“If we worked on it, we would ruin it”: The one song Genesis decided not to “overblow”
The 1960s was a unique period in musical evolution wherein popular music trends aligned with progressive trends at the evolutionary vanguard. Famously, after joining the rhythm and blues craze in the early 1960s, British invasion acts like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles began to broaden their horizons with quirky psychedelic music. Albums like Their Satanic Majesties Request and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band laid the foundations for early prog rock groups like Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis.
While The Beatles maintained global allure with accessible tracks like ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ and ‘Getting Better’ alongside more oblique compositions like ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘A Day in the Life’, bands like Genesis and Yes worked their music into tighter niches. The first few Genesis albums under Peter Gabriel’s leadership were intentionally convoluted, often based on mystical concepts that George Harrison might have dismissed as “fruity”.
With Gabriel’s departure in 1975 and guitarist Steve Hackett’s two years later, Genesis was increasingly in the hands of drummer Phil Collins, who steered the ship to more radio-friendly climes. As the 1980s dawned, Collins realised that Genesis couldn’t provide for the entirety of his creative whim, and he branched out into a highly successful solo career with Face Value and Hello, I Must Be Going.
Legend has it that Collins began his solo career because he had a couple of songs rejected by his bandmates, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. Some sources claim that the pair had issues with ‘In the Air Tonight’ specifically, calling it “too simple” for a band like Genesis. However, Banks has since denied that Collins ever showed them a demo before he recorded it on his own.
Either way, Genesis had a famous penchant for compositional complexity and abstract lyricism with which Collins didn’t always concur. In 1986, Collins admitted to finding Banks’ Invisible Touch cut ‘Domino’ a little bit overcooked and inaccessible. “I found it tricky,” Collins once admitted of the song’s impenetrable 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.”
After Invisible Touch, Genesis gradually began work on new material that would ultimately comprise 1991’s We Can’t Dance. The album contained a similar pop sheen but heard a nuance of compositional simplicity in places. The second single, ‘I Can’t Dance’, was intentionally straightforward in response to prior convolutions.
At this later stage in the group’s career, even Banks and Rutherford understood the power of simple progressions and lyrics. “Mike had this basic riff which he played, and we worked it into a 16-bar riff,” Banks said, discussing the song on the Way We Walk DVD. “Then we started doing it heavy, which it immediately demanded, so Phil was playing heavy drums, and I was adding big chords and sounds. It was one of those bits we felt would go nowhere – it sounded fun, but it wasn’t really special. But there was one time when Mike was playing it, and Phil was at the microphone, so he wasn’t playing drums. I started playing drums on this thing [sampler], and that gave it a completely different feel.”
With the idea that the song was a humorous ditty, they decided to keep things simple. “We knew if we worked on it, we would ruin it, so we didn’t even give it a middle eight or anything,” Banks added. “We put it down in a few hours. It shows a certain direction we could go in for certain songs, which is totally opposite to what Genesis used to do in the past, which was to overblow a thing – take one idea and make it massive. This was taking an idea and leaving it really small and making it work.”
The song became the basis for the album’s lighter, less convoluted feel. ‘I Can’t Dance’ peaked at number seven on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart. Meanwhile, the album was a global commercial success, becoming Genesis’ fifth consecutive album to reach number one in the UK Albums Chart. We Can’t Dance remains Genesis’ best-selling album, suggesting that, for commercial success, simplicity is key.
