The story of Genesis

Schoolboys, a pop svengali and a flop

Genesis began at Charterhouse, a private boarding school in Godalming, Surrey. Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel both arrived in September 1963 and bonded over music and a shared dislike of school life. With a drummer called Chris Stewart they formed a band called the Garden Wall, while Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips played in a rival school group called Anon. At the Garden Wall's final show, Gabriel wore a kaftan and beads and showered the audience with petals picked from the neighbours' gardens. In January 1967, with both bands gone, Phillips and Rutherford made a demo at a friend's home studio and invited the other three to join in. The tape reached Jonathan King, a former Charterhouse pupil who had scored a 1965 hit with Everyone's Gone to the Moon. King loved Gabriel's voice and signed the teenagers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

King arranged a one year deal with Decca Records, and he offered the band a name, Gabriel's Angels. They politely refused and took his other suggestion, Genesis, which King said marked the beginning of his own career as a serious producer. At Regent Sound in London's Denmark Street the boys wanted to try long, complicated pieces, but King steered them towards simple pop. So Banks and Gabriel wrote The Silent Sun as a deliberate imitation of the Bee Gees, King's favourite group, with Gabriel trying to sound like Robin Gibb. It came out in February 1968 and was played on Radio One and Radio Caroline, but hardly anyone bought it. A second single in May did no better. That summer Chris Stewart was out, and another Charterhouse boy, John Silver, took over the drums.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

King believed an album would do better. During the school summer holiday of August 1968 the band recorded From Genesis to Revelation in just ten days. King shaped it into a concept album and had the arranger Arthur Greenslade add orchestral strings, which the band only discovered when the record came out. Phillips was furious. Then Decca found an American group already called Genesis. King refused to change the name, so the band's name was simply left off the cover, which showed the title on plain black. Released in March 1969, the album flopped, partly because shops saw the title and filed it in the religious music section. Banks later recalled it had sold six hundred and forty nine copies after a year or so, and the partnership with King and Decca ended.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After the album the band scattered to exams and colleges, but in mid 1969 they chose music over university. John Silver left to study leisure management at Cornell University in America, and John Mayhew, a drummer and carpenter from Ipswich, replaced him. Late that year the band shut themselves away in a cottage in Wotton, Surrey, owned by the parents of their school friend Richard Macphail, rehearsing for up to eleven hours a day. Macphail became their roadie and driver, taking them to gigs in an old bread van. In March 1970, during a Tuesday night residency at Ronnie Scott's club in Soho, they were spotted by Charisma Records. Its owner, the former football journalist Tony Stratton Smith, offered a record and management deal within two weeks, and paid them ten pounds a week.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In June 1970 Genesis recorded their second album, Trespass, at Trident Studios in London. The songs were long, folky and full of shifting time signatures, ending with the nine minute The Knife. The painter Paul Whitehead had finished a gentle cover before that song was added, so the band had him slash a knife across the canvas and photographed the result. By then Genesis had already lost a founder. Anthony Phillips had developed crippling stage fright, then caught bronchial pneumonia, and his doctor advised him to quit. His last show was at Haywards Heath on the eighteenth of July 1970. The others regarded him as the member who had pushed them to turn professional, and they came close to splitting up. Banks agreed to go on only with a stronger drummer, so Mayhew was let go too.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Phil Collins and Steve Hackett arrive

Genesis advertised in Melody Maker for a new drummer, and the advert was spotted by Phil Collins, a nineteen year old from West London. He had been a child actor, playing the Artful Dodger in the West End run of Oliver!, and had drummed with a group called Flaming Youth. Collins and his friend, the guitarist Ronnie Caryl, went to audition at Gabriel's parents' house in Chobham. Arriving early, Collins took a swim in the pool and listened to the drummers ahead of him, memorising the parts. Gabriel and Rutherford said they could tell he was right from the confident way he sat at the kit. Banks liked that he could swing, sing harmonies and make them laugh. Collins joined on the eighth of August 1970. Caryl did not get the job.[1] [2] [3]

Finding a guitarist took longer. For a while Genesis played as a four piece, with Banks playing lead lines on an electric piano through a fuzz box. A guitarist called Mick Barnard filled in for a couple of months but did not quite fit. Then, in December 1970, Gabriel answered a Melody Maker advert from Steve Hackett, who wanted to join receptive musicians determined to move beyond stagnant music. Hackett auditioned in front of Banks and Gabriel only, because Rutherford was ill in bed. Rutherford later admitted that he had been looking for a copy of Anthony Phillips, and if he had been there that day, Hackett would probably not have passed. Hackett played his first show with Genesis at City University in London on the fourteenth of January 1971.[1] [2] [3]

