The Genesis album that saved the band: “We found ourselves a little bit”
It’s impossible to really nail down the kind of band that Genesis was in their prime. They may have been the kind of artsy progressive rock act with Peter Gabriel dressed in some of the most outlandish costumes imaginable, and yet they were also the same band that managed to put out the poppiest progressive music of the late 1980s once Phil Collins stepped out from behind the drumkit. That kind of combination shouldn’t really work together, but Mike Rutherford believed that the true core of their sound came when working on the album Duke.
Once Gabriel left the group, though, it was unclear why anyone even wanted to perform anymore. There had already been artists that were doing their complicated schtick better than them, like King Crimson, and now that they had lost one of the most charismatic frontmen in the genre, what was the point in just watching a bunch of prog nerds play to amuse themselves?
It wasn’t an easy decision to find a new singer, but the only reason that Collins got the chance to be the voice of the band was out of desperation. After another failed audition, Collins said that he had had enough of going through everything, recalling to Behind the Music, “I said, ‘Can I have a go? I know I can do better than this.’ I became the singer because we couldn’t find anybody else.”
Although Collins is known as the one who destroyed the band in some respects, A Trick of the Tail didn’t show them straying too far away from their prog roots on songs like ‘Entangled’ and ‘Dance on a Volcano’. Once Steve Hackett left to pursue his own solo projects, the band were relegated to a trio and had no idea where to go anymore.
And Then There Were Three did a decent job at showing the band licking their wounds, but Collins’ decision to take a break from the band to work on his marriage may have been a blessing in disguise. Once everyone got their solo material out of their system, Duke was a far more polished effort than anyone thought.
Looking back on the album, Rutherford thought that this was the moment when they knew they could carry on as a band, saying, “Duke is a very important album. I think if Duke hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have carried on, I think. We found ourselves a little bit. By then, we had done solo albums, so you were less pushy about stuff you’d written.”
It would be easy to say that the “sell out” years start out here, but it’s not like the pop songs don’t work well on them. Despite being Collins’s first stab at songwriting for the group, ‘Misunderstanding’ is one of the best breakup songs they had ever put to tape, almost carrying on the romantic angle they had on ‘Follow You Follow Me’.
Just because they started to branch out didn’t mean things didn’t get any less complicated. Songs like ‘Turn It On Again’ remain the most rhythmically complex songs to find their way onto the pop charts, complete with changing time signatures that usually left fans wondering where the hell the one beat was. Genesis would eventually branch out even further into easy-listening territory, but any prog band should be proud of getting something this complex to actually chart.
