Quote from Fabrizio

For years I thought FYFM on 3SL put the SO version to shame, same with Afterglow. I guess I got carried away by Phil's newly found vocal power but in time I came to realize that delivering a song is also about mood and nuances, not necessarily power. The perks of aging, I guess but again, it's a mood thing, I can listen to the two versions equally, depending on the moment.

About Misunderstanding, one of the songs I started skipping, I agree that it is incredibly overrated, same with Abacab but I understand why the former is always played live.

FYFM on Seconds Out???? I get your point though, and I agree. It's the light and shade, power and delicacy that you get from those earlier songs and performances which appeals to me. In the 80s (and evident on 3SL) it was "BAM, we're here, we're good at what we do, take that, and that...and that" whereas in 77 it was more about the range and getting the most atmosphere from each piece. I think much of this was down to Steve Hackett still being in the band. Daryl might be technically more proficient but Steve had atmosphere in spades. Also, Tony was still using the Mellotron, which might have been a nightmare to maintain but the sounds it produced were perfect for classic Genesis and never matched by his synth efforts in later years. And although Hugh Padgham's production, with its very immediate sound, was perfect for the 'newer' numbers on 3SL, David Hentschel captured the feel of the bands 'older' numbers proportionately better on Seconds Out (despite SH being too low in the mix in places). In my view of course.

I've said enough!

Quote from Backdrifter

While I disagree with most of what you say about 3SL, especially in comparison to SO, I do largely agree with this ^. While I actually love M&SJ on Abacab - for me, it's a classic - the 3SL version is poor and somewhat clunky. But they needed to bolster the presence of the recent album otherwise it would've been represented by the title track and Dodo. No Reply didn't sound good live and would've been a poor choice; MOTC might've been a possibility I suppose.

FYFM is ok but underwhelming and as you say, that's characteristic of its live appearances generally. At the recent tour I went to 3 gigs and during the 2nd and 3rd FYFM was the only time the show started to drag a bit. It was also dull on the 07 tour.

Misunderstanding - I've never minded the song and thought DS added some nice touches to it live but the elongated vocal business near the end is irritating and overdone. (Did that feature during its appearance on the TLD tour?).

But yeah you're right, they were both big hits and couldn't realistically be left off.

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Don't misunderstand me, I think Me and Sarah Jane is a reasonable track. In the studio. On stage, I think it was let down by Chester's drumming (sorry Chester) which lacked the subtlety and feel that the song needed. Phil is a bit too OTT as well.

When I saw Genesis at Twickenham in 2007 Follow You Follow Me was touching and brought a tear to my eye. The 3SL version feels like filler to me.

Misunderstanding - we'll have to agree to differ there! I agree that Daryl helps make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. However, I think Chester (again) lacks subtlety here, the bit at the end is toe curlingly awful and, well, the song is overrated generally. But life would be boring if we all agreed on everything.

I loved Fabrizio's summation. I can appreciate a good chunk of the band's simpler, more direct stuff (except that DREADFUL album with Stations in the title) and I can also appreciate the evolution of their live sound, particularly the 81 and 82 tours funnily enough, where they totally rocked. Also, against the grain here, I quite like the Abacab album and I think Phil's voice peaked at this time too.. However, the band I fell in love with was the band that went for ambitious arrangements, moods and complexity (but without disappearing up their own backsides like Yes etc) and that's why Seconds Out wins for me. I'm not a 3SL hater, it has some great live tracks and I listened to it only a couple of weeks ago, but Seconds Out is one of the top five that I will always enjoy because, for me, good progressive rock is music which takes you on a journey, and in this respect it beats 3SL hands down.

Quote from Fabrizio

Bought it and played it to exhaustion, in time I began skipping a couple of songs but I loved the energy of the album. To me it isn't necessarily better or worse than SO, they just are very different, it's more of a mood thing. 3SL was summertime, packed with energy and joie de vivre, SO was more wintertime, intimate and wistful. I think Phil never got enough credit for the kind of singer he became, something that became evident evident on 3SL.

So well put. I agree.

It's a very good live album. I first got a copy about a year after it was released and I still listen to the In The Cage medley (sublime drumming in there), plus side 1 and very occasionally side 4 (although I'm not fan of One For The Vine, even though this version is superbly played). As for side 2, the first two tracks are great, but Me and Sarah Jane is boring (to my ears) and Follow You Follow Me might be a popular song but I don't think it offers anything here (or to most live shows) and I'd rather it had followed the proverbial lemmings off a cliff. There were other much better performed songs on the Abacab tour which lost out to those two. Similarly, I appreciate the business reasons for including Misunderstanding, but to me the real misunderstanding here is in the band's belief that a fan would actually listen to it. I always dropped the needle where the applause gave way to "I've got sunshine in my stomach".

