Genesis - The chameleons of progressive rock

We're in the mid-1960s, and Charterhouse is a prestigious private school near London, one of those institutions built entirely on discipline and "sound principles", where boys learn to make their way in the "English manner". The original nucleus of Genesis is born here, where the well-off families of Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Anthony Phillips and Michael Rutherford send them for their secondary education. Gabriel and Banks start tinkering at the school piano and writing songs, and before long these boys begin to see music as their future. After a few attempts with separate little bands, Genesis is formed.

The first turning point comes with Jonathan King, an English pop singer and producer fairly well established in the second half of the Sixties, himself a former Charterhouse pupil, who takes a liking to Genesis and gets them to sign their first contract - a truly absurd deal for 16-year-old kids, five years with an option for another five (later drastically shortened thanks to their parents' intervention) - and to record their first album, From Genesis To Revelation, a concept record based on the Old Testament, on King's own suggestion. It's clearly far too big a step for these still-naive students, who at the time are Peter Gabriel (vocals), Anthony Phillips (guitar), John Silver and, on two tracks, Cris Stewart (drums), Anthony Banks (keyboards), and Michael Rutherford (bass and guitar). The record is at times classical-leaning, at times pop, due to King's heavy influence; it has a few interesting moments in hindsight, knowing what came later, but it's green to say the least. It's made up of lots of very short, simple songs, yet stuffed with pompous arrangements of strings and trombones - a world away from what was to come. The album is released by Decca in March 1969, and is pretty much ignored by everyone.

King loses interest in Genesis as their compositions grow more complex, and the group finds itself alone, though not without enthusiasm. Turning down significant financial help from their families, they scrape by to survive. The period is financially dire for the boys (someone close to them at the time would say: "I had the impression they were skipping meals"), and with the arrival of new drummer John Mayhew, the meagre earnings from their first gigs prove a breath of fresh air.

It's precisely in this phase that, through small adjustments and an enormous amount of work, trying and trying again, Genesis hone what will become one of their great strengths: live performance - not through cocky rock-star posturing, but by learning to build an atmosphere capable of gradually drawing the audience into their music, which is really what they want, with ever greater intensity. The very young Genesis (all in their early twenties at the time) trust almost no one in the business, until they land the big catch: winning over Tony Stratton-Smith, the godfather of Charisma, a young but already significant progressive label, who within a couple of weeks signs them and thus puts them in a position to record a new album.

Trespass (October 1970) is in many ways still a transitional record, but it's a huge leap forward from its predecessor. Substantial traces of the band's personality begin to show. Standouts on the album include "Visions Of Angels", for the classic "grand finale" epic quality we'll find again in compositions on later albums, "Stagnation" for its acoustic softness, and "The Knife", which departs considerably from the rest for its sheer "rock" impact, with its violent attack and powerful rhythmic drive - and which would close every Gabriel-era concert to come.

Immediately after the recording sessions, Anthony Phillips, one of the band's main songwriters ("The Knife" is his), leaves: "We were just a bunch of perfectionists. (...) Music had become the source of my deepest suffering". Losing their friend is a heavy blow, but, as happens in the best stories, the band manages to seize the moment to make a decisive leap forward instead, deciding to also change their drummer.

Through an ad in Melody Maker, Phil Collins is recruited on drums. He already has a very long history in showbiz, having been in it since childhood as a child actor in TV commercials and on stage, and later in rock as a member of several bands that always seemed on the verge of making it and then regularly fell apart. Shortly after, they get in touch with a guitarist-songwriter looking for a band, who had placed an ad in the same magazine. It's Steve Hackett, who, after listening to Trespass and seeing them live, is favourably impressed. Cunningly, he gets Genesis to come straight to his house, surrounded by all "his gadgets", and impresses them so much that, without auditioning anyone else, they decide to take him on. The first impact for the very young Steve is far from easy. The sonic perfection Genesis want to achieve on stage is far from being realized due to the limits of their equipment, and the shows are often plagued by technical problems, but despite this things slowly fall into place and the band begins to grow.

