Genesis (the band!)—Mentioned in conversation the other night over dinner, in a pub playing 80s music (as they always do!).
What do we know about Genesis? Did they do a song called “Domino?”
Genesis are a Grammy Award-winning English rock band formed in 1967, and are among the top 30 highest-selling recording artists of all time with approximately 150 million albums sold worldwide, including 21.5 million albums sold in the United States. In 1988, the band won the Grammy Award for Best Concept Music Video. The longest-tenured members of Genesis are Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks. Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett also played major roles in the band in its early days.
Genesis began as a 1960s pop band playing moody, simple keyboard-driven melodies. During the 1970s, they evolved into a progressive rock band, incorporating complex song structures and elaborate instrumentation, while their concerts became theatrical experiences with innovative stage design, pyrotechnics, elaborate costumes and onstage stories. This second phase was characterised by lengthy performances such as the 23 minute “Supper’s Ready” and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the 1974 concept album. In the 1980s, the band produced accessible pop music based on melodichooks; this change of direction gave them their first number one album in the United Kingdom, Duke, and their only number one single in the United States, “Invisible Touch“.
Genesis was formed in 1967 when Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks were students at Charterhouse School in Godalming. Formed out of school bands Garden Walland The Anon, Genesis’s original line-up consisted of Peter Gabriel (vocals), Anthony Phillips (guitar), Tony Banks (keyboards), Mike Rutherford (bass & guitar) and Chris Stewart (drums). The group originally formed as a songwriting partnership with no intention of performing, but decided to start playing their own music when they were unable to find anyone else willing to record it. Charterhouse School alumnus Jonathan King hosted a concert at Charterhouse in 1968 while the band was still in school. Following the concert, Gabriel gave King a tape of songs the band had recorded and King thought enough of them to sign them to a recording contract. King was a songwriter and record producer who had a hit single at the time, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”. King named the band Genesis (after previously suggesting the name Gabriel’s Angels), recalling that he had “thought it was a good name… it suggested the beginning of a new sound and a new feeling.” The resulting album, From Genesis to Revelation, was released on Decca Records in March 1969.
Trespass was the template for the band’s albums in the 1970s—lengthy, sometimes operatic, pieces, and occasional short, humorous numbers resembling the style of progressive rock bands such as King Crimson, Yes and Gentle Giant. Trespass included progressive rock elements such as elaborate arrangements and time signature changes, as in the nine-minute song “The Knife”.
Collins and Hackett made their studio debut in 1971 on Nursery Cryme, which features the epic “The Musical Box” and Collins’s first lead vocalperformance in “For Absent Friends”, the song was also the first written by new members Collins and Hackett within the band. Two engineers were hired and then quit before John Burns took over during the recording of their next album, and this began a successful three-album collaboration between Burns and the group. Foxtrot was released in October 1972 and contains what has been described as “one of the group’s most accomplished works”, the 23-minute multi-part epic “Supper’s Ready“. Songs such as the Arthur C. Clarke-inspired “Watcher of the Skies” solidified their reputation as songwriters and performers. Gabriel’s flamboyant and theatrical stage presence, which involved numerous and elaborate costumes and surreal spoken song introductions, made the band a popular live act. Genesis Live, was recorded on the Foxtrot tour in 1973, shortly before the band’s upcoming album was released.
Selling England by the Pound was released in November 1973 and was well received by critics and fans. Gabriel insisted on the title, a reference to a current Labour Party slogan, in an effort to counter the impression that Genesis were becoming too US-oriented. The album contains “Firth of Fifth” and “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)”; these songs became part of their live repertoire, with the latter becoming their first charting single, reaching #17 on the UK singles charts.
During this period Hackett became an early user of the electric guitar “tapping” technique, which was later popularized by Eddie Van Halen, as well as “sweep-picking“, which was popularised in the 1980s by Yngwie Malmsteen.These virtuoso guitar techniques were incorporated in the song “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight“. At the same time, the band signed with new manager Tony Smith, who published all subsequent Genesis songs through his company Hit & Run Music Publishing.
In 1974, Genesis recorded a double disc concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway which was released on 18 November. In contrast to the lengthy tracks featured on earlier albums The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a collection of shorter tracks, connected by a number of segues. The story describes the spiritual journey of Rael, a Puerto Rican youth living in New York City, and his quest to establish his freedom and identity. During his adventure, Rael encounters several bizarre characters including the Slippermen and The Lamia, the latter being borrowed from Greek mythology and influenced by a poem by Keats.
The band embarked on a world tour to promote the album, performing it 102 times in its entirety, with Gabriel adding spoken narration. During their live performances, Genesis pioneered the use of lasers and other light effects, most of which were built by the Dutch technician Theo Botschuijver. A customised handheld unit was used to channel laser light, which allowed Gabriel to sweep the audience with various light effects.