It's all a question of individual taste though, and with a band which lasted this long and with such variation in its back catalogue, inevitably there will be wildly different opinions. However, I don't see how Three Sides Live can even hold a candle to Seconds Out. Admittedly, Seconds Out was the album which got me fixated on Genesis (I first heard it in 1981, I think) and so I'm particularly fond of it, but whether it's viewed as over-polished or not, sides 2, 3 and 4 are absolutely epic. Suppers Ready has the grace and beauty that this song needs, whereas in the Gabriel era it could be clunky at times and in the Encore era it was more of a rock performance than an attempt to take the listener on a journey. Cinema Show is full of energy, an absolute belter, and I don't think this rendition of Dance of a Volcano / Los Endos was ever bettered.

It's a shame the Lyceum show was never made a commercial release but the available bootleg versions (particularly TM) make it as good as.

I share the views of others that it's a pity they didn't delay the release of 3SL until after the Encore tour. Some of those performances were incredible and (notwithstanding my comments above) it was brilliant to hear them dusting off Suppers Ready again. To my ears, that setlist was one of the strongest they ever played.

Anyway, I'd rank 3SL at number 2 for their live albums.

Quote from thefarmer

I feel the same about Whitesnake. Saw them in the early 80s and just the other day wqs the second time! Farewell tour. I know nothing of Tool you make want to check them out.

Lucky man if you saw Whitesnake in the early days. That early line up with the Deep Purple backbone was a really strong band.

Confession - I saw someone's YouTube upload of their recent O2 gig and I thought it wasn't bad, but David Coverdale's voice is (inevitably) not a patch on his younger days and the band still seem to think it's 1987. I'm sure I'd have sung along if I was there though and I have a renewed appreciation of their bass lines!

I'm a Tool convert now, but they're infinitely better live than they are in the studio. Their sound needs a big live PA and I have truly never seen such an effective use of lights, screens etc with the sound. It's like a two hour trip.

Quote from Backdrifter

The Charlatans, Aberdeen Music Hall, last week. I've been missing out on seeing them since I became a fan over 20 years ago - their closest gigs to me always clashed with other things. Even this one was scheduled for last December, I was poised to go but it was postponed due to some virus or other. I thought, the universe really doesn't want me to see this band!

So I'm glad I finally did and it was worth the wait, I enjoyed it very much. I also added an extra day to give me some time to enjoy Aberdeen, a city I've previously been a bit ambivalent about. On this trip I started to warm to it a bit more and look forward to my next chance to visit.

I've followed them on and off since Some Friendly, which I used to play to death. Only seen them live once though, at V Festival (2007 I think

Whitesnake's best era for me was the early years when the blues was strong in them and the hairspray and leather hadn't showed up. I still listen to Live In The Heart of the City, a great live album. That line up (the one with Ian Paice on drums) was brilliant.

Then I saw them at Donington in 1990. WAY too OTT; the worst excesses of 1980s hard rock but after the 80s had closed out and others had recognised that times were changing. Abiding memories of that day were the opening band, the then little-known Thunder, blowing everyone else away (including Aerosmith and Whitesnake) and the Hells Angels at the back throwing drinks bottles of p1ss over the rest of us.

The last live show I went to was Tool at O2 on 10 May. I barely knew anything abut them beforehand and I wasn't expecting much when I arrived, but it turned out to be the best gig I've ever attended. Incredible band, superhuman drummer and the trippiest visuals. Great also that cameras were banned from the main show and only allowed on the encore which, whilst fantastic, was more straight up in format. It made the main show a sort of secret ultra special event. More of an experience than just a gig.

Nice article and I loved the I Can't Dance commentary!

A band that could call on some absolute epic pieces for an encore deployed one which could have been written by a toddler on a Fisher Price toy keyboard. Still, they feel that their tongue in cheek take on the blues and early 90s culture said something, and many of the nightly audiences liked it too.

If there's one thing we can all appreciate Genesis for it's the variety in their material, and it's inevitable that that something somewhere in their back catalogue will put everyone's teeth on edge. Fortunately they avoided Calling All Stations, as just about anything on that one would cause me to grind my teeth to powder.

Absolutely yes to Duchess.

if only it was possible to devote a couple of shows to the fans of the pre-pop era. The adjusted set to accommodate this material would have been incredible.

Secret Machines - Now Here Is Nowhere

Quote from thefarmer

A few . Several live ones.

A Trick Of The Tail

Wind and Wuthering

Selling England By The Pound

Seconds Out

Dark Side Of The Moon

Wish you Were Here

Animals

The Wall

Pulse

The Kick Inside Kate Bush

The Dreaming

Hounds Of Love

The Sensual World

Aerial - A Sky Of Honey

Hunky Dory - Bowie

Ziggy

Diamond Dogs

Viva Roxy Music

Overkill - Motorhead

Ace Of Spades

No Sleep Till Hammersmith

Led Zeppelin IV

Made In Japan Deep Purple

Definitely Maybe Oasis

Abbey Road

Sgt Pepper

Bursting Out - Jethro Tull

Songs From The Wood

Heavy Horses

Master Of Reality - Black Sabbath

Paranoid

Dummy - Portishead

Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

Blue Lines - Massive Attack

If You Want Blood ... You Got It AC/DC

A Farewell To Kings - Rush

Hemispheres

Moving Pictures

Roadhawks - Hawkwind ( yes it's a compilation but just the way it's put together)

Space Ritual - Hawkwind.

