“How do I sing this thing?”: The Genesis song Phil Collins couldn’t handle
When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1974, followed by guitarist Steve Hackett in 1977, the band found itself increasingly under the leadership of drummer Phil Collins.
Taking over lead vocals, Collins led Genesis in a more commercially-driven direction. Amidst the band’s prolific output in the early ’80s, Collins embarked on a successful solo career, releasing two of his most popular albums, Face Value and Hello, I Must Be Going.
In such releases, Collins stirred up charts on both sides of the Atlantic, but alongside bandmates Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, Genesis maintained a similarly lofty status. Genesis reached a significant peak in commercial success in 1986, driven by Invisible Touch, the band’s 13th studio album.
Invisible Touch is best known for Collins’ eponymous lead single, which remains Genesis’ only single to top the US Billboard Hot 100. Elsewhere, the release was buoyed by contributions from Banks and Rutherford, including the latter’s single ‘Land of Confusion’.
For the most part, Genesis’ core trio worked as a tight, cohesive unit throughout the 1980s, but Collins admitted to having issues with ‘Domino’, Banks’ two-part epic on Invisible Touch. “I found it tricky,” Collins once admitted of the song’s seemingly nonsensical lyrics. “I used to think, ‘How do I sing this thing about double glazing? How do I sing this and convince an audience?’ I found it awkward because I was getting more personal in my songwriting, and here I was singing things I didn’t understand – just syllables.”
With a lyric like “Sheets of double glazing help to keep outside the night,” the drummer might have been onto something here. Still, Banks maintains that ‘Domino’ has personal resonance and cloaked depths.
“The first part is very personal, coming from an individual’s point of view of how he might be affected by what one person set in motion without realising what he was doing,” Banks said of the song on the Way We Walk DVD. “It’s a war situation I was thinking of where a guy has lost his woman and his attitude of ‘look what you’ve done’ in speaking to the guy who pressed the button that made the whole thing happen.”
The second part of the ten-minute track visits more abstract pastures, hence Collins’ consternation. “The second half is a different approach,” Banks said. “It’s a more surreal approach to the idea with a nightmarish quality to it. The domino itself is the idea that there’s nothing you can do if you’re next in line. It sounds good when it’s sung, and it’s also a good image.”
The track wasn’t released as a single but after a few outings became a hit with the band’s fanbase, especially after the 1992 tour which utilised giant screens to provide visuals for the track. Talking of the tune’s origni, Banks revealed, “Mike (Rutherford) played a guitar riff, and if Mike’s fairly static on a simple little riff, it gives me a chance to play any chord I like, and I just played every chord that would fit over that riff. Put them in a certain kind of order and you get a certain kind of result. The two halves were not the same song originally.”
He confirmed, “The second half developed out of a jam that we called ‘Hawkwind’ because it reminded us of the English group who used to do a lot of psychedelic jams. It was just keeping a thing going in the bass and making funny noises on the top. It’s an excuse to use those horror-film chord sequences that I always like. Not so much dramatic as melodramatic.”
Listen to ‘Domino’, one of Genesis’s fan favourites, below.