The new line-up recorded Nursery Cryme at Trident in August 1971. Banks added a Mellotron that had previously belonged to King Crimson, and Hackett brought a harder electric edge, including an early use of tapping on the fretboard. The opening track, The Musical Box, is a gothic tale in which a girl named Cynthia accidentally knocks off the head of her friend Henry during a game of croquet, and his spirit returns as an old man. Hackett and Collins wrote For Absent Friends, the first Genesis song with Collins singing lead. At home the album sold modestly, but Italy fell hard for the band. Nursery Cryme reached number four in the Italian chart, and Genesis played there to wildly enthusiastic crowds.[1] [2] [3]

Gabriel was learning to be a frontman, sometimes painfully. During an encore of The Knife on the nineteenth of June 1971, he took a running jump into the crowd expecting to be caught. The audience stepped aside, he hit the floor and broke his ankle, and he played the next few shows with a wheelchair and crutches. Around the same time he started telling strange improvised stories between songs. They began as a practical fix, filling the silence while Rutherford and the guitarists retuned their twelve string guitars or while technical problems were sorted out. The stories grew into part of the act, and one of them was later printed on the sleeve of the band's first live album.[1] [2] [3]

The fox head, Foxtrot and Selling England

In the summer of 1972 Genesis rehearsed in a room beneath a dance school in Shepherd's Bush and decided to write a piece long enough to fill most of a record side. The result was Supper's Ready, which runs for almost twenty three minutes. Gabriel's lyrics were partly inspired by a frightening night at his wife Jill's parents' London flat, when Jill seemed to start speaking in a completely different voice. The piece builds to a section in nine eight time worked out by Banks, Rutherford and Collins. Hackett later said he feared fans would not buy into something so long. Foxtrot came out on the fifteenth of September 1972, reached number twelve in Britain and number one in Italy, and critics called it a creative peak.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A fortnight later came the moment that made Genesis famous. At the National Stadium in Dublin on the twenty eighth of September 1972, Gabriel slipped off stage during an instrumental passage of The Musical Box. He came back wearing his wife's red dress and a fox's head, echoing the Foxtrot cover. The music papers put it on their front pages, and the band were able to double their performance fee. The costumes kept coming. For Watcher of the Skies he wore fluorescent face paint and a cape with bat wings. For Supper's Ready he used several guises, including a flower mask, and for The Musical Box the mask of an old man. Soon critics were writing more about Gabriel's outfits than about the music.[1] [2]

In December 1972 Genesis played America for the first time, at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and at Philharmonic Hall in New York, a benefit for United Cerebral Palsy. Concerts recorded in Britain for the American radio show King Biscuit Flower Hour became Genesis Live, released in July 1973, which reached number nine in the UK. The sleeve was dedicated to Richard Macphail, who had driven, lifted and cheered the band since 1969 and was treated as their unofficial sixth member. The influential BBC disc jockey John Peel was another early champion. Genesis recorded sessions for him between 1970 and 1972, and Supper's Ready later appeared in his listeners' Festive Fifty, although Peel himself grew tired of the band's later excesses.[1] [2] [3]

Selling England by the Pound was recorded in August 1973 and released on the fifth of October. Gabriel's lyrics looked at commercialism and the fading of old English culture, and the title borrowed a Labour Party slogan. Firth of Fifth contains one of Hackett's most loved guitar solos, although the melody was actually written by Banks. The album reached number three in Britain, and I Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe became the band's first hit single, reaching number twenty one in early 1974. They were invited onto Top of the Pops and turned it down, feeling it did not suit their image. Behind the scenes Genesis were a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in debt, so they hired a new manager, the promoter Tony Smith.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Lamb and Peter Gabriel's exit

In June 1974 Genesis moved into Headley Grange, a former workhouse in Hampshire, to write their next album. They found it in a terrible state, with rats and excrement left behind by a previous band. Rutherford suggested an album based on The Little Prince. Gabriel thought that far too twee, and instead proposed a surreal story about Rael, a half Puerto Rican youth in New York who is pulled into a bizarre underworld. Gabriel insisted that, having devised the story, he should write all the lyrics, leaving most of the music to the others. That division of labour began to strain old friendships. In August recording moved to Glaspant Manor in Wales, using a mobile studio parked outside the house.[1] [2] [3]

Life outside the band was pulling Gabriel away. The director William Friedkin, fresh from The Exorcist, had enjoyed a story Gabriel wrote on the Genesis Live sleeve and invited him to work on a film. Gabriel briefly left the band for it, then came back when the project was shelved. At the same time his wife Jill had a difficult first pregnancy and birth, and he spent periods away to be with her. The others complained about his commitment. Gabriel later called it a really unsympathetic handling of a family crisis, and Rutherford admitted they had been horribly unsupportive. Brian Eno added electronic treatments, credited on the sleeve as Enossification, and Collins repaid him by drumming on an Eno track.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway came out in November 1974 as a double album and reached number ten in Britain. Genesis played the whole thing on a tour of one hundred and two dates across North America and Europe, with three screens showing one thousand four hundred and fifty slides from eight projectors. Gabriel played characters from the story in ever more elaborate costumes. The most awkward was the Slipperman, a costume so cumbersome that he struggled to get the microphone to his mouth and was sometimes too out of breath to sing. Many fans were baffled by two hours of unfamiliar songs, and reviewers again fixed on Gabriel's theatrics, which irritated the rest of the band.[1] [2]

