Well, TBH, he's probably made a few more since I posted that 8 months ago!
I doubt it. He died in 1998.
Posts by StillCan'tDance
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Yes, I've read this article before and it's spot on. By the way, what is this phrase "deep cuts" that I've been hearing lately? What does it mean? I have to say, I don't subscribe to these faddish phrases - I remember when "game changer" was on everyone's lips way back when and I turned my nose up at that too!
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I picked up a second hand copy of this on vinyl back in the early nineties. I think The Steppes is fantastic and The Show is a great pop tune. Can't recall much else about it, though.
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...was at Milton Keynes 1982 - which was the most euphoric I've ever been at a gig. I still pinch myself sometimes and listen to the bootlegs with a big cheesy grin on my face.
The Milton Keynes gig was one of the first bootlegs I ever got (this was when you got a bootleg in the post and then copied it for three other people). I've listened to it once. I guess you just had to be there!
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I fucking love this album.
Aye, aye Mr Potty Mouth!
I don't know whether it's the placebo effect but I do think that the remix of this album does give it a warmer sound that benefits both the music and the singing. Okay, no amount of studio jiggery pokery is ever going to make Ray Wilson sound like Nat King Cole but I do think it sounds a lot better now.
Listening recently to some of the performances of Congo from the tour shows how a great song could have been taken to an even greater level, what with the guitar solo and everything. In fact, it caused me to revisit my own remix of the album and with a little studio jiggery pokery of my own, I've integrated the guitar solo into the song and I lke the result very much.
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Prog magazine issue 110 will feature Rick Wakeman, discussing among other things "what happened with ARW" according to Burning Shed's email.
While, I had no interest whatsoever in seeing them perform 'live' I would have liked to have heard a studio album by ARW. When Yes did their eight-man-lineup Union tour, Rabin and Wakeman got on famously and in a perfect world the next Yes album would have had Wakeman onboard. But this band is blighted by politics and so it never ended up happening. A shame really.
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Well, it's been argued there are concept albums years before the 60's (Sinatra is someone who has been credited as doing one
Come Fly With Me, Songs For Swingin' Lovers, A Swingin' Affair, Only The Lonely, In The Wee Small Hours, Where Are You, Come Dance With Me, Great Songs From Great Britain...they're the ones I can quote off the top of my head (a few more than the "one" you suggest!).
Frank Sinatra was the first pop artist to master the art of the concept album and some of those records rank amongst the finest albums of all time.
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I think Phil has expressed having problems with the lyrics in the past, but I think (unlike many guys his age) he's getting a lot more mellow about some things that used to bother him more.
I also think that's a song he could sing pretty easily, and it's what, 3 minutes long?
Seems like an easy win for everyone to me. We get an unplayed song, Tony gets a song he likes, Phil has a song that should be easy to perform.
Phil only had an issue with one word in the song, which Tony persuaded him by saying that the word featured a lot in the songs of Led Zeppelin, of whom Phil has always been a big fan.
I wouldn't kid yourself that the length of the song makes it any easier to sing. That chorus would be a real struggle, I imagine.
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I knew things had changed for the worse when I was in a car full of people driving to the IT show at RFK Stadium. I was playing a cassette recording from the King Biscuit Flower Hour of a show from the Mama Tour. When In the Cage started a girl in the backseat said “We want to listen to Genesis. Turn this stuff off!” Argh.
I think what happened at that point was that Genesis had become one of those bands who people went to see, not because they were fans, but because they were the big show in town. Pretty much the kind of thing that's been happening with The Stones for some time. It's not a bad thing, it's a reflection of just how big they were by the time of Invisible Touch.
I'd never listen to the music of the band I'm going to see on the way to the gig, though - I recall a friend and I listened to Erasure on the way to the gig at Roundhay Park in 1992 - the same way that I don't listen to the music that I sing when I'm on my way to one of my own gigs. But that's just me!
Looks like you saw the band when they were at their best, anyway
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Is that why those versions have never been re-released??
No.
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It's a shame that they couldn't find the original tapes for the full-length versions of "Mama" and "It's Gonna Get Better" - I love those two versions.
