I found it interesting peeking back at this. I'm in here along with others saying it won't happen.
Maybe it still won't! I don't know how the 'live' music industry is ever going to recover and if it does, in what form it will continue.
Posts by StillCan'tDance
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Dont get me wrong . She likes them both. We both saw the TIOA tour and PG a couple of times . But yes. Words fail me too.
My wife and I are usually in synch where music is concerned but I will be eternally perplexed at her unbridled dislike of Jon Anderson's voice. Reminds me of what Fish once said about Van der Graaf Generator, that he had a girlfriend who "refused to be in the same room as Peter Hammill's voice"!
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I've not heard of that one. I'll give it a go. I just looked it up on Amazon and one of the reviews is from the most predictable old prog-head "they were crap from Follow You Follow Me onwards" types who refers to the book as a "hardcover fanzine" and drones on about the band selling out. I thought, well if a whinging old git like him doesn't like it, it's worth getting.
It's extremely well-written, quite possibly the best book I've read on the band to be honest and it takes the story up to the We Can't Dance tour and also covers the solo careers of all the members.
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No, it's true. They bounced around the idea of Tony singing silver rainbow and Mike singing just a job to do. I read Tony's comments on the matter and that they decided in the end that Phil was the best singer so it didn't make sense. However, can I remember where I read that? No. Can I link to material supporting the claim? Also... No. I came across it many years ago in a book, or magazine. Or it might even have been a recorded interview as I can remember the comments in Tony's voice.
In Bowler and Dray's excellent biography of the band, the writers mention that it was a shame that Mike and Tony didn't sing any lead vocals on the album. I always thought it was a strange comment to make but in light of what you say it makes a lot of sense now.
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Scratch My Back
No. Scratch your own...oh, I see, the cover versions album. Gotchya.
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Ray is her favourite Genesis singer, and CAS is her favourite Genesis album . I'm afraid Phil and Peter don't come close!
Words fail me.
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I have to say I've never been hugely fond of the studio version of The Fountain Of Salmacis. I first heard it on Three Sides Live where it sounded terrific but when I finally heard the studio version it sounded bloody awful. Of course, John Anthony's muddy production didn't help but the drums sounded tubby, Gabriel's thick voice swallowed up everything in its path and the guitar solo didn't grab me the same way it did when I heard Daryl play it. My favourite version of the song remains the one from Dijon in 1978.
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I did go to see them on the tour. I wanted to give them a chance. A friend and I went to see them in Manchester (in fact that very same gig has recently become available to download through the Movement site) and really the only thing that grabbed us was the drumming. I thought Ray was terrible as a front man. Sorry, Ray fans!
A few plusses about that show, though: the acoustic set was a wonderful idea and something I wish they'd done while Phil was in the band (in a parallel universe, on the We Can't Dance tour, they dropped one of the Invisible Touch songs and performed a medley of Lover's Leap, Blood On The Rooftops and Many Too Many) and the guitar "duel" between Mike Rutherford and Anthony Drennan at the start of The Dividing Line was fantastic. Oh, and Ray's harmonica playing during I Can't Dance was pretty darned good, too.
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the Lamb steps up the production values again massively.
Oh yes. The production on that album has always had some bite to it. John Burns produced it but he also produced Selling England, whose sound I've never liked.
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Difficult to pick 3. I plumped for III So and Us but I could easily put IV UP and SMB.
SMB?
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I went for The Musical Box, Harold The Barrel and Return Of The Giant Hogweed.
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I think the real reason was someone had lost enthusiasm and just didn't want to go ahead with the tour
I think you're way off on this. If "someone" had lost enthusiasm and didn't want to go ahead with the tour, then why not cancel the European leg, too?
The tour dates and venues are decided by the management, not the band, and according to Tony Smith the indicators from America were that there was not sufficient interest to justify Genesis touring there. These decisions are not based purely on album sales - if you recall, Phil's Dance Into The Light album performed quite poorly but people still wanted to see him in concert and his Trip Into The Light tour was as successful as any other he'd performed - and Tony would have not taken the decision lightly.
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I've grown to like this album less over the years whilst, conversely, I like Nursery Cryme so much more. I just feel that Nursery Cryme hangs together so much more successfully than Foxtrot.
Supper's Ready, of course, is great and I've always liked Get 'Em Out By Friday and Can-Utility And The Coastliners but Time Table is dull and Horizons is ever duller. And the album cover is terrible!