Early in the tour, during a stop in Cleveland, Gabriel told the others he would leave when it was over. His final show with Genesis was in Besancon, France, in May 1975. The news stayed private until the fifteenth of August 1975, when he published a statement in the music press titled Out, Angels Out, saying he was disillusioned with the business and wanted time with his family. He later said he had felt like part of a machine and did not like himself. Banks said Gabriel was being portrayed as the man in charge, which had never been true, and admitted his exit was a bit of a relief. Much of the music press assumed Genesis were finished.[1] [2] [3]

The drummer becomes the singer

Genesis decided to carry on. Collins suggested becoming an instrumental band, but the others thought that would be boring. Hackett, unsure the band would survive, made his first solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte. In October 1975 the band started recording A Trick of the Tail with producer David Hentschel, laying down the music first and auditioning singers as they went. An anonymous advert in Melody Maker for a singer for a Genesis type group drew around four hundred replies. Collins taught the songs to the hopefuls, and one of them, Mick Strickland, struggled because the backing tracks sat outside his range. With no one suitable found, Collins went into the studio and tried Squonk himself. The others loved it, and the drummer reluctantly became the singer.[1] [2] [3]

A Trick of the Tail was released in February 1976 and reached number three in Britain and thirty one in America. Rolling Stone wrote that Genesis had turned the possible catastrophe of Gabriel's departure into their first broad American success. The album went gold in June, helping clear four hundred thousand pounds of debt the band still owed when Gabriel left. On stage Collins needed another drummer while he sang, and Bill Bruford, formerly of Yes and King Crimson, took the job for the 1976 tour. Collins was a very different frontman. Instead of masks and theatre he chatted and joked with the crowd, and audiences warmed to it. Shows in Glasgow and Stafford were filmed for the concert film Genesis In Concert.[1] [2] [3]

Wind and Wuthering was recorded in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1976, its name inspired by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. For the 1977 tour Bruford moved on, and Collins rang an American drummer he had never met, Chester Thompson, after hearing him on Frank Zappa's live album Roxy and Elsewhere. Thompson got the job without an audition. The tour opened on the first of January 1977 at London's Rainbow Theatre, where eighty thousand applications were made for eight thousand tickets. Genesis went on to play Madison Square Garden in New York and, for the first time, Brazil, where more than one hundred and fifty thousand people came to see them and each member had an armed bodyguard.[1] [2] [3]

Steve Hackett was growing frustrated. Making a solo album had given him a taste of control, and he felt his songs were being passed over. One of them, Please Don't Touch, was rejected in favour of material Banks put forward, and Hackett later used it on his own record. Collins said the band simply picked the strongest songs, whoever wrote them. In May 1977 three leftovers came out as an EP, Spot the Pigeon. Hackett quit while the double live album Seconds Out was being mixed, and his departure was announced on the eighth of October 1977. He said he needed autonomy and wanted to find out how good he was on his own. For the second time in two years, Genesis had lost a key member.[1] [2] [3]

And then there were three

Banks, Rutherford and Collins chose not to replace Hackett in the studio, and Rutherford took on lead guitar as well as bass. By the time Seconds Out appeared, the trio had already recorded And Then There Were Three, released in March 1978, a set of shorter songs. Its standout was Follow You Follow Me, which Banks called their only truly group written number. It grew from a Rutherford guitar riff, and he said he wrote the lyric in about ten minutes. The band felt their audience was mostly male and wanted to change that. The single reached number seven in Britain and twenty three in America, by far their biggest hit, and some long time fans accused them of selling out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For concerts they still needed a guitarist. Rutherford tried several players, including the Weather Report bassist Alphonso Johnson, who could not comfortably play Hackett's lead parts and suggested his friend Daryl Stuermer from Jean-Luc Ponty's band. Stuermer auditioned in New York and was hired the same day. He was given twenty six songs to learn and worked through them five a day. The 1978 tour took Genesis to Japan for the first time, and in June they headlined the Knebworth Festival. Stuermer and Chester Thompson would become the band's live backbone for years to come. At one show on that tour Peter Gabriel walked on as a guest to sing I Know What I Like, a sign there was no lasting bitterness.[1] [2]

