The 1980 Genesis song too difficult for Peter Gabriel to sing: “It was typical Peter”
Whether you like it, love it or simply loathe it, prog-rock has had an influential part to play int he musical landscape, and Genesis are perhaps one of the most important players in that game.
Any great prog rock musician knows how to get their chops up. No matter how many times artists might try to reinvent the genre in ways that haven’t been done before, it usually takes a healthy amount of dexterity to pull off anything that makes it onto a progressive rock record. While Peter Gabriel may have been able to keep up with every member of Genesis along with wearing outlandish costumes, one of the group’s biggest songs left him in shambles trying to play it.
For the first half of Genesis’ career, Gabriel was responsible for putting many of the tracks together. Formed through the partnership between Gabriel and keyboardist Tony Banks while they were still kids at boarding school, many of the band’s first songs revolved around using different approaches to traditional rock, stretching out songs like ‘The Knife’ on the album Trespass to enormous proportions.
As Gabriel began working on the band’s stage setup, he also got in touch with the theatricality of the music, opening up one of their concerts wearing a fox’s head inspired by the artwork of the album Foxtrot. Then again, Gabriel wasn’t going to stop at just one show, going on to create costumes like flowers to go along with every song.
Although Gabriel could have kept the band going forever, his choice to step back from the band after The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway led to Phil Collins stepping up from behind the drumkit. While many thought that the shows would be kneecapped, Collins came into his own as a frontman, having a searing vocal range and one of the greatest senses of rhythm on the rock scene.
That transition also marked a subtle shift in Genesis’ musical priorities. While the band never abandoned their progressive roots entirely, Collins’ arrival at the forefront encouraged a slightly more accessible approach, blending complex arrangements with sharper hooks and more immediate songwriting. It was a balancing act between musicianship and mainstream appeal that would come to define their later success.
Even so, the technical demands of their material never truly diminished. Songs from this era still required a deep internal understanding of rhythm and structure, often disguising their complexity beneath a more polished exterior. It meant that, even as Genesis reached wider audiences, they remained a band whose catalogue could challenge even the musicians who had originally helped bring it to life.
When Gabriel decided to come back to see the last days of Genesis, he decided to try his hand at going through the material after he left. Having been honing his craft in his solo career with songs like ‘Solsbury Hill’ and ‘Sledgehammer’, Gabriel still felt out of practice when trying his hand at the song ‘Turn It On Again’ for the first time.
Gabriel had initially thought that the song was impossible to play, with Banks recalling to Louder, “It was typical Peter: ‘Oh, I can play this’. But once he started playing, he kept looking around going: ‘Oh fuck!’ Turn It On Again does funny things; it’s truly a Genesis song”. Considering the different changes in the metre, it’s no wonder why Gabriel had trouble finding his footing at first.
Despite being one of the biggest hits of the Collins era, ‘Turn It On Again’ also features one of the wildest time signatures they have ever laid down, with a central pulse of 13 beats in a bar. Instead of internalising the rhythm like a common shuffle, the extra beat added into the mix makes every bar feel like it’s being elongated a bit, making it difficult for anyone to get their bearings when playing it for the first time.
Although it would have been impossible to get crowds dancing along to the song, ‘Turn It On Again’ is one of the purest examples of Genesis working to their strengths. It might not be what listeners expected, but the results were still impossible to resist.
