Posts by thewatcher

    Not sure about the bashfulness bit but if it's there it's probably not too different from a person looking at an old photo and thinking, jeez I had that hair and those clothes?!

    Yeah, there may be a cultural element of being self-deprecating too. Didn't Phil say he'd have left Genesis in a heartbeat if Led Zeppelin (or something) had asked him to join? I may be misremembering and it's somewhat tangential to the topic at hand. I also remember him comparing Genesis to another big band - I think it was U2 - and saying that they (Genesis) just didn't have that confidence. He said something along the lines of "man, if we were just a little bit better we'd be great!". He was making a wisecrack I guess, and it's certainly not specifically casting their older material in any kind of negative light, but they do from time to time seem a little chastened by all the the flack they came in for over the years. Which was totally unjustified in my eyes! And maybe it's just Phil.

    I read an interview in which Banks spoke with obvious pride about Supper's Ready and Duchess as two of the best things they ever did.

    Rightfully so.

    I like pretty much everything in this take on the big topic of How Genesis Sold Out. My go to argument is that they were trying to do exactly the same thing with IKWIL as they were with That's All: write a hit song. I love that they pushed on as much as they did, I'm not sure they'd have had the staying power they have without doing so. It may be cheesy to say, but there's nothing much more progressive than moving with the times and updating their sound to stay relevant across three decades. (And for the record Art Vandaley I'm not saying you said they sold out and I do detect some bashfulness when they talk about the older material).

    This morning I turned on Today, the main BBC radio news programme, to hear a presenter grilling a treasury minister about PG’s request for government support for music festivals as WOMAD faces cancellation. I think they’d interviewed PG himself earlier on.


    The treasury minister wasn’t particularly helpful, but maybe PG’s old band could use some of the profits from their lucrative upcoming tour to bail out WOMAD. It wouldn’t be the first time....

    I've heard reunions with former bandmates can be a useful way of raising a bit of awareness and dosh... Y'know, with very little preparation, in a soggy field to increase the excitement, that sort of thing.

    Haha. I can picture your eye twitching as you pick it up to pay for it.

    Good god man, I didn't buy it! I'd be afraid of waking up in the middle of the night to find that skeletal winged creature perched on the end of my bed. I am morbidly obsessed with the cover. It continues to blow my mind just how the creator sat back at the end, perhaps with a contented sigh, and thought to him or herself, 'yep, that's it. It's done. It can't be bettered".


    I'm also fascinated by it's appearance in Newbury Comics. I wonder if it'll be a sleeper hit among college kids who might like getting high and staring at the cover until the various elements start to move about and speak.

    Watched the docuseries called Wild Wild Country on Netflix. Boy was that something else!


    Currently watching Unforgotten on Amazon Prime, a British series with Nicola Walker. VERY GOOD. I love British shows, but my wife needs the subtitles. She doesn't understand "English" English LOL

    This reminds me of the time we took our then 4 year old home to Ireland. Paw Patrol here in the US is done with American actors, over there it looks identical but is done with British actors. Her question to us: "why is it in Spanish?" 😆


    I went back and it's still there. I picked it up and took a photo of it. It's real. It costs $37. I felt my phone wince as the camera tried to focus, it did that blurry in-and-out thing like it would do in a Japanese horror film just before the dead girl with the jerky limb movements rushes toward you and eats your face. None of these sentences are false. It costs $37.


    Edit: $37.

    Today's news on the delay of England's reopening plans is not good news for the tour.


    19th July is just under 2 months til the beginning of the tour in Dublin (which we have our own issues with allowing events here)

    Clearly they need to reschedule the entire tour to Massachusetts. Come, bask in the maskless utopia. What, none of the band are allergic to lobster rolls? What's the excuse then?! Put the booking fee for cancelled venues toward air travel for discommoded fans. Covid vaccine required? You can win a shotgun over here for doing that! It. Makes. Sense. We also have very good beer and if they time it right, you won't burn to a crisp or freeze to death. There's a few hours in September when that happens. I have a big garden for an after party. Let's go.

    Picked A Trick Of The Tail, Wind & Wuthering and Duke in no particular order. Those 3 sum up what I like about it Genesis. And Then There Were 3 is pretty close as is Lamb & Abacab.

    I love it. Genesis are a band that demands 6 favorite albums, dammit.


    (I'm not kidding, I have a top tier of Genesis albums that had CAS and Trick at the top followed by Abacab/Duke but Lamb and Trespass won't be refused entry to the club, what am I to do?)

    Beautifully put. I think the same experiences I was having were shot through with an unpleasantness the music was good enough to absorb somehow. It has a membranous quality very hard to attain, almost like Bowie had.

    It's a great album. I remember listening to it a lot during an unsettled time in my life however, and it's funny how those connections can carry forward. Despite the quality of it, it dredges up negative memories. That said, it's so good it's still my second favorite PG album after Up (which I love anyway, and coincidentally saturated my playlists during a thrilling time of discovery for me!).


    I went for Intruder, Family Snapshot and I Don't Remember.

    Ok, a thread like this for a band like Genesis I expect will have highly inflamed diversions like the page above. To be honest, I'm surprised it's not worse.


    OT: my topmost wish for the tour is that they play different songs each night, so they cover more of their vast, rich catalogue over the course of the tour. I accept this is very unlikely. If I was going to daydream (edit: for the show I'm going to attend), I could imagine them opening with Eleventh Earl of Mar for the first time on the tour, filling their rotating B side slot with Feeding the Fire, and using the 'unfinished business' section - a new innovation in between the Old Medley and Turn It On Again where they spend twenty minutes playing some songs they never played on prior tours - for playing Seven Stones (for the third time this tour) and Anything She Does (for the fourth time this tour). And then the random audience shout, where they play a track generated from an audience poll on the night, would be Chamber of 32 Doors. These elements, like celestial bodies, orbit the sun of setlist staples (Domino, Home By The Sea, Mama, IT etc) and everyone has a ball.


    Aaaaaahhhh that felt good.

    Everything on the bbc has gone woke, it's pretty blatant, they even had a dig at Trump on the PC programme.

    😲 Call the church elders! Form a protective ring around the former president, he was robbed anyway, he'll be reinstated later this afternoon!!

    26 pages of daydreaming is pretty endless.

    No it's not, it ends at page 26.


    I used to get excited about Christmas, then I grew up.

    Could it be, perhaps, that his heart was three sizes too small?

    I'm completely out of touch with the charts and I assume it'll largely be stuff of no interest to me. But there are plenty of very good acts around who don't find their way into the chart. Most of my current music listening is stuff new to me by current acts and which I like very much.

    Totally agree with this. There is great music around if you are willing to do a little digging.


    And also, it's a fan forum for a band touring later this year. Of course there's going to be a 'setlist' thread filled with hopes, gripes and banter. And a lot of inane fantasy (I'm sure I've contributed my share!). It's all part of the fun.