Touring came at a price. Collins had married Andrea Bertorelli in 1975, and while he was away on the road she began an affair. By the end of 1978 the marriage was in crisis, so Collins moved to Vancouver to try to save it, and Genesis went on hold. Banks and Rutherford used the break to make their first solo albums at Polar Studios in Stockholm, A Curious Feeling and Smallcreep's Day. After only a few months in Canada, Collins admitted defeat and returned to England in April 1979, living alone in his house in Shalford, Surrey. There, with time on his hands, he began writing songs full of anger and grief. They would become his first solo album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Later in 1979 Banks and Rutherford moved into Collins's house in Shalford to write the next album, Duke. With only three of them, the writing felt freer, and Banks said Collins was now coming up to be a kind of equal, bringing in Misunderstanding and Please Don't Ask. Duchess became the first Genesis song built on a drum machine, a Roland CR-78 imported from Japan. They dropped a plan for a thirty minute suite about a character called Albert, fearing comparisons with Supper's Ready, although Albert still appeared on the cover. Released in March 1980, Duke gave Genesis their first number one album in Britain, and all one hundred and six thousand tickets for their forty date UK tour sold within hours.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Solo stars and the farm studio

In February 1981 Collins released his solo album Face Value, shaped by the end of his marriage. Its first single, In the Air Tonight, reached number two in Britain and turned him into a star in his own right. Its thunderous drums used a sound called gated reverb, developed by the engineer Hugh Padgham when Collins played drums on Peter Gabriel's third solo album. Meanwhile Genesis bought Fisher Lane Farm near Chiddingfold in Surrey and turned it into their own studio. For their next album, Abacab, they brought in Padgham, parted with their producer of six years, David Hentschel, and threw away an hour of songs that sounded too much like old Genesis. The title came from the order of the song's sections, which once spelled A B A C A B.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Abacab came out in September 1981 and went to number one in Britain and seven in America. The song No Reply at All featured the horn section of Earth, Wind and Fire. On tour Genesis became early users of the Vari-Lite, a computer controlled lighting system, and were so impressed they became shareholders in the company. A 1982 EP of three leftover tracks, called 3 by 3, had a cover copying the Beatles' Twist and Shout EP, with sleeve notes by the Beatles' former publicist Tony Barrow. Then on the second of October 1982 Peter Gabriel rejoined his old band for one night at the Milton Keynes Bowl, in a show called Six of the Best, to rescue his debt ridden WOMAD world music festival. Steve Hackett flew in from abroad just in time for the last two songs.[1] [2] [3]

The next album, simply titled Genesis, was the first made entirely at the Farm. Its opening single, Mama, starts with a harsh drum machine pattern programmed by Rutherford and fed through a distorted guitar amplifier. The lyric is about a young man's obsession with a prostitute, and Collins's menacing laugh was inspired by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message. Mama reached number four in Britain in 1983, their highest charting single there. The album also included Illegal Alien, a jokey song about crossing the border into the United States that some heard as mocking Mexicans. Banks denied any racist intent, saying it was tongue in cheek and sympathetic to immigrants. The album sold more than four million copies in America.[1] [2] [3]

In 1984 and 1985 Collins seemed to be everywhere. Against All Odds topped the American chart, his duet Easy Lover with Philip Bailey was a British number one, and his album No Jacket Required sold more than twelve million copies in the United States. At Live Aid on the thirteenth of July 1985 he played Wembley Stadium, then flew to Philadelphia on Concorde and played there the same day. The press said he had become bigger than Genesis, and a false report on BBC Radio One claimed the band had split. Collins insisted he would not be the one to leave, telling Rolling Stone that the next member to go would finish the band. Rutherford, meanwhile, launched his own group, Mike and the Mechanics.[1] [2] [3]

Invisible Touch and the stadium years

Genesis regrouped at the Farm in October 1985. The title track of Invisible Touch came out of a jam, when Rutherford played a riff and Collins sang an improvised line about a woman with an invisible touch, which became the chorus. Released in June 1986, the album became their best seller, with around seven million copies. Its five singles all reached the American top five, a first for a group, and Invisible Touch became their only American number one. It was then knocked off the top by Sledgehammer, sung by their former frontman Peter Gabriel. Collins later joked that if they had known at the time, they would have sent Gabriel a telegram of congratulations, finished off with a rude word.[1] [2] [3]

After Collins was lampooned on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, he did something unexpected. He hired the show's creators, Peter Fluck and Roger Law, to make puppets of the whole band for the video of Land of Confusion, a Rutherford lyric about a world in turmoil. The video showed a puppet Ronald Reagan having a nightmare among caricatures of world leaders, and it won the Grammy for best concept music video, one of only two ever given in that category. The Invisible Touch tour ran to one hundred and twelve dates across 1986 and 1987, drew criticism for its sponsorship by Michelob beer, and ended with four sold out nights at Wembley Stadium in London.[1] [2]

