Oh how articulate! Thanks for that explanation. I stand gratefully corrected.
Brevity is the essence of wit. Even the most cursory read of your posts assures me (as if I needed assuring) as to who is the more articulate poster around here. You can sit down now.
Banks described the album as ‘Foxtrot 4 years later’ and I can see exactly what he means. It’s just a shame that with the advent of Punk & New Wave, the hostility of the music press towards prog rock at the time and the greater success they enjoyed with Trick that they would abandon this level of complexity and resort to a more easily digestible musical output on the albums to follow
It's called progression 
What I do find irritating and unnecessary is the little gap between the two parts on the album, as if they needed to physically separate them.
Rather than being a contrived attempt to bridge the two parts of the song, it's actually a reprise of the bridge section heard earlier in the first part.
Did Genesis themselves "sell England by the pound" by abandoning the theme for a totally American based one in the Lamb, their next album?
No.
I still find it astonishing that...this track was rejected from Foxtrot.
Phil could not get behind the song as presented so Tony worked on it some more and the version he presented to the band in 1973 was much more workable. I think this was mentioned on the DVD interview for the Nick Davis remix but I'm not entirely sure.
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.
Thanks! Would you like to elaborate? I think it sounds like nothing else they ever did.
Well, I think that not only does it stand out in the Genesis repertoire as being unlike anything they'd done before, but it also has the distinction of sounding unlike anything anyone else had done before. The lyrics are used not so much for their meaning but for the sound of the words used. Musically, it has a bombastic opening which then gives way to a reggae backbeat and then the song switches to Lurker which is completely off-the-wall. Lurker captures a certain magic with its jaunty keyboards and Phil's comedy vocal stylings giving way to a passionate and heartfelt reading of "clothes of brass and hair of brown etc."
How can you have a good example of an atypical song?
Atypical means one of a kind, implying there are no good examples.
Wrong.
I didn't and that's interesting. My question would have been wether Phil's voice could have handled Supper's Ready. Correct if wrong, but didn't he have some issues with it on the IT tour and it was removed from the medley? I know Phil had issues with his vocals on the WCD tour as the encore of one of the shows I saw was cut short.
I considered that, too. Whilst the shows on the North American leg of the tour saw some fine performances of the end section of Supper's Ready, by the time the band reached Australia, there were clearly some vocal problems which resulted in the song being replaced with Afterglow.
Phil has always said he enjoys singing Supper's Ready, though, and has no issue with fans considering it to be the best thing Genesis ever did.
On the WCD tour, Phil caught a cold which resulted in a concert in Miami being cancelled. Subsequent to that, he lost a lot of his mid-range and Mama had to be dropped from the set. By the time the tour reached England, his vocals didn't seem as powerful as they used to be, although he still gave it his all on stage and some of the melodies on stuff like No Son Of Mine and Home By The Sea were sublime. After the stadium tour, Genesis did an "encore" tour of smaller venues throughout Britain. I caught the band at Earls Court and Phil's vocals were still in good shape.
Best Steve Hackett album ever. Compared face to face with And Then There Were Three, it could not show more clearly what a loss Steve was for the band and how liberated he was after leaving.
None of that stuff would have ever made it onto a Genesis album, anymore than Phil's cover of You Can't Hurry Love or Peter Gabriel's Modern Love would have. The problem with Steve was that he rated his material far higher than the rest of his bandmates did. He was valued as a player but not as a writer. Looking at the success Genesis continued to enjoy after Steve left, I don't think they considered him to be that great a loss.
Good for Steve, though; being in Genesis gave him the confidence that he needed to go out there and plough his own furrow as a solo artist.
"Swallowing hard and coming out with it".
Guitar: Frank Zappa
Bass: Marcus Miller
Drums: Phil Collins and Chester Thompson
Keyboards: George Duke
Trumpet: Dizzy Gillespie
ATM, I would pick No Son of Mine as my favorite Genesis opener. Why? The lyrics are personal, the musicality is tight, focused, and has amazing build-ups and an even better resolution to them. I also have a complicated relationship with my father so I can kind of relate to the song as well. My runner-ups are The Musical Box and Mama.
As the lead single from the new album, No Son of Mine really delivered the goods, I thought. Phil's newfound ability to write about social issues as opposed to just boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-and-moves-into-a-house-where-the-roof-is-leaking resulted in one of his strongest lyrics. What makes the song even more dramatic is that there is no happy ending (at least in the song Vancouver the girl is welcomed back with open arms!).
[the Old Medley on the Way We Walk] felt forced as if they knew they had to tip their hats to that era.
My question in all this is, "What would the fans rather have seen live?" Some bits and pieces of songs over 15-20 minutes or 1-2 full songs? Like instead of the 15-20 min old medley, do all of Cinema Show or Firth or whatever.
Well, you know that when they were looking at what old material to play on the We Can't Dance tour, Phil suggested they perform Supper's Ready but was voted down.
As you may or may not know, Genesis was not Phil's first band. That honour would belong to Hickory (later renamed Flaming Youth). They did a song, you know? It was called Green Light. Would you like to hear it? Oh, okay then: Green Light
Did you like that? I expect you'd like to hear another. Check this out: Lying Crying Dying
I particularly like that last tune. At times, you can hear the influence of Cream in Phil's singing. Pretty hip.
You got me intrigued in this Ark 2 album now!!...
It's bloomin' awful! I think Phil said that he's personally signed every copy that was bought. It's worth a listen and - like FGTR - there are some good ideas in there but it sounds very dated. It's worth noting that the band themselves didn't come up with the concept; that was the brainchild of Howard and Blaikley (who had written hits for The Honeycombs and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich).
Your missing out on so much music mate!
Ask COT, genesis1964, slowdancer and NedFalnders123..... Trust me, it's not garbage at all.
Well, I could say that someone who devotes 90 percent of their listening to just one sub-genre of music is also missing out on so much, too!
I love some so-called prog rock bands - Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator - but I can't say my listening tastes are limited to one particular genre.
Anyway, back to Ark 2, I don't know why you assumed, never having heard it, that it wasn't a progressive rock album. It is. And conceptually it's as ambitious as FGTR. Neither albums succeed for me in achieving their aim but it's fun to hear what they were up to at the beginning of their careers.
I'm not familiar with Flaming Youth music at all.... Mostly my love is purely Progressive music..
I would say mainly 90 % of my music is progressive.
That's fine; nobody's perfect 
Flaming Youth (named after line in a Roosevelt speech) only did the one album. Ark 2 is a concept album about humanity having to leave a dying planet behind for a life beyond the stars. It might just satisfy your criteria for progressive music!
I keep finding albums that Phil has appeared on.
Ark 2 by Flaming Youth (featuring both Phil and Ronnie Caryl) is worth checking out if you haven't already heard it. It's interesting to listen to it in relation to From Genesis To Revelation, actually, just to check out what both parties were doing around the same time...and how different it was!
