The Genesis song Tony Banks thinks portended “the bombing of the Twin Towers”
With Peter Gabriel’s departure in 1974 and Steve Hackett’s following in 1977, Genesis was left increasingly under the leadership of Phil Collins, who gradually steered the group from its prog-rock roots to a more chart-orientated sound. During Genesis’ prolific spell in the early ’80s, Collins alleviated his dam-busting creative flow with a solo career on the side, releasing two highly successful LPs, Face Value and Hello, I Must Be Going! between 1981 and ’82.
Throughout the 1980s, Collins impressively divided his time between Genesis and his solo endeavours; however, his attention migrated increasingly to the latter. The drummer finally left the band in 1996, leaving Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford to rebuild the band.
The pair hired Ray Wilson, formerly the frontman of Stiltskin, as the lead vocalist and set about creating a follow-up to 1991’s We Can’t Dance. Sadly, the album, titled Calling All Stations, was panned by the critics and sold poorly compared to Genesis’ previous albums, thus indicating the end of the band’s recording career. Genesis remained active until 2000 and has since periodically reunited with Collins for reunion tours.
“I think we produced some very good songs for the album,” Banks reflected, discussing Calling All Stations in a 2019 interview. “I wanted to include one or two more solo-type things in there, both from Mike and me. I loved the more ‘Ripples’-type things that Mike might do and the more adventurous ‘One for the Vine’-type things I might do. But Mike wasn’t keen to do that, so we ended up doing a certain kind of thing for the album. I think the album has a kind of uniformity about it that I regret.”
He added: “All in all, I wasn’t dissatisfied with the album.”
One of the album’s deeper cuts is the surging nine-minute synth-odyssey ‘One Man’s Fool’. While the anthemic song says very little about Genesis’ established identity, it’s an inoffensive creation credited to both Banks and Rutherford.
In a 2018 interview with Songfacts, banks remembered the song as one of his better lyrical creations on Calling All Stations. “I was quite proud of the lyric when I wrote it, and because the album wasn’t a great success, it’s probably got a bit lost,” he said. “But, it’s a lyric worth listening to, I think.”
Banks wrote the song as a reaction to the June 15th, 1996, truck bombing attack in Manchester by the IRA. The opening lyrics read: “As the buildings crumble, tumble to the ground / And the dust-filled smoke rises in the air / You know that somebody, somewhere / Looks with pride, they’re satisfied”.
Continuing, Banks noted that the lyrics were hauntingly prescient of the 9/11 attack in 2001. “If anybody hears it now, they would assume that that lyric was referring to the bombing of the Twin Towers, but it wasn’t,” he said. “It was written four years before, and yet it sounds like we were recalling that”.
He concluded: “I was actually writing about a bomb attack in Manchester, in England, which was done by the IRA at the time, and the idea that people carry out these attacks and did they really believe that, all the destruction, that it really is worth it? But, it still works, unfortunately, because we have this kind of terrorism still out there.”
Listen to ‘One Man’s Fool’ by Genesis below.
