Fading lights - Genesis at the O2 Arena

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

Clearly, I’m a devotee of unfashionable causes. When news broke that my football club’s owner was being sanctioned for his association with Vladimir Putin, and the club itself was to be put through the ringer as a consequence, there was little sympathy from across football’s tribal communities. Likewise, I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy all that much admiration (or is it empathy?) for going to see Genesis on Friday night, on what would turn out to be their penultimate live performance, 54 years after forming.

I’ve long accepted that Genesis are a Marmite band. A guilty pleasure, even. Amid the devotees from their origins as one of ’70s progressive rock’s pre-eminent acts, and those drawn to their catchy, mid-’80s MTV dominance, are those who just never got them (or saw them as just another outlet for Phil Collins’ ubiquity). Then there’s another group - those, like me, who’ve seen good in all their guises. Over the course of three nights at London’s O2 Arena, 60,000 fans of, mostly, a similar venerability, were of the same view. 

These were the final performances of a tour that had been truncated by the coronavirus (the first scheduled dates were delayed by lockdowns and then the London shows got postponed again by a band member testing positive for Covid), which started to feel like a stay of execution. The tour itself had been named ‘The Last Domino?’ - an intentionally ambiguous in-joke but not without its inevitability, given that an increasingly immobile Collins, robbed of his truly unique ability to drum by a congenital back problem and other health issues, had indicated that this would have to be it. Compared with other still-touring bands of a certain vintage (the Rolling Stones come immediately to mind, and Paul McCartney), the core surviving members of Genesis - Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist/bassist Mike Rutherford  - were all 71 as they took to the stage on Friday (the still youthful-looking Banks turned 72 yesterday), so there’s nothing materially requiring them to bring the band to a halt. But from the moment Collins walked on stage, slowly and assisted by a stick, to take the seat he would occupy for the next two hours, it was clear that this Genesis would be different. 

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

With his stage school training, Collins was always an impishly lively frontman, ever since he came forward from the drum stool in 1976 to replace the outgoing Peter Gabriel. Live reviews frequently referred to his end-of-pier schtick, a change of tone from Gabriel’s eccentric but hesitantly-delivered fantastical stories which he used to tell between songs as the band retuned their notoriously fussy 12-string guitars. For the live version of their minor 1973 hit I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), Collins developed a remarkable tambourine tarantella, colourfully extending the percussive agility that easily made him a peer of other thunderous drummers of his time, like Bonham, Moon and Rush’s Neil Peart. But no more. Knowing this, some expectation management would be required. 

This was to be a farewell performance, not just a wallow in nostalgia. Not that there was an obvious air of mourning in the air. Opening with Behind The Lines, the song I first saw them open with 41 years ago at Wembley Arena, the hair on the back of my neck raised a little. From that first moment of hearing and ‘seeing’ that song performed live, it has always struck me as the way to open any gig. “Brrrrang!” chimes the opening chord, followed by a fanfare-like keyboard riff. If I ever formed a band myself, I’d want to kick-off a gig like that. 

Long before the video hits, and throughout the years when they weren’t seen as ‘commercial’, Genesis were always a live band. Despite Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford (along with original guitarist Anthony Phillips) regarding themselves more as songwriters than rock stars when they started out, their shows never lacked impact, visually or musically. That has largely been down to the material, songs which - even in the band’s more pop-orientated era - have lent themselves to entertaining engagement live. I may not be a huge fan of the hits that came out of the ’80s, but the albums they were written for didn’t lack the more epic grandeur Genesis established as their stock in trade in the ’70s. 1986’s Invisible Touch album netted five hit singles, more from one album than the band had enjoyed in, then, 20 years of existance. It’s title track is still one of my least favourites, but others - performed on Friday like Throwing It All Away, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight and Land Of Confusion (whose Spitting Image-based video was tweaked to reflect the chaos of Covid), still stand up strongly live.

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

In 1977 Genesis released the live album Seconds Out, recorded on the tour for only Collins’ second album as lead singer. As a result, the double release comprised songs from the Gabriel era as well as the new stuff with Collins as singer. Tellingly, it contained only one song that had been released as a single - I Know What I Like, and yet it represents my favourite era of Genesis, with even complex, meandering, multi-part songs like Supper’s Ready found new life by Collins’ stagecraft. Their next release, ...And Then There Were Three, which followed guitarist Steve Hackett’s departure, included the single Follow You, Follow Me, which was the first Genesis track I ever heard on the radio. It’s a simple love song, set to a slowed down samba-like rhythm, and it reached No.4 in the charts. It’s popularity, especially in America, changed the band’s fortunes. The concert demographic started to change: whereas ’70s gigs were mostly attended by earnest young men with long hair, beards and army-surplus greatcoats, making notes on the songs they heard for discussion later over a half of mild, all of sudden there were women at Genesis concerts. 

The Duke album followed, and two more radio hits - Turn It On Again and Misunderstanding, competing with contemporary rock acts like Rainbow or Toto for FM radio airplay in the US. It marked a deliberate shift away from the fantasy stories to more immediacy in their songwriting. Collins inevitably took the blame, but Rutherford and Banks were still the main songwriters. Collins had always been the class clown to puncture the band’s public school loftiness, but he was gradually able to bring more of his own personality into the music. Good Lord, they even recorded a track featuring the Earth Wind & Fire horn section!