In March 1987 the man who first believed in Genesis, Tony Stratton Smith, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty three. As a young sports reporter he had been due to cover Manchester United's European Cup match in Belgrade in 1958, but a senior colleague took his place and was killed in the Munich air disaster. Stratton Smith went on to found Charisma, help fund Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and keep Genesis on a wage through their lean years. Rutherford faced loss too. His father died in 1986, and the Mike and the Mechanics song The Living Years, co-written with B A Robertson after both men lost their fathers, went to number one in America.[1] [2] [3]

Genesis returned in 1991 with We Can't Dance, made with a new co-producer, Nick Davis, and running to more than seventy one minutes on CD. No Son of Mine dealt with the domestic abuse of a fifteen year old boy, and grew from a phrase Collins had been singing as a placeholder. Jesus He Knows Me was a barbed parody of American televangelists. Collins also wrote the lyric of Since I Lost You for his friend Eric Clapton, after the death of Clapton's four year old son Conor. The album was a British number one and sold more than four million copies in America. The 1992 tour averaged around fifty six thousand people a show and ended with six nights at Earls Court.[1] [2]

Collins leaves and the Ray Wilson years

On the twenty ninth of March 1996 it was announced that Collins was leaving Genesis after twenty five years. In a statement he said it was time to change direction, towards film music, jazz projects and his solo career, and that they remained the best of friends. His personal life had been turbulent. His second marriage, to Jill Tavelman, ended in a divorce finalised in 1996, and he had moved to Switzerland, where he began a relationship with Orianne Cevey, a translator on his 1994 tour. Banks and Rutherford decided to keep Genesis going. Rutherford admitted the first writing sessions were hard, because Collins had been the guy in the middle who made the two of them work better.[1] [2] [3]

The search for a new singer took most of 1996. Candidates included Francis Dunnery of It Bites, Nick Van Eede of Cutting Crew and David Longdon, who later joined Big Big Train. The job went to Ray Wilson, a Scottish singer whose band Stiltskin had topped charts across Europe with Inside, a song used in a Levi's advert. Banks and Rutherford had heard him on a CD passed to them by Virgin Records. Wilson was announced in June 1997, and with two drummers, Nir Zidkyahu and Nick D'Virgilio, the band made Calling All Stations. Released in September 1997, it reached number two in Britain but only fifty four in America, their weakest showing there in almost twenty five years.[1] [2] [3]

Genesis toured Europe with Wilson in early 1998, but a North American tour was cancelled because of poor ticket sales. Wilson later said nobody ever fired him. The band simply called to say they were not continuing, because the market did not want them. In 2000 Banks and Rutherford announced that Genesis would no longer record or tour. There were warmer moments too. In 1998 Banks, Collins, Gabriel, Hackett, Phillips, Rutherford and John Silver met for a photo session and dinner to launch the Genesis Archive box set. In 1999 the classic five re-recorded The Carpet Crawlers for a hits album, and in September 2000 the trio played a short acoustic set in honour of their manager Tony Smith.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The years around the turn of the century also brought grief and disgrace to the band's wider circle. In July 2000 Paul Young, one of the two lead singers in Rutherford's Mike and the Mechanics, died of a heart attack. Then in September 2001 Jonathan King, the producer who had discovered and named Genesis, was convicted at the Old Bailey of sexually assaulting five boys aged fourteen and fifteen in the 1980s. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and released on parole in 2005. King has always denied wrongdoing. A later trial on separate allegations was halted in 2018 after a judge criticised serious police failings, but his 2001 conviction stands, and his appeals against it failed.[1] [2] [3]

