“Flowing out of us”: how the tiny town of Chiddingfold briefly saved Genesis
When you need to lock in and save a band from the brink of collapse, what do you do? Do you take some time apart? Do you move into each other’s homes? Or do you splash out on a brand new base? In the case of Genesis, they did all three.
For a long time, Genesis seemed only a hairpin away from destruction. The chaos started back when Peter Gabriel left the group in 1975, leaving them wondering what they would do. When Phil Collins stepped up to be frontman, it seemed for a while like everything would be OK, but then, with the pressures of all the time away on the road, even that got difficult as Collins declared in 1978 that he needed to step back and focus on family.
For the next few years, the group seemed to be trying everything possible to get themselves back in a good place. They took time away, having a break between the release of …And Then There Were Three… in 1978 and Duke in 1980. They even tried forcing themselves to just get on with it, as in 1979, when they started working on that return record, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford fully moved into Collins’ home to write, forcing themselves to spend time together again and collaborate in a more intense way.
The aim was simply to be “getting back to the basic stage of ideas being worked on jointly,” as Rutherford said, and it worked. So after Duke was born that way, they decided to take it a step further – they decided to buy their own studio.
Up until this point, Genesis records were made here, there and everywhere. After writing it at home, Duke was recorded in Sweden. Before that, they’d been everywhere from the Netherlands to Wales to London. But as they realised that maybe being in one place altogether was the best way to work, they decided to invest in a home base, purchasing Fisher Lane Farm in 1980.
Suddenly, they were homeowners. Fisher Lane Farm included a big farmhouse and a cowshed, which they converted into their own studio and rehearsal space. Found near Chiddingfold in Surrey, it’s a random spot for the band to de-camp to, but it also provided the kind of distraction-free focus they needed, and a place where they could lock in together and get to work in the hopes of holding things together.
And for years, it worked. Between 1981 with Abacab to their final album, Calling All Stations, in 1997, Genesis made their home at The Farm, writing, rehearsing and recording all their albums there. At the midpoint of that time frame, though, comes their undeniable masterpiece – Invisible Touch.
At that point, the magic of the Farm seemed to be at its peak. The band would essentially move there and spend time crafting songs through extended jam sessions and improvisations. By 1985, when they were working on Invisible Touch, that method was working at its best, and it seemed, for a golden moment, that all was well, leading to the making of their most commercially successful record, with Banks recalling that the ideas were “flowing out of us”.
However, it couldn’t last forever. The cracked formed back in the 1970s still never truly healed, and no farmhouse property could keep things together. In 1996, Phil Collins left the band, and the death knell rang for the group.
