this was at least partially inspired by Wishbone Ash who had released Argus a few months before and had a guy dressed as the watcher from the album cover standing on the side of the stage briefly at their gigs. Gabriel concluded that if anyone was going to do the dressing up it might as well be him and next thing PG in the fox head was on the front cover of Melody Maker and their fee doubled overnight, which no doubt made it easier to swallow for the rest of the band.


    But back to the Dublin gig. Remember that Genesis were the support band on the tour, if anyone was doing a big push for their new album it was Lindisfarne, who were at that time streets ahead of Genesis in terms of commercial success, having had the biggest selling album in the UK in 1972.

    Foxtrot for me. Got it the day after release as none of the local record shops had it in on release day. Still remember getting it home and being so blown away by side one as soon as it finished I put it on again and then again. I don't remember ever doing that with a new release before or since and of course when I eventually flipped it over side two was even better.

    FWIW, Mario Giammetti in his book says the release date for “Foxtrot” was 6th October, 1972. Perhaps he was/is guessing too? 🤷‍♂️ In that date’s favor, both “Chapter & Verse” and Alan Hewitt’s bio of the band say October as well (although I’d only regard the former in any way authoritative).

    I bought Foxtrot the day after its release - I would have bought it on the actual day but none of the shops in town had it in and I had to go back the next day. Sadly I can't recall the exact date but my feeling is that it was September rather than October, I saw them only a few days after the supposed October release and had certainly owned the album for a few weeks by then, which would indicate an earlier date. I did also get Lindisfarne's Dingly Dell at the same time, which was released on the same day, and is generally agreed to be a September release.

    What a bill.


    I saw Genesis 9 times and only once out of those gigs did they have another band on first, Wembley 1987, Paul Young.


    Leaving aside big outdoor shows like Knebworth and Milton Keynes did anyone see a support act at a Genesis gig?

    String Driven Thing at Manchester Free Trade Hall February '73, then Ron Geesin at Manchester Opera House October '73. Probably best known for his work with Pink Floyd on Atom Heart Mother and his collaboration with Roger Waters on the Music from the Body album. To be honest I can't remember too much about his set other than he was wonderfully eccentric and went down pretty well.


    Also saw Ritchie Havens supporting them at a couple of the Earls Court shows in June 1977.

    We travelled from the UK for this on the Mead Gould Promotions coach tour. Recorded the Genesis set, which is in circulation, but not Crimson for some long forgotten reason. Got searched on the gate but whatever they were looking for it wasn't recording gear as they waved me through anyway.

    Was this some sort of warm-up gig prior to the SEBTP tour starting? Hogweed is thrown in, which was not part of the standard SEBTP setlist, hence the question.

    The Selling England tour began with a handful of dates in France, Germany and Switzerland. The only full length recordings we have from these shows are from Osnabruck and Munster, both of which have Hogweed as the encore. By the time of the UK leg in October the order of the songs had be re-jigged and Hogweed dropped and replaced by The Knife at the few shows where an encore was played. These two recordings first appeared in 2008 when the taper lent his master tapes to AS, who many will know from his Hogweeds series, to transfer and master, although neither were actually released as part of the Hogweeds project for reasons I can't now recall.

    Queued all day in December '76 outside the Free Trade Hall, Manchester to get tickets for the W&W tour got to 20 feet from the door and told 'Sold Out''.

    We went to queue at the Free Trade Hall in '76 as well. Caught the train up to Manchester on the Sunday evening and arrived to find a show was just finishing and crowds of people were exiting the venue, but no sign of a queue for Genesis tickets. Asked about it and were told they'd put them on sale earlier than had been advertised in the music press and they were now sold out. After a brief moment of panic we decided to phone all the other venues in travellable distance, not really expecting any success this late on a Sunday night, but surprisingly got a reply from the Liverpool Empire who confirmed they would be on sale at 9:00am on Monday. Caught the train over to Liverpool but when we got to the Empire around midnight there was no sign of a queue again. When I'd queued overnight for tickets for the Lamb tour the queue had started forming early evening, so the alarm bells were already ringing but we decided to stick it out anyway even if something didn't seem quite right. In any case by then there were no trains back home so we were stuck there overnight anyway. Absolutely freezing cold night with ice forming on the pavement, we has a space blanket each to keep warm and a bottle of whisky for sustenance but in the end had to take it in turns to jog around St George's Hall opposite the Empire to keep warm. By morning a big queue had formed and we felt a bit better that we were not only in the right place at the right time after all but were in prime position at the front. Then around 9:00 a guy came out of the theatre and explained that tickets couldn't go on sale after all as there had been a delay at the printers and they hadn't received the tickets yet. Word got passed down the queue and things looked like they might turn a bit ugly, so we appealed to the guy's better nature and he said he'd see what he could do. Eventually he came out again and said if we went into the box office and booked our seats they'd give everyone an envelope for us to address and they'd send them on to us when they received them. Got four tickets each for both the early and late shows and later managed to get a spare front row seat for Manchester from a friend , plus Birmingham and London from postal applications and then got down to London again for two of the Earls Court shows in June, the most gigs I ever managed in a single tour.


    Starting in 1972 this is the final tally:


    Foxtrot '72 - Stoke Trentham Gardens

    Foxtrot '73 - Manchester Free Trade Hall

    Selling England '73 - Manchester Opera House

    Lamb '75 - Manchester Palace Theatre both nights

    TOTT '76 - Hammersmith Odeon two nights, Stafford Bingley Hall

    W&W '77 - London Rainbow, Birmingham Odeon, Manchester Free Trade Hall, Liverpool Empire early and late shows, London Earls Court 2 nights.

    ATTWT '78 - Knebworth

    Duke '80 - Birmingham Odeon, Manchester Apollo, Stoke Trentham Gardens, Liverpool Empire both nights

    Abacab '81 - Cologne Sporthalle, London Wembley Arena 2 nights, Birmingham NEC 2 nights

    Encore '82 - Hamburg Wihelm Koch Stadium, Birmingham NEC 2 nights, Deeside Leisure Centre, London Marquee

    Six of the Best '82 - Milton Keynes Bowl

    Mama '84 - Birmingham NEC 4 nights

    IT '87- Leeds Roundhay Park, London Wembley Stadium

    Silver Clef Concert '90 - Knebworth

    WCD '92- Leeds Roundhay Park, London Earls Court

    CAS '98 - Birmingham NEC

    TIOA '07 - Manchester Old Trafford


    And that's it for me. Won't be going to the Last Domino tour if/when it happens, not really interested anymore and wouldn't pay that sort of money to see anyone anyway. In hinsight I think I hung on a few years too long after my enthusiasm had waned a bit, I think you can see that from the list, down to one or two shows per tour when we get to the mid-80s. Regret not being a couple of years older so I could have seen them with Ant and a few more times pre-Foxtrot, the 69-72 period is my favourite era.

    I thought it was Trespass, not Nursery Cryme, that was rehearsed at The Maltings, the cottage owned by a family friend.

    They wrote and rehearsed for about six months in Christmas Cottage in Wotton near Dorking, which was owned by Richard Macphail's parents. That's where Trespass was written and rehearsed. The Maltings is in the centre of Farnham, an old maltings that at the time was disused but shortly after was renovated as an arts centre. They began rehearsing there just after Phil joined. Nursery Cryme was rehearsed and partially written at Luxford House, near Crowborough on East Sussex - Tony Stratton-Smith was renting it at the time. There's a picture of it in the gatefold sleeve of Van der Graaf's Pawn Hearts.