Reunions, the last domino and later years

The first plan for a reunion was ambitious. In 2004 and 2005 the classic five discussed staging The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway again, but Gabriel decided against it, and Hackett stepped back too. Instead, in November 2006, Banks, Rutherford and Collins announced the Turn It On Again tour, with Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer back on board. Collins insisted it was not about money, saying they were all loaded enough not to worry about the next million. The 2007 tour sold close to four hundred thousand tickets in forty minutes in Germany and the Netherlands, and the European leg ended with a free concert at the Circus Maximus in Rome on the fourteenth of July, in front of around half a million people.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That tour came at a physical cost. Drumming on it injured Collins's neck, and after surgery in 2009 he lost feeling in his fingers and could only grip sticks by taping them to his hands. In March 2010 Genesis were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Trey Anastasio of Phish. Gabriel missed the ceremony because of rehearsals for his own tour, and Banks joked that they would just tell everyone they were snubbing him. In 2011 Collins announced he was stepping away from music. He later described sliding into heavy drinking after his third divorce, and a spell in intensive care. In 2014 all five classic members took part in the BBC documentary Genesis Together and Apart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In January 2020 Banks, Rutherford and Collins were spotted together at a basketball game at Madison Square Garden, and on the fourth of March they announced a reunion on Zoe Ball's BBC Radio 2 breakfast show. Collins could no longer drum, so his eighteen year old son Nic took over, with Stuermer on guitar. Banks said Nic could sound like Phil, and that gave them the idea of how to do it. Chester Thompson was not invited, and said he had not spoken to Collins in ten years. The Covid pandemic pushed the Last Domino tour back twice. It finally began on the twentieth of September 2021, with Collins singing seated, and in October the last British dates were postponed after positive Covid tests in the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Genesis played their final concert at the O2 Arena in London on the twenty sixth of March 2022. Collins told the crowd it was the last show for Genesis, and joked that they would all have to get real jobs. Peter Gabriel was in the audience but did not join them, and Collins wondered aloud whether he was the one shouting for Supper's Ready. The encore closed with The Carpet Crawlers. In September 2022 Banks, Rutherford and Collins sold rights to much of their music, including the post 1978 Genesis songs and their solo work, to Concord in a deal reported at around three hundred million dollars. Forbes named Genesis the highest paid entertainers of 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The years since have been hard for Collins. In a 2026 interview he revealed that, after stopping a drug that made him ill if he drank, he had fallen back into alcoholism, and in November 2023 he was taken to hospital for seven months with kidney and pancreas damage, at one point close to death. He has said he has not drunk since. The band's friend Richard Macphail died in August 2024. In September 2025 Gabriel and Banks oversaw a fiftieth anniversary edition of The Lamb, which went back into the British top forty. In 2026 Collins was voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, and a remixed From Genesis to Revelation was due in October 2026. The band have said the 2022 shows were their last.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

The people around Genesis

Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel. They met at Charterhouse in 1963, bonded over music and a shared dislike of the school, and wrote the band's first songs together. Gabriel called Banks his best friend in the band and also the person he clashed with most, describing them both as awkward. Banks guarded the keyboards jealously, and Gabriel had to fight to play a small part that was then left out of the mix. Fifty years on, they worked together on the new mix of The Lamb.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel. Their voices were so alike that, double tracked together, they sounded like one strong singer. After Gabriel left, Collins drummed on his third solo album, where the gated drum sound was born, and Gabriel returned for the Six of the Best concert in 1982. In 1986 Gabriel's Sledgehammer knocked Invisible Touch off the top of the American chart, and Collins joked about sending a cheeky telegram. Gabriel watched the band's final show in 2022 from the audience.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. Banks and Rutherford are the only two members who were in Genesis from the first demo to the final show. They kept the band alive after Gabriel, Hackett and Collins each left. The friendship has had prickly moments. After Rutherford's 2014 memoir, The Living Years, Banks said he found it inaccurate and a bit dismissive of him, told Rutherford so, and decided not to read any of his bandmates' books. They remained friends.[1] [2] [3]

Steve Hackett and Genesis. Hackett bonded quickly with Rutherford over unusual chords and tunings, but never felt fully heard. He offered to quit as early as Foxtrot, felt his songs lost out to Banks's on Wind and Wuthering, and left in 1977. Relations stayed cordial but cool. He called the 2014 BBC documentary biased for ignoring his solo work, yet in 2025 he joined Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford to celebrate The Lamb's fiftieth anniversary.[1] [2]

Genesis and Jonathan King. King discovered the band, named them and produced their first album. He paid them forty pounds for four songs and kept the rights to that record, reissuing it many times under different titles. Rutherford later said that, for all King's faults, he gave them a chance to record. King's career ended in 2001 when he was jailed for sexually abusing teenage boys, and the BBC's John Peel archive now describes him as a convicted paedophile.[1] [2] [3]

Genesis and Tony Stratton Smith. The founder of Charisma Records signed Genesis in 1970 on a hunch, kept them on a weekly wage through years of weak sales, and set up their first American shows. When their contract came up in 1973 they could have moved to a bigger label, but stayed with him out of loyalty. Genesis became Charisma's most successful act. Stratton Smith died of pancreatic cancer in 1987.[1] [2] [3]

Genesis and Tony Smith. The promoter Tony Smith took over as manager in 1973, when Genesis were deep in debt, and stayed for the rest of their career. He also managed the solo work of Collins, Rutherford and Banks, and published their songs through his company Hit and Run Music. In September 2000 the trio reunited for a short acoustic set at the Music Managers Forum in his honour, and that year he received the Peter Grant Award. He also produced the film Children of Men.[1] [2]