So it is that in January '71 a collective Charisma tour comes along, organized by Stratton-Smith to launch his most promising acts: Van Der Graaf Generator, Lindisfarne and, of course, Genesis. Our lads are obviously bottom of the bill. Over the nine dates of the tour, though, things change and Genesis explode, relegating the others to the role of followers unable to keep up, as Peter Hammill himself admits: "Everyone was trying to outdo everyone else every night, but at a certain point it became impossible to outdo them". In June '71, during a show, Peter Gabriel jumps from the stage into the crowd (something he'd repeat, with less violence, later in his solo career) and breaks his leg, forcing the tour to stop; so the band turns to writing and rehearsing, which proves extremely useful both for bonding with the two new members and in preparation for the imminent next album.

Nursery Cryme comes out in November '71, and is a pivotal record for Genesis, because for the first time the band's standard of songwriting and arrangement clearly emerges - "the Genesis style" takes shape, something that had only surfaced in patches on Trespass: long tracks built from intimate, acoustic moments followed by fierce electric onslaughts. The style is now clear in the lyrics too, rich with historical, literary, mystical and fairy-tale references. The whole album plays with a Victorian atmosphere, starting with the cover art. Emblematic of this is the long composition that inspired it, the opening "The Musical Box", in which sex - generally treated with irony and through metaphor - becomes one of the main components of Gabriel's lyrics, and will remain so for a long time. The band's musical style thus takes shape and finally finds its true dimension in this mini-suite, showing a tendency toward compositions built from alternating moments of different rhythm and tone, delicate guitar arpeggios followed by driving surges and then by new acoustic passages. The dramatic climax reached in the final section reveals, for the first time, the five musicians' definitive musical "intentions": complex, classically-inclined compositions rendered with rock instrumentation, and dramatically underscored by arrangements that create scenes capable of leaving a deep impression on the listener.

The album's first side unfolds through two more compositions of differing tone: first the delicate, acoustic "For Absent Friends", then the far more rock-driven power of the pounding "The Return Of The Giant Hogweed", another of Genesis's long-standing live "war horses". After such a formidable, "progressive" first side, one expects miracles from the second, which instead has a more uneven flow. It opens with a track that's ultimately not that memorable, "Seven Stones", continues with the theatrical, spectacular "Harold The Barrel", dips again with the slow-moving "Harlequin" which doesn't quite flow, but closes in style with another complex mini-suite, "The Fountain Of Salmacis", based on the classical myth of Hermaphroditus (so we're back to playing with sex and ambiguity).

The album gets a cold reception in England and the band's morale hits rock bottom, when suddenly something stirs where they least expect it: abroad, specifically in Belgium, where the album shoots straight to number one on the charts. A tour of the country is organised and enthusiastically received, and so Nursery Cryme also breaks into the top ten in Italy. This is how Genesis first "land" in Italy, with audiences flocking to see them and giving them a rapturous welcome.

All this pulls the band out of the budding depression brought on by their struggles at home. It's in Italy, during breaks between shows and rehearsals, that some new compositions start to take shape, among them "Watcher Of The Skies". These tracks are performed live for the first time over the following months on their European dates, and are honed in the process. Little by little the band also starts making headway at home, but soon enough it's time to record the new album, which is by now ready to go.

Foxtrot (1972), in this writer's opinion, is the best Genesis album. Everything works and suddenly falls into place. The band is now fully mature, and every element supports the others beautifully, forming a complex cathedral whose keystone is, by turns, the majestic sweep of Banks's mellotron, the guitar textures of the Hackett-Rutherford duo (who swap between 12-string and bass), the warm, powerful voice of Gabriel and his wordplay, and the drumming of Collins, so incredibly spontaneous and rhythmic despite its "art rock" complexity, finally well served by the production.

