You look at they way the went along in their career in the first years you just question it.
Not really. I don't question why Stephen King is writing books like The Outsider and Revival these days instead of Carrie and Salem's Lot. It's just artistic progression, that's all.
It comes with the territory alright, just some people seem to be more impervious to it
Like who?
I like to think that I was open to the change, I kept on listening they really lost me with IT
See, Invisible Touch is where I came in. So the first big change I had to deal with was Calling All Stations. And it took me twenty years to adapt to that particular change!
It wasn't me, they always wanted to do that, they just didn't know how to and so on
From Mike Rutherford: "We always wrote short songs, it was just that they were crap."
Yes, Phil responded to journalists who made what he felt to be ill-informed comments about him and his music. You really think music journalists know what they're talking about? Personally, I find Frank Zappa's comment on such people to most appropriate: "Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read." Frank Sinatra put it more succinctly, calling them "pimps and hookers".
And as someone who is a professional performer, I can tell you with some authority that being thin-skinned tends to come with the territory. Rare is the performer who doesn't take criticism to heart.
I was one of those old gits from the 70s. However, I did get a few earlier cd's from the 80s. I was not a fan of these changes, because I loved Genesis as it was back then and moved to bands such as Marillion to get that similar sound. Though Marillion now has changed their sound quite a lot over the years.
Yes, Marillion were very much a tribute act to that era of music, I felt, what with the album covers and Fish with his makeup and costumes. They never appealed to me but when Steve Hogarth took over, I gave them a listen and I loved what I heard. I think Brave is a fabulous album.
Well, those of us who bought the albums by the band have never experienced those gaps. If people want to download dodgy MP3s off the internet, though, I doubt they care much about music in the first place.
I would say that for my taste, my attitude towards the band changed as of Abacab,
I think that's good. If the fans of the seventies stuff loved Abacab just as much as Selling England By The Pound, then I think Genesis would've questioned their own ability to move with the times. Remember, Genesis felt Abacab was such a radical shift from the past that they almost changed the name of the group.
As someone who did discover Genesis in the eighties, I was much more accepting of the changes in their music when I looked back over their career. Had I been with the band from the start, I have no doubt that I would have stopped listening to them at a certain point, because that's what happens with most fans.
it is true, perhaps Mike couldn't have never written something like Invisible Touch in the 70s
Well, considering he was the band's bass player in the seventies and the song itself is based on a Prince/Sheila E style of song, neither of whom were making music in the mid-seventies, no, he wouldn't have written something like that back then.
As a fan of Genesis with my own opinion and tastes, I will take what a member of the band said over anything that I or any other fans have to say. So, you may well dismiss the comments of the band's erstwhile drummer, singer and front man as being no different to the platitudes of a politician...but I don't.
Incidentally, has anyone attempted to link Dancing With The Moonlit Knight with The Cinema Show? Do they even match up? If so, where would you make the join?
Yeah, I've always made a similar argument to fans of punk music over the years, met with reluctant acceptance through to "**** off mate, no way!"
Numerous punk icons from John Lydon, Hugh Cornwell and Jaz Coleman expressed a liking for some progressive bands; The likes of Hawkwind, VDGG, Amon Duul, Neu, Soft Machine and even some early Genesis. Phil Collins was said to have been approached by a nervous Rat Scabies from The Damned in an airport, who claimed to be a great admirer of his talents as a drummer.
Punk does have something in common with prog IMO. It was just ironic that the latter was so unceremoniously replaced by the former.
There's a great story from Nick Launay who worked on the Flowers Of Romance album by PiL (great band, much better than The Sex Pistols in my opinion) where he brought about a meeting between Phil Collins and John Lydon over lunch. The two got on famously, much to everyone's surprise: The Curious Tale Of Phil and Mr Rotten
The only editing I'd need to do would be to remove that irritating half second gap between the two tracks. Bugs the hell out of me why they had to chop it up like that. Same gripe about the way Home By The Sea is unnecessarily divided. Floyd have no problems letting stuff flow together on Dark Side etc. To the extent that I don't even really know the tracklisting - it's just one piece of music. Ditto The Wall.
There's no gap between the two tracks is there? I agree that The Lamb is one complete listening experience, just like The Wall 
Pinball Wizard had great energy and made me want them to do a straight cover of the whole track.
Okay, hankies at the ready. Here's John Martyn revisiting his tune Ways To Cry with his old mate Phil Collins: Ways To Cry
Yes, I'd forgotten about that. Somewhere in the realms of Genesis nutjob-fandom there has to be someone who's worked that one out.
I played it backwards to see if I could work it out but my efforts were unsuccessful.
If Fly were paired with its successor - Broadway Musical 1974 then it would be a strong candidate for a place in my top ten. But both are too short to merit inclusion on their own.
There’s not a whole lot else I’m mad about on the album. In the Cage, Hairless Heart (again very short), umm now I’m struggling.
Depending on how much time you have on your hands, you could always edit Fly On A Windshield together with Broadway Of 1974 on Audacity. That way you have one damn fine piece of music of a decent length. And Hairless Heart can easily be extended using the same software so that it doesn't end so soon - of course, what it really needed was a guitar solo...
I sense a hole opening up in front of me but my take on prog has always been that it's adventurous, an attempt to do something beyond the accepted norm, a response in part to what was popular in the charts at the time (the time being the late sixties). And it seems to me that the movement (if it can be so called) was inspired directly by the pioneering work of the later albums by The Beatles. I imagine very few of the musicians in prog rock would classify as virtuoso - indeed, the conceit that someone needed to be a master of their craft seemed to be the undoing of prog when so many bands lost favour with the masses when punk came along.
"We were punks, you know," Jon Anderson once said. The quote may inspire hilarity but I can see where he's coming from. When prog rock began, it was as much a response to the current musical climate as punk was.
Have you seen that clip of them miming to both those tracks on a US talk show?
Yes, quite an odd one that but a reminder that they were courting a much larger audience long before the days of Invisible Touch.
I think Thick as a Brick is massively overrated, I don't really love Anderson's voice and the musicianship was subpar when compared to other Prog bands.
Hang In Long Enough is about ambition and hanging on in there without selling out to the people who'll sell you down the river. Phil used to meet with young adults on weekends with the Princes Trust and they'd ask him "If you have loads of money do your problems go away?" to which he said "No, you just have a different set of problems". I suppose encounters like this informed the lyrics of Hang In Long Enough. The lyric seems to be a message to those kids who want success but haven't had the break they need in life and might be tempted to sign a Faustian deal just to get some money in their pocket.
It's really refreshing to read comments from Genesis fans who actually know what they're talking about!
As for Jethro Tull, I much prefer the name Robert Plant gave them: Jethro Dull.
