Genesis – a Revelation

To a lesser or greater degree music plays a part in most people’s lives. So much so that it seems that many organisations think that we can’t live without it. It is played in shops, doctor’s waiting rooms, in lifts, before and increasingly during sporting events, by the bloke who has come to hang your wallpaper and on the phone when your call is so important that there is no one to answer it for half an hour. You would have thought that this would be counter productive. What is considered good music is entirely subjective which suggests that bad music is likewise found in the ear of the beholder. Consequently there is more than a good chance that you will consider music that you can’t escape from is, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. Subjecting your potential customers to sounds that annoy them is not, I would have thought, good sales technique. Morrisons plays music to its customers, Tesco doesn’t. I prefer Tesco. Go figure. (The lack of an apostrophe in Morrisons may also be contributing factor).

Now you’ve done the figuring you may assume I’m not a fan of music. That is not true. I’m not a fan of MOST music but some I enjoy a great deal. I was perhaps a late starter as I was sixteen or seventeen when I stated to take an interest in the contemporary music of the time. That was in the late seventies, the time when punk rock has turned the world of popular music on its head. I could have been part of that new wave but even then I despised the nihilistic nature of punk. No, as a rather pretentious young chap who used words like ‘nihilistic’ I threw my lot in with progressive rock, exactly the sort of thing punk was supposed to have destroyed. To be honest at first I was only trying to impress girls. The fact I failed miserably was, however, more to do with me being an awkward, spotty, greasy haired oik than the genre of music I gravitated to. Okay, maybe the genre of music I gravitated to didn’t help. Nevertheless I was developing a new interest and on a voyage of discovery that quickly led me to a band rather aptly called Genesis. They were not a new band having been going for a good decade or so but because of the recent rise of punk they were distinctly uncool.  This didn’t prevent their popularity rising throughout the eighties, however, and by he 1987 tour they were playing massive venues like Wembley Stadium and selling it out four nights on the trot. I took great delight in being part of that bandwagon and loved seeing them each time they toured. I did have one regret though. I’d missed the best bit.

Having discovered the band I was eager to discover their back catalogue. At that time it meant saving up to buy their old LP records from a curious discount record shop in the Packhorse Arcade in Huddersfield. I would have liked to have got them in chronological order as that sort of thing is somehow important to a man but the shop only stocked what it could get hold of on the cheap at the time. Therefore my first of their older albums may have been Trick of the Tail from 1976 followed by Nursery Cryme from 1971 then 1973’s Selling England by the Pound. Eventually I had all seven of their previous proper albums – there was an earlier one that had been produced by Jonathan King that doesn’t count – and it was these that became my favourites. Nearly forty years on I find myself playing these seven albums frequently and the subsequent seven not nearly as much. I like the newer ones but the older ones stir my soul.

Records are one thing but the ultimate goal is to experience the band playing live. In the case of Genesis it is not likely to happen. They got together eleven years ago to do a tour and I was all set with my mate David to see them in Amsterdam. Alas, the day we were due to fly out was the day two jihadist wankers decided to try and blow up Glasgow Airport, succeeding in only burning themselves to death and singing the paintwork in the check-in hall. The fact that our flight was cancelled and I never got to see the gig was perhaps an unintended consequence of their actions but you won’t find me shedding a tear whenever someone dies a horrible death in some misguided belief that seventy two virgins are waiting for them. I’m sure the gig would have been great, in fact I know it would as I have a recording of it, but the set list owed more to later era Genesis than earlier. There is a way of hearing the sounds of 1970s Genesis live though without waiting for he band to reform and embark on another farewell tour. Enter the world of tribute bands. These are not limited to Genesis of course. There’s a whole generation of music fans who pay to see musicians playing the songs of bands that have either split up, taken a different musical direction, died or a mixture of the three. This generation naturally despises the music their children listen to, as their parents did of theirs, and hark back to the days when our record collection was something  to be revered, a new album release was a major event and the mad scramble to get tickets to see our musical heroes in the flesh at places like Manchester Apollo. Tribute bands now fill the live music void. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you may get a long since departed band member cashing in on earlier fame and gathering together some musicians to play the old songs once more. If you are really, really lucky you will get to see both in two nights.

Last Monday I went with a couple of other retired gentlemen to see Steve Hackett perform his Genesis Revisited tour at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall with, and this upped the prog level by several notches, the Heart of England Philanonic Orchestra. Hackett was the band’s guitarist from 1971-77, the very period I consider to be their finest. He has been a prolific solo artist since then but in the past few years he has realised precisely what his fans want. Yes, a couple of his own songs are great but for most of the gig we want to be bombarded with music from his time with Genesis. He and his band certainly delivered on that front and the audience left happy on a wave of pure nostalgia. The following evening I found myself at Manchester Apollo with my sister Jill.  The first time I saw the real Genesis was at this venue in 1980 so in a way the journey had come full circle. Performing that evening was tribute band The Musical Box, though calling them a tribute band does them a disservice. Hailing from Montreal they have been authentically reproducing Genesis concerts from the Peter Gabriel years of 1971-75, right down to the sets and lighting. They have been doing this for over 25 years. Tuesday night was something different. Entitled ‘A Genesis Extravaganza’ they played a collection of music from 1970-77. Apart from one heckler who objected to a medley of tunes at the start by hurling a string of obscenities in a thick Mancunian accent before he took the advice from everyone else to ‘piss off’, everyone there had a ball.

‘Everyone’ of course consisted by and large of fifty-something men who were there back in the hayday of the real Genesis or in my case, wishing they had been there. There were ladies there too, just as there were back in the day, but progressive rock always appealed to rather more men than women. I don’t know why this is. Maybe because it got us chaps out of dancing as Kool and the Gang was always preferred by the local disco’s DJ. Whatever, you would be hard pushed to find a group of people as happy as all these somewhat mature chaps as they wallowed in nostalgia. Will the youngsters of today be able to do that in thirty years time? Will there be a Beyoncé tribute band? Will someone have to dress up as Olly Murs to make those who have collected all his records happy? Could it be that even now there are some musicians getting ready to form Someford and Son? I’m not sure that music today has quite the same meaning to folk as it did back then. Then again, I’m a fifty something bloke and that’s the sort of thing I’m supposed to say. I’ve also got my Hackett ticket booked for his next tour in November next year. He’s planning on doing all of the seminal 1973 release Selling England by the Pound. Doesn’t that sound fantastic?