Creating the ambitious The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album strained relations between band members, particularly Banks and Gabriel. Gabriel was the lyricist, while the other band members wrote the music, with the exception of “Counting Out Time” and “The Carpet Crawlers“. “The Light Dies Down on Broadway” was co-authored by Banks and Rutherford. The other-worldly, blurbling, sequenced synth sounds and shattering glass loops in the track “The Waiting Room”, as well as the vocal effects in the track “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging” coined “Enossifications”, were produced by the ambient composer Brian Eno.
During the Lamb tour, Gabriel announced to his bandmates that he had decided to leave the band, citing estrangement from the other members, and the strains of his marriage and the difficult birth of his first child. Nonetheless, he saw his commitment through to the conclusion of the tour, which ended anti-climactically in a cancelled gig at Besançon in Eastern France. In a letter to fans, delivered through the music press at the end of the tour, entitled Out, Angels Out, Gabriel explained that the “…vehicle we had built as a co-op to serve our songwriting became our master and had cooped us up inside the success we had wanted. It affected the attitudes and the spirit of the whole band. The music had not dried up and I still respect the other musicians, but our roles had set in hard.” Collins later remarked that the other members “…were not stunned by Peter’s departure because we had known about it for quite a while.” The band decided to carry on without Gabriel.
The group auditioned reportedly over 400 lead singers to find a replacement for Gabriel. Phil Collins, who had provided backing vocals, coached prospective replacements. Eventually, the band decided to use Collins as the lead vocalist for 1976’s A Trick of the Tail. The new producer David Hentschel, who had served as engineer on Nursery Cryme, gave the album a clearer-sounding production. Critics noted that Collins sounded “more like Gabriel than Gabriel did”.
Despite the success of the album, the group remained concerned with their live shows, which now lacked Gabriel’s elaborate costume changes and dramatic behaviour. Since Collins required the assistance of a second drummer while he sang, Bill Bruford, drummer for Yes and King Crimson was hired for the 1976 tour. Their first live performance without Peter Gabriel was on 26 March 1976, in London, Ontario, Canada.
Later that year, Genesis recorded Wind & Wuthering, the first of two albums recorded at the Relight Studios in Hilvarenbeek in the Netherlands. Released in January 1977, the album took its name from Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, whose last lines—”how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth”—inspired the titles of the seventh and eighth tracks.
For the 1977 Genesis tour, the jazz fusion-trained Chester Thompson—a veteran of Weather Report and Frank Zappa—took on live drumming duties. Collins’s approach to Genesis shows differed from the theatrical performances of Gabriel, and his interpretations of older songs were lighter and more subtle. At the 1982 Milton Keynes reunion show, Gabriel admitted that Collins sang the songs “better”, though never “quite like” him.
Guitarist Hackett had become increasingly disenchanted with the band by the time of Wind & Wuthering’s release, and he felt confined. He was the first member of the band to record a solo album, 1975’s Voyage of the Acolyte, and greatly enjoyed the feelings of control over the recording process that working within a group could not provide. Hackett had asked that a quarter of Wind & Wuthering be allocated to Hackett’s songs, which Collins described as “a dumb way to work in a band context”. While Hackett was given songwriting credits on the two instrumental tracks “Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers…”/”…In That Quiet Earth” , the Hackett/Collins’s “Blood on the Rooftops” was never performed live, and his song “Please Don’t Touch” (which appeared as the title track to his next solo album released in 1978) was rejected by the rest of the band, who opted for the shorter and catchier three-minute instrumental “Wot Gorilla?” which closes Side 1 of the Wind & Wutheringalbum. Hackett left the band following the release of the 1977 Spot the Pigeon EP while the band was in the studio mixing together the live album Seconds Out.
The acclaimed Seconds Out live album was recorded during the 1976 and 1977 tours and was to be Hackett’s final release with Genesis. Rutherford took on guitar duties in the studio, and during live performances alternated guitar and bass with the session musician Daryl Stuermer.
Following the departure of Hackett, Rutherford took on guitar duties in the studio and the band was getting closer to a balance of what each member provided from a creative standpoint. The group decided to continue as a trio, a fact they acknowledged in the title of the 1978 album …And Then There Were Three…. The album was a further move away from lengthy progressive epics, and yielded their first American radio hit, “Follow You, Follow Me“, whose popularity led to …And Then There Were Three… being the band’s first U.S. Platinum-certified album.
After his attempt to save his marriage (which ended in divorce), Collins returned to the UK in August 1979, and found himself in a holding pattern while Banks and Rutherford were working on solo recordings. With time to spare and new equipment in his home, Collins immersed himself in the recording of home demos that would become his first solo album Face Value (released in 1981) and provide two songs for the upcoming Genesis project. In addition, he rejoined Brand X for their 1979 tour, and appeared on their album Product. When the three bandmates came back together to begin recording their next album Duke the product was much more the result of all three working together equally. Duke was the real transition from their 1970s progressive rock sound to the 1980s pop era. The use of a drum machine became a consistent element on subsequent Genesis albums, as well as on Collins’s solo releases. The first Genesis song to feature a drum machine was the Duke track “Duchess“. The more commercial Duke was well received by the mainstream media, and was the band’s first UK number one album, while the tracks “Misunderstanding” and “Turn It On Again” became live performance favourites.
