The Genesis song Phil Collins said was impossible to play live
Anyone even marginally familiar with Genesis knows that none of their music is exactly easy to pull off.
Who are we kidding here? This was the beginning of prog-rock, and it wasn’t out of the question for these musical monsters to play the most intense riff in 5/4 or change the song’s time signature for a split second before going back to the original form. That should have been no problem for someone in Phil Collins’s position, but even he knew that there were a few tunes that were never going to translate that well to the stage.
That’s not to say that they didn’t try, though. The Peter Gabriel era of the band includes some of the most cerebral progressive rock ever made, and even when the frontman left, the fact that Collins was able to nail tunes like ‘Supper’s Ready’ on the live album Seconds Out is an insane feat for anyone to pull off. But any prog rock act is going to make their records a little more complicated.
After all, the studio is where everyone gets the chance to spread out a bit more, and musicians of their calibre weren’t going to kick back singing songs that lasted for a few minutes. There was a lot of wiggle room on vinyl, and they were bound to wiggle to their heart’s content. But that didn’t mean that every record served as the best place for a prog newcomer to jump into the genre.
Selling England by the Pound is certainly one of the greatest albums that they made with the original lineup, but once Gabriel had the idea of bringing costumes into the equation, it was going to be a bit harder to tell those musical stories. The frontman was practically looking at the live show the way that most people look at theatrical performances, and while that’s great for a few songs, it was bound to get a little testy during The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
There was no way for the band to play every single piece of the record on tour, but when trying out their epic pieces like ‘The Colony of Slippermen’, things were bound to fall apart. Given its place in the story, hearing the band start in the middle of the record for an exposition song was always going to be a gamble, but Collins remembered the biggest hurdle being Gabriel’s costumes.
Dressing up like a disease was a novel idea, but if you’re thinking about the practicality of everything, Collins knew it was going to be a nightmare, saying, “‘Slippermen’ was the one where he could barely get a microphone near his mouth. But that’s something I haven’t done with any of this stuff. I think it is opening a can of worms, and where do you stop?” Even if he could sing normally, though, chances are the audience might be turned off hearing every part of the tune.
The story of Rael’s Alice in Wonderland-esque adventure through New York City was bound to be interesting, but hearing about him becoming one of the Slippermen and having to castrate himself and put his appendage in a tube was bound to get a few concerned faces from people wondering when they were going to hear ‘Firth of Fifth’.
The band didn’t need to cower to what their audience wanted every time they played, but this is one of the few times where Collins was right in them going too far. Gabriel may have been out one album later to focus on raising his daughter, but given how pissed off the band were about how everything was going, it was about more than fatherhood that forced him out of the group.