It opens with the striking mellotron introduction of "Watcher Of The Skies", which in under a minute condenses so much of the progressive genre and the Genesis style: epic scope, intensity, refinement and sudden shifts of mood. The song proper is strongly rock-driven, with quick guitar flourishes, and pulls us into a science-fiction tale that's a bitter metaphor for the future of a humanity capable of destroying itself. "Time Table" is the album's most classically-leaning composition, with lyrics tinged with nostalgia for the past, and feels slightly weaker next to the grandeur of the rest, but it's a pleasant enough breather after the initial rush. The following "Get 'Em Out By Friday" continues in the sci-fi vein, creating a full-blown theatrical piece, Gabriel-style, about looming property speculation, rich in sarcasm, where he genuinely acts out the different characters, shifting voice and intonation each time. The music itself follows suit, turning gentler with the "good guys" and much more electric and driving with "the bad guys". "Can Utility And The Coast-Liners" is brimming with emotion: amid Simon & Garfunkel-esque touches, drums pushed to the fore and moments of intense guitar intimacy, a prelude to dramatic crescendos, the organ takes over, building to a dizzying, whirlwind final explosion.

The second side opens with "Horizons", a brief divertissement for Hackett's solo acoustic guitar, which reworks the first movement of Bach's "Cello Suite No. 1": it will become one of the band's best-known pieces. It continues with what is Genesis's most representative composition, that "Supper's Ready" which, for over twenty minutes, holds you spellbound with everything one expects from progressive rock: intensity, technique that's never an end in itself but always in service of the composition and kept firmly in check by it, intricate complexity, but above all ideas - ideas to spare, with no self-indulgent noodling. From the living room to the apocalypse and back, the suite tells of the second coming of Christ on earth, the battle against the Antichrist and his defeat, and thus humanity's ultimate conquest of the new Jerusalem, all of it obviously read as a metaphor for the struggle of good against evil. Musically there's an enormous variety of ideas and shades: from classical to hard rock, to almost cabaret-like, childlike pop, to odd time signatures ("Apocalypse in 9/8"), and a martial rhythm leading to a conclusion of almost unbearable orchestral intensity. Everything conspires to be overblown, yet it never is: it's music that astonishes without resorting to needless frills.

With the Foxtrot tour also come Peter Gabriel's famous costumes, as he begins dressing up inspired by the lyrics right after the first shows in late '72.

In the summer of 1973 Genesis release their first live album, simply titled Live, which essentially showcases the band's more "rock" side, lining up a sequence of five of the most electric tracks in their repertoire. Though not flawless in terms of sound quality, they nonetheless capture the atmosphere of the band on stage remarkably well. If anything, the imperfections probably improve the album in this respect, lending it spontaneity. Particularly excellent here are "The Return Of The Giant Hogweed" and the closing "The Knife".

Meanwhile Genesis keep writing non-stop and that summer record their next work, Selling England By The Pound, which shows a clear evolution in both composition and arrangement. The five musicians seek out new relationships between the instruments and between the fuller and sparser passages of their music, trying to bring first this instrument, then that one, into the spotlight, moving to some extent away from the "architectural choral quality" of their earlier work. A prime example of this is "Firth Of Fifth", where a long, astonishing solo piano introduction by Banks (a genuinely "classical" piece) gives way to a sudden entrance of the full band, with the vocal clearly taking over before yielding once more to a Banks solo, countered in the finale by virtuoso drum counterpoints, before Hackett takes centre stage with perhaps his finest solo ever, finally arriving at the collective reprise of the main melody. In short, everyone gets their own slice of the track, but rather than creating needless preciousness by forcing in space for this player and that at all costs - weakening the pieces and stretching them out pointlessly, as happened in those very years with other "giants" of progressive rock - it instead produces something solid and cohesive, unique and unrepeatable. The lengthy opener "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight" has Gabriel poking fun at the clash between modernisation and the "English way of life", full of double meanings and metaphors, and is made up of several sections written by different band members and stitched together with remarkable skill. The breezy "I Know What I Like", almost a slowed-down swing number, shows how Genesis could already, at that point, have tackled a lighter repertoire with far more substance (if not necessarily commercial success) than what would later characterise the surviving members of the band's future split. The sweet "More Fool Me" is an acoustic interlude that prophetically features Collins as lead vocalist.

Opening the second side, "The Battle Of Epping Forest" is a product of the tensions starting to surface between the singer and the band, and of problems that would soon follow: the track, while undeniably strong, has too much text and shows an unresolved relationship between voice and music. Hackett's instrumental "After The Ordeal" keeps the album's standard high, despite a production that isn't entirely sharp.

