Genesis keyboard player Tony Banks put it very simply: “Some of our ’70s stuff is rather deep and difficult music,” he said. “Technically, it’s quite hard to play. Really!”
Banks was talking to MOJO magazine in 2007 as Genesis rehearsed in Brussels for a series of stadium and arena shows billed as Turn It On Again: The Tour.
For these shows the Genesis line-up featured Banks and fellow founding member Mike Rutherford on guitar and bass alongside Phil Collins on drums and lead vocals.
This trio were joined by drummer Chester Thompson and guitarist Daryl Stuermer, veterans of Genesis tours since the late ’70s.
The original plan for this tour had been to reunite the band’s early ’70s line-up of Banks, Rutherford, Collins, guitarist Steve Hackett and singer Peter Gabriel.
This was the line-up that recorded landmark albums that helped to define progressive rock – albums such as Foxtrot, Selling England By The Pound and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.
But when Gabriel and Hackett stalled on the reunion, the other three decided they’d go ahead without them. “It was just too good an opportunity to miss,” Collins said.
The setlist for the Turn It On Again tour included just two complete songs from the Peter Gabriel era – I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) from 1973’s Selling England By The Pound and The Carpet Crawlers from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – plus excerpts from three other Gabriel-period tracks, Firth Of Fifth, In The Cage and The Cinema Show.
Speaking to MOJO, Collins said that this early material would be performed again “for the anoraks, if you want to call them that – the camp that thinks I fucked it up when I started singing!”
The bulk of the set was comprised of what Collins called “the Genesis that people know”.
Apart from Abacab (dismissed because, as Banks explained, “We couldn’t get into it”), all the big hits were performed – from Follow You Follow Me, the band’s first UK top ten single in 1978, through to 1992’s I Can’t Dance.
However, there was a night in 2005, just two years before that tour, when Phil Collins joined a Genesis tribute act on stage to play one of the band’s longest and most complex early tracks. And as he recalled to MOJO, this was no easy task.
That tribute act, The Musical Box, was named after the opening track from the 1971 album Nursery Cryme, the first Genesis record to feature Collins and Hackett.
The Musical Box invited Collins to jam with them when they played on 24 February 2005 in the Swiss city of Geneva, near to Collins’s home.
He agreed to sit in on the band’s customary encore of The Musical Box. But this was a song he hadn’t played for nearly 30 years. And just as Tony Banks said, that old Genesis stuff is rather tricky to play.
“I thought it would be fun,” Collins told MOJO. “That was a big mistake. I underestimated just how difficult it would be.
“I listened to [the song] on the morning of the gig and thought, ‘Shit, I wonder if I can still do that?’”
His worries increased when he got together with the band at the venue in Geneva.
“The drummer said, ‘My kit is exactly the same as yours’, but when I got on it felt nothing like mine. We ran through the song six or seven times and I know that they were all thinking, ‘I thought he’d be better than that!’
“It was horrible!” he admitted. “But it got a little bit better by the time we did the gig. Well, the fans liked it!”
Immediately after this show, Collins was interviewed by Swiss radio station DRS3 and said generously: “I thought The Musical Box’s performance tonight was extraordinary. They nailed every physical movement, and Martin, the drummer… I don't know if I’ve ever played that well. Maybe I have, but he played fantastically and he had everything I had.
“What I played, all the left and right hand stuff, it’s very personal and he copied it in a way that made it very interesting. So it was great for me and I really enjoyed it.”
In the interview with MOJO, Collins bemoaned what he perceived as a lack of respect for Genesis from music critics.
“When TV and magazines do those ‘Top 100 albums’ things, we’re never in there,” he sighed. “We don’t have a Dark Side Of The Moon. In the same way that Queen were, we’re very popular with the man on the street and never popular with critics.”
But he did at least have heartwarming story about a compliment he’d received from a fellow drummer, and a legendary one at that.
While Genesis were rehearsing in Brussels, so too were The Rolling Stones – and Collins had been delighted to meet up with Charlie Watts.
“He’s a lovely guy, Charlie,” Collins said. “He told me once, ‘I bought one of your records. You Can’t Hurry Love, on 12-inch – nice.’
“I’m thinking, ‘Bloody hell, a Rolling Stone buys one of my records!”
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