The only rock album Phil Collins felt Genesis ever made: “We had a real hard edge”
Phil Collins knew better than anybody that making a record is a small miracle for any rock and roll band.
Even if every member has all the resources they need to make a fabulous record, there’s no telling what can go on behind the scenes that ends up tearing things apart, whether it’s a few arguments here and there or a major screwup in the production phases. Collins might definitely have had a better handle on what he wanted his music to be by the time he went solo, but that didn’t mean that all the Genesis records came easy when he started balancing out his solo career with his bandmates.
Granted, the fact that Collins was able to do that musical tightrope walk is the real miracle of his career. Any other group would have been bitter about watching one of their bandmates become a far bigger presence than anyone else in the band, but since Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford each had their own solo musical ventures, it was easier for them to get those songs out of their system and then come together to make the best Genesis record that they possibly could.
They had already gone through the trouble of landing on their feet after Peter Gabriel left the band, but depending on who you ask, that was either the best or worst thing to ever happen to them. Their records certainly climbed the charts with Collins providing the vocals on every song, but their turn towards being pop stars was only going to upset the people who were there since the days of ‘The Knife’ and ‘Supper’s Ready’.
Because at that point, Genesis was more of a pop band than a rock and roll outfit half the time they played. They had their heavy moments like on ‘Mama’ and ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’, but was anyone actually listening to a song like ‘Throwing It All Away’ or ‘Invisible Touch’ and claiming that they were flying the flag for rock and roll? Of course not, but to their credit, Collins felt that the songs weren’t being done justice whenever they walked into the studio.
And it’s not hard to see what he’s talking about. Their live performances had a far greater punch to them, and even back when they had Gabriel at the helm, there was a certain sheen that was taken off their records whenever they started making tunes like ‘Firth of Fifth’ or ‘Dancing With the Moonlit Knight’.
If anything, Collins felt that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was the closest the band ever came to getting the sounds they heard in their head in the studio, saying, “We were more rock ‘n’ roll than we ever sounded. I’ve got all the cassettes for all the albums that came out later, and in rehearsal, we actually had a real edge, which is why we were very popular live. We had a real hard edge that always got softened and glossed and shined in the studio. We never really got it right on record. The Lamb was close, because we recorded that on a mobile in a barn in Wales. But everybody tensed up in the studio.”
The remixes do help put a bit more grit into the songs from time to time, but if there’s one thing that The Lamb does better than anything else, it’s showing off the kind of drumming Collins could do. Everyone might remember him now as the darling of adult contemporary rock in his solo career, but ‘In the Cage’ is one of the clearest examples of him being able to hang with everyone from Keith Moon to John Bonham if he wanted to.
A lot of that may have been lost when they went through the final mixing process, but The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway does at least have one thing that no other rock band could touch. It’s a little frayed around the ends, and the storyline is more than a little bit wacky, but it showed everyone that Genesis did have the power to kick some ass if they wanted to.