The soft, romantic "The Cinema Show" is instead a gem built entirely around three interweaving, ethereal guitars, followed by gentler, more markedly progressive passages. In the vocal, at times falsetto, Gabriel once again plays with male-female relationships, attraction and hermaphroditism, again drawing on mythological references - here Tiresias, following Hermaphroditus in "The Fountain Of Salmacis". The track's long instrumental coda, in truth the one part of the album that's compositionally a bit overlong, fades into the closing "Aisle Of Plenty", which reprises and closes out the musical theme of "Dancing...".

Musical marvels abound and the album could have been just as immense again, but its real weak point is precisely the production, with the drums pushed into the background for long stretches and the drums and cymbals reduced to a muddy "mush".

The tour kicks off, and Gabriel's increasingly elaborate costumes have by now become legendary among fans, so much so that many flock to the shows just for those, with no idea of the music on offer, only to end up captivated by it anyway. The band is probably at the peak of its live performance powers. During this tour, the singer starts mulling over the idea of recording a concept album and pitches it to the others, who embrace it enthusiastically; the various members' story proposals are discussed, and Gabriel's own idea wins out: thus is born one of the most monumental double albums in rock history, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

What Genesis create in 1974 is a genuine "rock opera", indeed a landmark of the genre, based on the story of Rael, a Puerto Rican hoodlum from New York who finds himself hurled into an underground world where he lives through an incredible string of adventures, through which Gabriel uses metaphor to narrate the coming-of-age of an adolescent and the stuff of everyday life. Musically the band changes once again; the songs are on average shorter than on previous records and the sound is far more forceful and heavy; the production once again favours the drums and leans heavily on power and raw atmospheres, unusual for the band, and it's in this very respect that the opening title track immediately signals how the album departs from its predecessors. Alongside the drums, it's Rutherford's bass, at last given its proper due, that lends great rhythmic force to the arrangements. Hackett's guitar work consists of short, sharp solos. Banks ranges across all the compositions (many of which are predominantly his work, even though the album was written collectively), acting as a continuous "thread" for the others to build upon. Naturally there's no shortage of acoustic, intimate moments closer to the band's classic style, as in "Carpet Crawlers", but the shape of the compositions is markedly less elaborate, and the shifts in rhythm and feel that used to occur within a single track are now entrusted to the alternation between different songs. Still, in a work of this scale, however astonishing, there are moments where the listening experience drags.

Work on the double album was troubled, above all because of Gabriel's delays in writing the hugely complicated lyrics, more than usually packed with literary quotations and mythological references, rich in pathos while also necessarily having to describe Rael's story. The five of them initially split the workload, with the singer writing the lyrics and the others composing the music, but this, besides sharply separating the two sides of the band's creative process for the first time, inevitably created friction. By this point the band openly disapproved of Gabriel's way of working, and arguments were a daily occurrence: "Peter was way behind with the lyrics, so he'd turn up late and sing over everything, even over what were meant to be instrumental passages. To me it was like someone had taken a painting I'd just finished and smeared it all over with red paint", Hackett would later reveal.

Added to this, after the album's release, were the frustrations caused by the way both the public and critics misattributed the songs, crediting almost everything to Gabriel and relegating the others to supporting roles. The massive tour that followed across the United States and Europe, in which Rael's story was performed in full with spectacular theatrical tricks, video projections and Gabriel decked out in ever more outlandish costumes, actually only made things worse. Audiences flocked to the shows in droves, but the popularity gained backfired on the band, fuelling envy and resentment toward the singer, who had by then become the undisputed star of the show, compounded by his personal family troubles. All of this led Peter Gabriel to decide to leave.

The news sent shockwaves through pretty much the entire music scene, and, viewed in hindsight, probably marks a watershed moment in the history of rock itself. With this farewell, progressive rock itself bids goodbye to its golden age, and a whole musical world bids farewell to an era. "The times, they are a-changin'", and Gabriel himself was probably well aware of this in making his decision.