Warrior On The Edge Of Time

PG 3

So

The Levellers

Levelling The Land

What Sound - Lamb

How Dare You - 10cc

The Yes Album

Close To The Edge

Going For The One

The Joshua Tree U2

Achtung Baby

The Roaring Silence - Manfred Mann's Earth Band

Contraband- Velvet Revolver .

Libertad

Innervisions - Stevie Wonder

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100% with you on the highlighted ones.

I'd add Roxy Music - Country Life to the RM choices, but maybe that one was all about the cover!

So good to see someone mention The Levellers.

Separately, I'm going to throw in a curve ball as it's too easy to keep reeling off the same old same old from prog and rock worlds -

Unkle - Edit Music for a Film: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Reconstruction

And the next best live album after Seconds Out -

Iron Maiden - Live After Death

And one more bit of curvage -

Joshua Redman Elastic Band - Momentum

And inevitably while on jazz -

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

Quote from Harold

When did they play "Like it or not"??

Very occasionally on Abacab tour, e.g. Toronto.

Happy Mondays - Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches

Nitin Sawhney - Last Days of Meaning

Absolutely agree with you about Blood on the Rooftops. It might have been a challenge (vocally) to play live but I'd have liked to have seen them try. For me this is one of the best songs they ever produced, yet it receives little mention.

Similarly, I think Man of Our Times would have worked well on the Duke tour.

Actually those two are pretty much it for me.

The Rolling Stones - Blue & Lonesome

A good discussion piece of an article but some properly odd rankings in there. Illegal Alien and Shiprecked (from that awful album that should have got lost in a shipwreck) ahead of Silent Sorrow?! Anything She Does ahead of The Waiting Room?! And bloody Congo ahead of the Waiting Room come to that.

Afterglow outside the top 100 but Evidence of Autumn inside the top 50.

Los Endos trumped by No Reply At All, which is at number 10 for heaven's sake.

Whoever came up with this list certainly has a very individual understanding of what constitutes good material from Genesis, although at least the higher numbers are largely occupied by material from the Calling All Codswallop era.

Once inside the top 10 they're not far off the mark. Perhaps the Ketamine was wearing off that point.

Anyway, definitely an interesting discussion piece.

For me, Genesis have produced tons of 9/10 pieces but my 10/10 picks are-

The Musical Box

Suppers Ready (Seconds Out version)

Firth of Firth

Fly on a Windshield / Broadway Melody

Los Endos

Entangled

Blood on the Rooftops

If I could choose only one it would be Suppers Ready. Predictable, but it’s a masterpiece.

20-1-74. Geoff C's transfer and a few mildly tweaked versions of it are on the Genesis Movement torrent site. There are others reportedly from the Farm too

Quote from bromleybruce

There is a comprehensive list of recordings that Genesis do possess.

They were discovered in a case at 'The Farm'.

This dates from 1973 onwards. It is somewhere on this forum.

I remember seeing it a few years ago.

Yep. Photos and details were circulated many years ago (I seem to recall on the original Genesis forum) and it was said that (I think) Geoff Callingham and Nick Davis were working on some of them. If memory serves, they later decided that it was a supreme amount of effort for a comparatively substandard product, and so the idea of a series of 'official bootlegs' was shelved.

Big shame, as I think the people who would be receptive to this material are not overly interested in whether the sound quality is like a contemporary 'in your room' recording. They're interested in these pieces as collectibles and time capsules, and would snap them up if the quality was only half-decent. I do however get the cost-benefit angle though, as the engineering and production costs would far outweigh the likely returns.

Would be nice to see more finding their way to decent engineers who could do a labour of love thing and get the recordings restored and onto the Genesis Movement. Quite a few appeared this way, but I'm sure there must be more, plus more engineers who could do sound restorations to the standards set by TM and others a few years ago.

Quote from OneForTheVine

That's a stunning photo (and it was taken during the song that will, more than any other, be my enduring memory of the show I saw: "Duchess").

If you had told me in advance of the tour that one of my greatest memories from it would be a video of the movements of multi-colored dots, there is no way I could have taken that seriously. However, after seeing exactly that during a spectacular performance of "Duchess" on this tour, it was truly one of the peak moments of the show. I'm glad that Grant captured a moment from it.

Totally agreed. This was absolutely a peak moment of the show for me, and I found it very emotional. Visually, the gradual emergence of what were almost fractal-like shapes and patterns in the opening section was perfect for the the ambient sounds, and it developed from there to match the song itself. A really strong moment, and for me up there with the best of the past.

Which leads me on, because you could make a thread about the other examples, e.g.:

Original use of varilites on In the Cage in 1981

The moving jumbotron screens of 1992

The mirrors, 1978

The "landing lights" of the Wind & Wuthering Tour

The groundbreaking projector screens on the Lamb tour

The fox's head, and later the old man costume and persona

The Watcher opening

Always strong creatively in their live presentation, right to the end.