The only tape that couldn't be found was that of Say It's Alright Joe from And Then There Were Three. The reason that the extra verse for It's Gonna Get Better wasn't used would have been down to the band, same as the reason for the longer edit of Mama not being used. Everything you hear (apart from the song mentioned) is taken from the original tapes of the respective albums.
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TTT, Land Of Confusion, and Domino for me.
I wonder how Nick happened across the few extra seconds of the closing jam on "Anything She Does" for the 2007 remaster (or, perhaps a better question, why doesn't the original version have that bit).
Nick went back to the original tapes, he didn't simply remaster the existing mixes. Anything She Does isn't the only song where previously un-used vocals were used; in Since I Lost You on We Can't Dance, there's a bit of vocal from Phil which is exclusive to that mix. And Mama was re-edited, using some bits that were cut from the album version (it's still not as long as the 12 inch version, though).
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Yeah for me there was always something a bit too bright, shiny and clattery about the sound but as WinstonWolf said above the 07 remaster is a lot better.
That might have been more to do with the album being mastered by Bob Ludwig than the actual production. Hugh Padgham had been working with the band since Abacab but - as far as I know - Invisible Touch was the only album which they passed it on to an outside source to do the mastering. Bob Ludwig is something of a legend in the music business.
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Ah right, it might have thrown me as I always thought of Headley Grange as a big house while mention of a cottage confused me into thinking of Christmas Cottage. Yeah I'm sure the dark atmosphere there they've often described had an effect on the music and the sound.
Phil tells a great story about them writing The Waiting Room at Headley Grange. In fact, the stories of the band's experiences in that place are almost as fascinating as the music that they created there.
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I don't think it has aged well, mostly because of the production.
What issues do you have with the production? I revisited both mixes of the album this week because I'm revising some of the mixes I did on my own copy and the production sounds perfect to me. Obviously, Nick's remix brings out some bits here and there - there's more of Mike's guitar solo on The Brazilian, some more keyboard sounds on Tonight Tonight Tonight and some extra vocals at the end of Anything She Does - but it's a solid sounding album and doesn't use dated sounds (like, say, Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes).
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I simply never compare this with Selling or Trick
I think there's a lot to be said for a band that progresses. Genesis, for me, changed through the years but maintained their integrity. I wouldn't want to listen to A Trick Of The Tail and then Invisible Touch and say, "Yes, this sounds like exactly the same band!"
I know they get ribbed by some fans for having commercial success with the three-man lineup but every decision they made was theirs and theirs alone and not dictated to them by the record company or the producer.
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Cottage?
I thought it was Trespass, not Nursery Cryme, that was rehearsed at The Maltings, the cottage owned by a family friend.
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True dat.
(Sorry, I'm a big fan of The Wire).
I've never seen The Wire but it occurs to me that if 'live' gigs do make a comeback with the caveat that audiences must observe social distancing, I might be able to finally lay claim to playing a sold out gig!
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my main issue now (and with PG4) is the very 80s sound, which hasn't dated well in my opinion.
I have never had any issues with 80s production. A lot of fine producers came out of that era, Hugh Padgham being just one of them. Indeed, I much prefer the sound of a lot of records that came out of the 80s than I do the stuff that was around in the 70s.
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I don't recommend it unreservedly. He doesn't like Abacab, which alienated me (he tries to be fair to it, though). He spends too much time talking about WCD chart positions rather than the actual music. He thinks Invisible Touch is 'poor' and unfortunately quotes that stupid American Psycho thing in full. I need to re-read it but overall I wasn't very impressed with it.
If he can dismiss Invisible Touch as "poor" and doesn't like Abacab, he clearly isn't suited to writing about that era of Genesis (I see his biog describes him as being a teenager in the 70s and a big fan of prog rock" so the bias against Genesis's later years is not exactly surprising).
At the moment, there's nothing out there on Genesis that interests me, having read all the books on the band that I consider worth reading. Still, if a god writer came along who could cover the history of Genesis as objectively as Bowler and Dray and with the same level of insight, then I'd happily give it a go. I'd certainly like someone to bring the story up-to-date, covering Calling All Stations and its subsequent tour.