The singer left for good in the spring of '75, although the decision had actually been made back at the start of "The Lamb" tour, going on in the following years to build an enormously important and artistically rewarding solo career, exploring new rhythms and sounds, between Africa and electronic experimentation, light years away from the music of Genesis. The band, meanwhile, although genuinely shaken by his departure, decided — to everyone's surprise — to carry on, and — to even greater astonishment — to do so, after countless auditions, without bringing in a new singer at all, handing vocal duties to Phil Collins.

Thus, just a few months after the tour ended, A Trick Of The Tail was born. Everyone was waiting to see how the drummer would fare as lead singer, and, helped also by the greater simplicity of the songwriting, he surprisingly manages not to leave listeners pining too much for Gabriel. The album sounds more polished in its arrangements and production. The opening "Dance On A Volcano" shows Collins in fine form behind the drums, helped by the track's structure: urgent, built on constant tempo changes, odd meters and syncopation in abundance. A track like "Squonk" makes clear that songs conceived for Gabriel's theatrical flair are still very much present (it's said he had even rehearsed it before leaving), but it gives Collins the chance to prove he knows his craft as a singer too, even if he still struggles to shake off Gabriel's influence and the inevitable comparisons.

The album is nonetheless a solid piece of work and is, on the whole, well received. The trauma of Gabriel's departure is thus cushioned, at least in terms of its impact on the audience. Musically too, the band absorbs the blow (far greater dramas are in store for the future): the songwriting is certainly different, simpler and more accessible, especially lyrically, the sound is brighter, the arrangements more direct. The band has opted for greater accessibility, though it can still deliver emotion and touches of class. There are, however, two songs, "Mad Man Moon" and "Ripples", that hint at the band's more conventional pop future to come, even though Banks's piano work, and his writing on "Mad Man Moon", drawing on his classical influences, are worth noting.

Wind & Wuthering came out almost two years after the previous album, and shows improvements along with a few more changes, though still within the new formula. The guitar takes on an ever greater role, and much of the album plays out as a Hackett-Banks duel. The past resurfaces at the start with "Eleventh Earl Of Mar", which features some lovely acoustic touches, with arpeggios somewhere between Arabic and Renaissance in feel, the result of Hackett's passion for those musical traditions. "One For The Vine" is built mainly around piano and synth movements, with a fast instrumental interlude in the style of a fugue and, again, an Arabic-tinged electric guitar. "All In A Mouse's Night" plays the role that "Dance On A Volcano" had on the previous album, urgent, with tempo changes and odd time signatures, but with less impact. "Blood On The Rooftops" sees a Hackett-Collins songwriting collaboration that bears good fruit. Then come two long, linked but clearly distinct instrumental sections, "Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers", suspended and dreamlike, and "…In That Quiet Earth", where instead we find hints of refined hard rock, with guitar barrages almost reminiscent of second-era King Crimson. The intense "Afterglow" closes the album with a sweet guitar arpeggio and synthesisers forming choral backing that lifts Collins's voice to considerable pathos; it's pop, but still classy pop. Overall, it's striking how much more room Hackett takes up compositionally too — indeed, some tracks credited to multiple writers are in practice almost entirely his, with the others simply going along with him. The guitarist begins nurturing the idea of a solo career after his first solo work, released in 1975, "Voyage Of The Acolyte".

The tour brings further, stellar success, but Hackett's doubts finally come to a head during the mixing sessions for the double live album Second's Out, drawn from those very shows, and so, terrified by the show-business machine he found himself caught up in, the guitarist too leaves, going on to build a lasting, extremely prolific and consistently strong solo career.

With hindsight, this departure can be considered far more traumatic than Gabriel's. The three survivors, by now launched toward financial horizons utterly unimaginable only shortly before, bound hand and foot by contracts typical of superstars, not only don't want to quit but probably can't afford to either. Second's Out explodes up the charts worldwide, revenues exceed every expectation, but why stop there? Everything that in Gabriel's day would have been unthinkable, and that with Hackett still ran into a thousand "artistic" scruples, has by now become possible; so the three remaining members don't even entertain the idea of stopping — quite the opposite, they set to work, coldly plotting one of the most shocking musical crimes in the history of rock.