Phil Collins and Andrea Bertorelli. They met as eleven year olds in a drama class and reconnected in 1974 when Genesis played Vancouver. They married in 1975, and Collins adopted her daughter Joely. Long tours strained the marriage and it collapsed in 1978 and 1979. That heartbreak fuelled Face Value and In the Air Tonight, and Collins has said large chunks of the Invisible Touch lyric are about her too. In 2016 she took legal action over his memoir's account of their relationship.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Hugh Padgham. Padgham engineered Peter Gabriel's third album, where the gated reverb drum sound emerged on the song Intruder with Collins at the kit. Collins then asked him to help produce Face Value, and In the Air Tonight made the sound famous. From Abacab onwards Padgham worked with Genesis too, on Abacab, the Genesis album and Invisible Touch, helping shape their sleek 1980s sound.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Chester Thompson. Collins hired Thompson in 1977 without ever meeting him, after hearing him on a Frank Zappa live album. Thompson became the drummer beside Collins on Genesis tours and on Collins's solo tours until 2010, and he returned for the 2007 reunion. But when Genesis reformed in 2020 with Collins's son Nic on drums, Thompson was not invited, and he said he had not spoken to Collins in ten years.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Nic Collins. Nic, Phil's son with Orianne Cevey, grew up to be a drummer and played in his father's band on the Not Dead Yet tour. Banks said Nic could sound like the young Phil, which gave the band the idea of how to reunite when Phil could no longer drum. Nic played every show of the Last Domino tour, learning songs recorded long before he was born.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Genesis