Which brings me back to the O2. Sadly, Collins has lost some of his vocal spectrum. It happens with age, but here, there were notable moments where his range was kept low, while - for the first time in Genesis history - two dedicated backing singers filled in some of the gaps in which Collins was struggling. But rather than feeling in any way let down, the band collectively played on. Collins himself, in the concert programme, admitted to his deficiencies. It wasn’t anything the crowd was going to complain about, either. This was an audience who had come to pay their respects to a band that had been a part of their lives for a very long time. They were rapturous when Genesis dipped into their deepest history, with the aforementioned I Know What I Like and the epic instrumental part of Firth Of Fifth from 1973 and even an excerpt from a 1970 track, Stagnation. 

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

Midway through the set, Rutherford, Banks, long-standing touring guitarist Daryl Stuermer and Collins’ uncannily talented 20-year-old son Nic on drums, repositioned around the seated singer to perform somewhat ‘unplugged’ versions of Follow You, Follow Me, That’s All and - to my delight - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. This was the title track of an album that, bizarrely, pre-dated punk, being a concept work built around the fantasy disappearance of a Puerto Rican street tough, Rael, into an imagined New York underworld (lyrically, it was Gabriel’s swansong). Here, though, stripped-down, it worked incredibly, suiting Collins Snr’s vocal limitations but sounding like it was always meant to be stripped back.

There were further treats from the past to close the show: after the almost obligatory performance of I Can’t Dance (which epitomised the band’s MTV dominance with its ZZ Top-aping video) - representing the band’s late-stage pre-eminence, there was an excerpt of Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, the opening track of 1973’s satirical Selling England By The Pound album, with its pastorality and references to “Green Shield Stamps”. In 41 years of seeing Genesis live, I’d never heard this track - an obscure entry in their canon at best - performed live. It was delightful. After the stomping pop, an example of the lyrical and musical individuality that, arguably, only this band could have ever produced, steeped in English tradition. 

For those who shunned the knowing commerciality that became Genesis’s hallmark, Moonlit Knight provided a reminder of how this band came into the world, around the time that The Beatles were inventing prog with the narrative concept of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, onto which David Bowie combined pop, rock and other artistic styles. Those early albums, Trespass, Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot may only have scratched the surface in places like Belgium and Italy, where the Gabriel-led Genesis enjoyed fanatical following, and now are politely “of their time”, but they contain many gems (even an early taste of Collins’ vocal beauty, the love song More Fool Me, along with Hackett’s truly innovative guitar virtuosity). There was, then, one more jewel from that first phase on Friday night: The Carpet Crawlers, one of the few real highlights from the sprawling Lamb Lies Down On Broadway record, its low-key vocal recreated perfectly by Collins, its musical subtleties providing a tender moment to end on.

With that, it was over. Literally (save for one final show the following night). As the full stage band dwindled to just Banks, Collins and Rutherford, who took a poignant final bow, it was time to reflect. All good things come to an end, and with rock bands you tend to want them to stop when they can and while they can. Banks and Rutherford could, probably continue (as they did in 1996 when Collins first decided to put his solo career first, and they brought in Stiltskin’s Ray Wilson in for one album and an ill-advised tour). But it seems unlikely. I would, sadly, even say it was unwise. Collins’ original departure was meant to give the other two an opportunity to prove that they are more than the sum of parts, but that denies the point that much of Genesis’s appeal for the greater part of their existence has been the knowledge that, since 1978, these three men were the band’s beating heart. Gabriel’s six albums defined the band in one way, while the eight with Collins brought with them hit singles. But it would be wrong to divide the band solely by their lead singers. The thread running through all 15 studio records is a style of songwriting that can be compared to no one else, not even the other stalwarts of the prog era, like King Crimson, Supertramp, 10cc, Yes or Pink Floyd. 

Of course, Genesis have never been to everyone’s taste, but for anyone prone to dismissing them for whatever prejudice or perceived prejudice they hold, they have always maintained a tradition of songwriting and song delivery established by A Day In The Life, Is There Life On Mars? or even Good Vibrations. Drama, narrative and, if you can excuse the record label pun, a unique charisma.If you had gone to see them on Friday night having never heard of The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, Squonk or Cinema Show, you would have heard a band of consummate musicians and songwriters, who for the better part of 54 years have made every note, every drumbeat, every chord, every riff and every vocal line count. 

At the start of this post I wrote about Genesis being a guilty pleasure. The trouble with that statement is that it places them in a similar category to, say, a Jason Donovan or a Rick Astley. But, then, to partition based on personal taste is to commit a facet of musical partition that I get very weary of. Taste might divide people, but talent shouldn’t. Genesis may have never been the most fashionable band, but the notion that fashion alone is the only diktat of popularity cuts no ice with me. Guilty pleasure, they may be, Marmite, even, but this band has been an unashamed part of my soundtrack since I was 11 or 12. My first forays with a guitar were to learn the solos and arpeggios of the early work, the infectious riffs of their later efforts. And in unsettling, troubling times like these, comfort is most welcome. On Friday night, in an O2 Arena still missing vast panels from its storm-wrecked roof, I found comfort, for the last time from a band that has been a part of my life for four-fifths of it. 

Marmite, they may be, but you know, I’m quite partial to it.

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band