With And Then There Were Three, in 1978, Genesis vanish, replaced by three clones of Banks, Collins and Rutherford, who turn in an insipid little pop record, at times genuinely irritating given who's behind it. Few progressive traces remain, as everything is engineered to chase the simplest effect and the most immediate appeal to the mass audience: saccharine keyboard solos and syrupy arrangements rule the day. True to their "keep it in-house" policy, this time the three are also careful not to seek out a new guitarist (that would mean splitting the profits with one more person), and the six-string passes to Rutherford, who, although he had always played rhythm twelve-string with the band, is technically, imaginatively and stylistically nowhere near comparable to Hackett as a soloist, and so settles for an honest bit of strumming. The single "Follow You Follow Me" is as light as air, with Collins murmuring a flimsy little tune that latches onto your brain instantly, especially in the chorus, to be savoured like candy floss under the lights of a funfair. Their first big hit single pushes the album to levels never reached before. Live, it's Daryl Stuermer on guitar and Chester Thompson on drums backing up the trio in concerts that draw crowds of up to 100,000. By now, no commercial milestone is out of reach.

Having found the winning trick, the three come back swinging in 1980 with Duke, where the transformation is finally complete and nothing more connects to the past. Recording takes place in Stockholm, at ABBA's Polar Studios, and everything takes on the super-glossy sheen of pure chart-pop production. "Turn It On Again" is enjoyable enough for a few effective touches, but by now we're at the level of dozens of similar products: beyond the single there's nothing but hot air and plenty of tedium.

Collins had already been involved since '76 in a parallel jazz-rock outfit, Brand X, but in 1981 he's the last member of the band to go solo, with a genuinely personal work that immediately meets with staggering success: "Face Value". Uneven as it is, it's at the very least a decent album, with interesting moments starting with the now-legendary "In The Air Tonight", a track with a truly remarkable structure for a pop-rock song: a first section where there's essentially just the voice over faint instrumentation and an unsettling, obsessive drum machine pattern (sampled countless times in the years to follow) to set a tense mood, and a second section where a literally staggering drum sound explodes, unforgettable, dominating and effectively "making" the song; the lyrics are deeply autobiographical. The work is certainly superior to the contemporary Genesis albums, but it's an exception: Collins will never again reach those heights, becoming instead one of the most successful pop solo artists in history, with a stream of hits and albums topping the charts everywhere. Like King Midas, Collins will turn to gold everything he touches, even as a producer.

Meanwhile, Genesis's career continues with a string of albums that regularly reach the top of the charts worldwide: Abacab (1981), which features horns courtesy of none other than Earth, Wind & Fire, Three Sides Live (1982), a double live album which, only in its US edition, has one studio side made up of leftovers from previous albums and a single, "Paperlate", which, coming from the Abacab sessions, is once again full of EW&F-style horns that give it a certain charm, and then Genesis (1983). The music on these albums is a kind of funk-pop, at times an ultra-light soft rock tailor-made for go-getting 1980s managers who never actually cared for rock in the first place. But above all, it's hollow, soulless music — it's no accident that writer Bret Easton Ellis would symbolically choose 1980s Genesis as the favourite band of the psychopathic yuppie serial killer at the centre of his celebrated "American Psycho".

The members' solo careers continue in parallel. We've already covered Collins. Rutherford, during these years, forms the pop group Mike & The Mechanics, who find immense commercial success right from their debut. Musically, there is precisely nothing of note about them. Banks has been releasing albums under his own name since the '70s, written in his typically distinctive style.

The worst, though, is yet to come. In 1986 comes the dreadful Invisible Touch, a further purely commercial degradation of a band that has long had nothing left to do with rock, either in sound or in songwriting: easy, instantly catchy little tunes (like the singles "Invisible Touch" and "Land Of Confusion"), over-produced with whatever happened to be trendy at the time, drenched in typically 1980s mainstream sounds. Like starting to dig once you've already hit bottom. The album, if anything, sells even more than its predecessors. A once-glorious name has, for a decade now, been literally hijacked by three immensely wealthy, well-fed gentlemen who have perfectly grasped the mechanics of the music business and embrace them without the slightest qualm. But, incredibly, this still won't be rock bottom.