Duke was followed by Abacab, which features a collaboration with the Earth, Wind & Fire horn section on the track “No Reply at All.” Much of the album’s rehearsals took place at The Farm, the band’s newly-built studio in Surrey, and the site where all of their subsequent albums were recorded. The album used a forceful drum sound which used an effect called gated reverb, which uses a live—or artificially reverberated—sound relayed through a noise gate set, which rapidly cuts off when a particular volume threshold is reached. This results in a powerful “live” sounding, yet controlled, drum ambience. The distinctive sound was first developed by Peter Gabriel, Collins, and their co-producer/engineer Hugh Padgham, when Collins was recording the backing track for “Intruder”, the first song on Gabriel’s 1980 solo album. The technique, in addition to Padgham’s production, had been apparent on Face Value (1981), Collins’s debut solo album. The “gated” drum sound would become an audio trademark of future Genesis and Collins albums.
In 1982, the band released the live double album Three Sides Live. The U.S. version contains three sides of live material—hence the album’s title—in addition to a side of studio material. The studio material includes the song “Paperlate“, which again features an Earth, Wind and Fire horn section. In the UK and the rest of Europe, the studio material was replaced by a fourth side of live recordings from previous tours. 1982 closed with a one-off performance alongside Gabriel and Hackett at the Milton Keynes Bowl, under the name Six of the Best. The concert was hastily put together to help raise money for Gabriel’s WOMAD project, which at the time was suffering from considerable financial hardship. Hackett, who arrived late from South Africa, performed the final two songs of the show (“I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)” and “The Knife”) with his former bandmates.
1983’s eponymous Genesis album became their third consecutive number one album in the UK. The album includes the radio-friendly tracks “Mama” and “That’s All“, and re-introduced the band’s flair for lengthy pieces in “Home by the Sea“. The track “Just a Job to Do” was later used as the theme song for 1985’s ABC detective drama The Insiders. The album became a worldwide success, although somewhat unusually for a Genesis album, it provides no “extra” material. The sessions from the previous five studio albums dating back to 1976’s A Trick of the Tail had all generated other songs that would be released as B-sides to singles or on EPs.
Genesis’s highest-selling album, Invisible Touch, was released in 1986, at the height of Collins’s popularity as a solo artist. The album yielded five U.S. Top 5 singles: “Throwing It All Away”, “In Too Deep”, “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight“, “Land of Confusion” and “Invisible Touch“. The title track reached #1 in the United States; the only Genesis song to do so; however, it stalled at #15 in the UK. In 1987, Genesis became the first band to sell out four consecutive nights at Wembley Stadium. Genesis were the first band to use Vari*Lite technology, and the Prism sound system, all of which are now standard features of arena rock concerts.
After a hiatus of five years, Genesis reconvened for the 1991 release of We Can’t Dance, which was to be Collins’s last studio album with the group. The album features the hit singles “Jesus He Knows Me“, “I Can’t Dance“, “No Son of Mine“, “Hold on My Heart“, “Tell Me Why” and “Never a Time” (a U.S. release only), as well as lengthy pieces such as “Driving the Last Spike” and “Fading Lights“. The album which was produced by Nick Davis includes “Since I Lost You”, which Collins wrote in memory of Eric Clapton’s son Conor.
After much speculation regarding a reunion, Banks, Collins and Rutherford announced Turn It On Again: The Tour on 7 November 2006; nearly 40 years after the band first formed. The tour took place during Summer 2007, and played twelve countries across Europe, followed by a second leg in North America. The trio had wanted to reunite as a five-piece with Gabriel and Hackett for a live performance of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. While Gabriel reportedly agreed in principle to perform, he was unable to commit to a date. Collins later observed that “Peter is a little over-cautious about going back to something which fundamentally is just fun.” Hackett agreed to participation, but without Peter joining in on the tour, Phil, Tony and Mike thought that it would be more appropriate to bring back Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer.
Genesis has taken influence from a wide range of music, ranging from classical music to mainstream rock and jazz. Banks drew influence from Alan Price of The Animals, whom he regarded as “[t]he first person who made me aware of the organ in a rock context.” Collins has cited Buddy Rich and the jazz outfits The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report, while Gabriel’s early career with Genesis took influence from Nina Simone and King Crimson.
Albums: (not including extensive live albums and re-recordings)
From Genesis to Revelation • Trespass • Nursery Cryme • Foxtrot • Selling England by the Pound • The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway • A Trick of the Tail • Wind & Wuthering • …And Then There Were Three… •Duke • Abacab • Genesis • Invisible Touch • We Can’t Dance
(All information above from Wikipedia.org)
And yes, to answer the question, there is a 2-part song, called Domino (Part 1 & 2), on the album, Invisible Touch from 1986. Those who were lucky enough to see the live tour witnessed the dual drum solo played by Phil Collins and Chester Thompson. Ah, those were the days!
(dedicated to everyone who has served their country, thank you.)
The first four-way, three-colour traffic light was created by 