• Phil Collins appears as a screaming fan in the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. Before Genesis, Collins was a child actor. He was an uncredited extra among the screaming teenagers in the television concert scene of A Hard Day's Night in 1964, the same year he played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! in the West End.[1]
• Roger Taylor, later of Queen, turned down an invitation to audition as the Genesis drummer. When Genesis advertised for a drummer in 1970, Roger Taylor was invited to audition but declined. The job went to Phil Collins, and Taylor went on to co-found Queen.[1]
• Collins swam in Peter Gabriel's parents' pool before his audition and memorised the other drummers' parts. Collins and his friend Ronnie Caryl arrived early at the Gabriel family home in Chobham. Collins took a dip in the pool while the drummers ahead of him played, and learned the pieces by listening.[1] [2]
• Steve Hackett was born just one day before Peter Gabriel. Hackett was born in Pimlico, London, on the twelfth of February 1950. Gabriel was born in Chobham, Surrey, on the thirteenth of February 1950.[1] [2]
• Steve Hackett was the only Genesis member of his era who did not sing. Hackett said he was too shy to sing in those days and feared he would be out of tune. Everyone else in the five piece band contributed vocals.[1]
• Drummer John Mayhew told Charisma that ten pounds a week was plenty when they offered fifteen. When Charisma offered the band a wage of fifteen pounds a week, Mayhew insisted ten pounds was more than enough, earning a good natured telling off from his bandmates.[1]
• Decades after leaving, John Mayhew was handed years of unclaimed Trespass royalties. Genesis lost track of Mayhew after he moved to New Zealand and Australia. In 2006 the band's management passed him all the royalties that had built up while nobody knew where he was. He died in 2009.[1] [2]
• The band's first drummer, Chris Stewart, became the bestselling author of Driving Over Lemons. Stewart drummed on the first two Genesis singles. He later settled on a farm in the Alpujarras region of Andalucia, Spain, and wrote a series of popular memoirs about life there.[1]
• Drummer John Silver left Genesis to study leisure management at Cornell University. Silver played on From Genesis to Revelation and left in the summer of 1969 to study in the United States. In 1973 Phillips, Rutherford and Collins recorded a tribute to him called Silver Song.[1] [2]
• Jonathan King wanted to call the band Gabriel's Angels. King was so taken with Peter Gabriel's voice that he suggested the name Gabriel's Angels. The band hated it and chose his other idea, Genesis.[1] [2] [3]
• The first Genesis album was often filed in the religious section of record shops. Because it was called From Genesis to Revelation and the band's name was left off the cover, shops often shelved it with religious records. Banks recalled it sold six hundred and forty nine copies in about a year.[1] [2]
• Tony Banks's Mellotron on Nursery Cryme had previously belonged to King Crimson. For Nursery Cryme in 1971, Banks added a second hand Mellotron that King Crimson had owned, helping create the band's grand, orchestral sound.[1]
• The Trespass sleeve was slashed with a real knife after the artwork was finished. Paul Whitehead painted a gentle cover before The Knife was added to the album. Feeling it no longer fitted, the band had him cut across the canvas with a knife, and photographed the result.[1] [2]
• Peter Gabriel broke his ankle jumping into a crowd that did not catch him. During an encore of The Knife in June 1971, Gabriel leapt into the audience expecting to be caught. They moved aside, and he spent the next few shows in a wheelchair and on crutches.[1]
• Gabriel's famous between song stories began as a way to cover guitar retuning. Early Genesis songs needed long retunings of twelve string guitars. Gabriel filled the silence with improvised surreal stories, which became a trademark of their shows.[1] [2]
• Brian Eno is credited on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway for Enossification. Eno added synthesizer treatments to The Lamb. As payment, Collins drummed on Eno's track Mother Whale Eyeless. Collins said he was sent upstairs as payment.[1] [2]
• Gabriel was annoyed to discover The Who had already used the name Rael. Gabriel chose the name Rael for The Lamb's hero because it had no obvious ethnic origin, then learned The Who had used it on The Who Sell Out. He kept it anyway.[1]
• The title Selling England by the Pound was borrowed from a Labour Party slogan. Gabriel's lyrics on the 1973 album dealt with commercialism and the decline of English culture. The title came from a Labour slogan, partly to show critics the band were not selling out to America.[1]
• Genesis turned down Top of the Pops when they finally had a hit single. When I Know What I Like reached number twenty one in 1974, Genesis were offered a spot on the BBC's national chart show and declined, feeling it would not suit their image.[1]
• The Firth of Fifth guitar solo, famous as Hackett's showcase, was composed by Tony Banks. Gabriel, Collins and Banks have all said Hackett made the melody his own through his playing on the 1973 recording, but Banks wrote it.[1]
• The 1977 Genesis tour lit its stage with two rows of Boeing 747 landing lights. The Wind and Wuthering tour cost four hundred thousand pounds to stage, with a new sound system, lasers, smoke and airliner landing lights.[1]
• Duchess, from Duke, was the first Genesis song built around a drum machine. The band used a Roland CR-78, imported from Japan, on Duchess in 1979. Drum machines became central to their 1980s sound, most famously on Mama.[1]
• The title Abacab comes from the order of the song's musical sections. While arranging the song, the band labelled its sections with letters. At one point the running order spelled A B A C A B, and the name stuck.[1]
• Genesis became shareholders in Vari-Lite, the lighting company whose system they helped pioneer. After a demonstration at their studio, the band and manager Tony Smith were so impressed by the computer controlled Vari-Lite that they invested in the company. They first used it on the 1981 Abacab tour.[1]
• The 3 by 3 EP sleeve copied the Beatles' Twist and Shout EP, with notes by the Beatles' former publicist. Genesis released three Abacab era leftovers as the 3 by 3 EP in 1982. Its cover paid homage to the Beatles' Twist and Shout EP, and Tony Barrow wrote the sleeve notes.[1]
• Tony Banks wore a snorkel on stage for Who Dunnit? on the Abacab tour. Banks was known for standing still behind his keyboards, but he made an exception for the playful Who Dunnit?, performing it in a snorkel during the 1981 tour.[1]
• Collins's sinister laugh on Mama was inspired by Grandmaster Flash's The Message. The band and producer Hugh Padgham revealed that the menacing laugh on the 1983 hit Mama came from The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.[1] [2]
• Collins paid for the Spitting Image puppets of Genesis after the show mocked him. After seeing his own caricature on Spitting Image, Collins commissioned its creators to make puppets of the whole band for the Land of Confusion video, which won a Grammy.[1] [2]
• No Son of Mine grew from a placeholder phrase Collins kept singing in rehearsals. The 1991 song about the domestic abuse of a fifteen year old boy began with Collins repeating no son of mine as a dummy lyric, which the band then built a story around.[1]
• As a young reporter, Tony Stratton Smith narrowly missed the Munich air disaster. He was due to cover Manchester United in Belgrade in 1958, but the Daily Express's chief football writer went instead and died in the crash. Stratton Smith later founded Charisma Records.[1]
• Rush drummer Neil Peart called Selling England by the Pound an enduring masterpiece of drumming. Peart praised Collins's beautiful drumming and lovely sound on the 1973 album, a reminder that Collins was a highly respected progressive drummer before he was a pop star.[1]
• Richard Macphail was credited as a member on the Trespass sleeve. The school friend who drove the van and ran the road crew was, in effect, the sixth member of Genesis. The band credited him on Trespass and dedicated Genesis Live to him when he left in 1973.[1]
• The question mark in The Last Domino? was Tony Banks's idea. The farewell tour took its name from the second part of the 1986 song Domino. Banks suggested adding the question mark, leaving a little doubt about whether it was really the end.[1]
• Mike Rutherford played cheap Squier guitars he bought during lockdown on the farewell tour. On the Last Domino tour Rutherford used Squier Bullet Stratocasters, budget guitars he picked up while stuck in Cape Town during the pandemic.[1]
• Genesis manager Tony Smith also produced the film Children of Men. Alongside managing Genesis and its members' solo careers, Smith moved into film with Hit and Run Productions, producing Eye of the Beholder and the 2006 film Children of Men.[1]
• At Live Earth in 2007 Collins's swearing during Invisible Touch forced a live on air apology. Collins had sung a rude word in Invisible Touch since 1992. When he did it at Wembley during a daytime broadcast of Live Earth, the presenter had to apologise.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.