In 1991 comes We Can't Dance, which follows in the footsteps of Invisible Touch and, at times, sounds like an album by the flimsier, solo version of Collins, as on "Jesus He Knows Me". Then, in 1992 and 1993 respectively, come two live albums, The Way We Walk – Vol. 1 and The Way We Walk – Vol 2, both strikingly, glaringly pointless.

When even Phil Collins officially quits the band, the hope is that the agony has finally come to an end. Time passes and the group seems definitively dead and buried, when, like a zombie that refuses to die or a vampire feeding on itself, the Genesis name is resurrected by the shameless duo of Tony Banks and Michael Rutherford. For the occasion, the two recruit Ray Wilson as singer, convinced that the name alone can still sell records six years after the last studio album, in a world that has changed utterly. The result, if it can be called that, is Calling All Stations (1997), a disgraceful record by any measure, which — despite a fairly substantial promotional push — sells far below expectations, especially in the US, the market the pair had been banking on.

Almost everyone has abandoned them. Stunned and disappointed, the two begin asking themselves serious questions on a personal level too: “I believed something worthwhile could still be done, but I have to think again. Times aren't the same anymore. We'll have to seriously consider whether it's worth continuing under the Genesis name or calling it quits,” Rutherford admits. In effect, a genuine tragedy to close out, exactly thirty years after it began, the story of a name that deserved far greater respect from the very people who used it to define an era, who gave it its lustre and devoted their lives to it. Musicians who had once believed so strongly in that name that they nearly starved to keep it going.

In 2007, aboard an enormous spaceship-like stage worthy of the final scene of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, the three aliens who still call themselves Genesis land on earth once again. That is, if a band can still be called Genesis when, pretending no one will notice, it presents a cylindrical Phil Collins as singer, far removed from the drums, an increasingly gangly Michael Rutherford on guitar, far removed from the bass, with only Tony Banks still on his original instrument, impassively strumming through thirty years of pop nursery rhymes with all the indifference of some land-registry clerk, flanked by the usual Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer.

Given that the band's “post-this-and-post-that” era now spans more than triple the length of its classic period, the setlist is almost entirely built around the former, with only the occasional dip into the back catalogue. The trouble with this brief excursion into the band's goldmine is that the (scant) enthusiasm with which it's performed is nowhere near worthy of the (enormous) enthusiasm with which the audience receives it. Any Genesis cover band or tribute act today plays those memorable pieces with a passion — and dare I say a competence — far greater than this band of aliens on the hunt for funds for their new Caribbean villa. Five hundred thousand people on a Roman evening may have convinced themselves they'd witnessed a Genesis show, but rock history knows better.

The years go by, and 2021 brings a new reunion, once again as a trio, taking on a tour with Phil Collins confined to a chair and his son admirably filling in behind the drums. The setlist is more or less the same as it's been since 1986, the dips into the past more or less the same ones as always, but a vast crowd awaits them, ready to pay their respects, for what will perhaps be their final run of shows. Alongside it comes the release of the double compilation The Last Domino?, which in September — coinciding with the UK concerts — entered the Top Ten best-selling albums chart across the Channel.

The Last Domino? contains all the big hits of the '80s and very early '90s, while ungenerously giving short shrift both to the Gabriel era and to the four-piece phase, the one with Steve Hackett still on guitar. There's no shortage, however, of some syrupy, very Collins-esque ballads, and the more expansive tracks from the later albums, the ones that tried to keep the Genesis stamp alive within more “modernist” prog structures, with results that are decent if uneven. The compilers' choices are puzzling, right down to an apparently incomprehensible sequencing, which in fact is meant to mirror the exact running order devised for the ongoing concerts.

And here lies the real purpose of the collection: to serve as the studio counterpart to this tour, a kind of souvenir for those attending the live shows. Having missed the chance to put together a truly memorable primer, what remains are still twenty-seven tracks that trace part of the history of one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Each of us will have at least one reason to feel attached to at least one of them.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia (“The Last Domino?”)

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