“A mistake”: The album that finally killed Genesis
For the longest time, Genesis was on rocky ground. Early on, they began being plagued by arguments and exits, making it a miracle they lasted as long as they did before the fatal final move.
Genesis is one of those bands with so many iterations and lineups that Wikipedia has to draw up a visual timeline to keep track of it all. When they started out, it was Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Anthony Phillips, Mike Rutherford and drummer Chris Stewart, five friends who met at school. Before they even really hit the big time, Phillips left, John Silver joined and then quickly left, and John Mayhew came and went.
All of it was born from creative conflicts, leading to the biggest one of all when the band’s singer, Peter Gabriel, entered the fold in 1975. That’s the sort of thing that few other bands would survive. The loss of a lead singer isn’t just the loss of any member; it’s the loss of the band’s voice, really of their whole identity. Gabriel’s role was a huge and vital one across singing and songwriting, so him deciding to quit to pursue his solo career was stripping the band of their identity in so many ways.
But somehow, they made it work. In fact, they didn’t just make it work; they entered a whole new level of success with Phil Collins at the helm. It was only once he took over leading duties that the band was hitting number one.
Even that could smooth things over, though. It still couldn’t break through their fighting and the members pulling in different directions, especially as Collins basically began to pull a Gabriel, itching towards a solo career. However, they kept trying, moving into studios together and trying to work on their friendships in an attempt to keep it all together.
However, in 1997, during the making of Calling All Stations, they just couldn’t. By that point, Collins was already gone as a sign that things really were on their last legs. Bringing in Scottish singer Ray Wilson to front them, the making of the album was a difficult task for a band trying to navigate a huge legacy with a brand new voice at a time when it was becoming clearer and clearer that it was all over.
In the mess of that, it was the matter of tracklisting that became hard. Not wanting to fall into even more arguments, it seemed that there was no one to actually advocate for their best work.
In 2019, Tony Banks reflected on the record, noting that while there were “some very good songs” on it, the band itself doomed it. “It contains one or two rather weak tracks, too. We also left off two of the strongest tracks, which was a mistake,” Banks recalled as the delicate relationships between everyone led to them green-lighting some rubbish songs, but letting some great ones fall in between the cracks.
Overwhelmingly, the end of the band came because the album was made in a climate where the group was clearly coming to terms with it all being over. Banks said that the room was tense with the awareness that they were already “becoming a catalogue act”, killing the motivation to push into new or exciting territory. So instead, they stagnated to their death, finally calling it quits.