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Should they have continued? That's much more of a judgemental question. We'll never know as we can't know what would have happened in this alternate universe. I was very disappointed they chose not to as I've already said. I gather from what I've read that at a minimum they should have resolved the situation with Ray better, although that is a somewhat separate issue.
I think they should have but I don't blame them for not doing so. I've been a professional performer since the mid nineties and I know how difficult it can be to build a fanbase. I seriously doubt I will know how it feels to be playing venues such as Knebworth Park, Madison Square Gardens and Wembley Stadium one minute and then lose an entire country's worth of fans. And not just any country; America is huge!
Where did all those fans go?! I know this was a question that vexed Tony Banks at the time. Clearly the pulling power of Phil Collins was the overriding factor. It was painfully evident on the tour but it's also starkly apparent on the album (and I like the album). By this point in their career, I think the fanbase was a lot more mainstream and more casual in their listening habits. So without a charismatic frontman (who also just happened to be one of the biggest solo performers on the planet) and without the big hits, the band was left with a hardcore and significantly smaller fanbase. And, having been in that situation at the start of their career, they didn't want to go back to that.
Now, I understand those fans feeling a bit peeved at that; they tend to be the type of people who think that Genesis make music for the fans and not themselves. There's a serious lack of empathy and anything more than a rudimentary understanding of what it's like to be a professional performer seems to escape them completely.
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Much, much prefer Please Don't Ask to Alone Tonight for just that reason. I find the latter very mushy. Please Don't Ask has wicked bass and atmosphere too, apart from being more genuine with the emotion.
Oh, definitely. Just that line alone "But I miss my boy". When I first heard the album, I was just a spotty teenager. I loved the song but I couldn't relate to Phil's situation. Now, I'm older and I have kids and the idea of my family unit breaking up and of me becoming a "Saturday dad" really hits home and the song gets to me on a much deeper level now.
The sequencing of that song, placed between two of the so-called proggier numbers, highlights what Tony Banks once said about the sequencing of Supper's Ready, where a romantic song placed next to an absurd song highlights the difference between them and enhances the respective mood of both pieces.
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They could have continued to make albums and tour arenas or theatres.
You and I (probably) will never know what it's like to be that successful so it's very easy for fans such as yourself to say that they should have gone on, as though failure on the level that they experienced in the late nineties doesn't matter. Which is why I started off my reply by asking you to "think about it". Such a request seems to have offended you, hence your pissy reply, but I can't help you there. All I can say is that the intention was not to offend, only to ask you to empathise a bit.
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Yeah, this isn't insulting or dismissive at all. Stay classy dude.
It was a joke. Jeez....
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What?
Do you mean "pardon"? lol
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What's fun is seeing how fans' opinions have changed in the 25 years since I started perusing the Internet. For example, lots of people have warmed to We Can't Dance (my personal favorite of the Genesis studio albums) since then. In the mid-90s you still had people trying to signal against the then-recent hits, but since then some of those folks have probably reexamined that album and others on their own merits rather than on radio play.
I only started surfing the internet in the last fifteen years and much less of that time has been spent posting on forums but I do recall that on one site some prog fans considered themselves "superior" to people who liked pop music. I'm not sure what basis they used for that assumption, only that I've never read such guff in all my days!
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Number One is Phil by a country mile. None of the others come close. His lyrics hit home, he's a musical prodigy, top-hole drummer and composer, soulful vocalist and he always picked the best musicians for his albums and tours. And being a jazz fan, I love his stuff with Brand X and the big band stuff he did in the late nineties. And then you have the stuff he did with Eno, Robert Plant, John Martyn, Eric Clapton and so on and so forth. Apparently, you judge a man by the company he keeps; I'd say, in musical circles, Phil is up there with the cream of the crop.
After that I would say Peter, certainly his albums from PG3 up to UP have got some great stuff on them. The downside is that a lot of it is over-produced and over-wrought. I prefer spontaneity in music, not the endless tinkering for which Gabriel has become infamous. It smacks of indulgence - a lot like Kate Bush; these people don't have to work for a living so they lounge around. If a shelf-stacker in Asda worked at the rate Gabriel does, he wouldn't make it past his first shift before being shown the door.
After Peter, I'd put Tony, Steve and Mike in the same boat. They've all done some great stuff but not for a long time and certainly not enough to make me a fan, although I've bought albums by all three of them.
