Genesis – Foxtrot
“Can’t you feel our souls ignite”
Following the release of Nursery Cryme Genesis toured extensively in the UK and Europe between November 71 and August 72 promoting the album. A non-album single called Happy The Man was released in May 1972 with Seven Stones from Nursery Cryme as the B-Side. It is a bit of a curiosity and lesser-known song outside of hardcore fans. Some dislike it but I quite like it – it is very Cat Sevens sounding and not coincidental Gabriel had actually played flute on his Mona Bone Jakon album in early 1970 so perhaps there is a link. It also tanked.
By this time Genesis had played 400+ gigs in the UK but were struggling without much critical success, though their popularity was steadily increasing in Belgium and Italy in particular and in part due to the costumes Gabriel would wear which definitely caught the attention of the press. Recording of the Foxtrot album was conducted in August/September 1972 at Island Studios in London with David Hitchcock after several other producers were tried and let go due to the fact that the band was so easy to get along with…I kid, I kid…sort of…just Tony…again I kid…but consider this… one of the producers thought Watcher of the Skies would be better without the Mellotron intro…so yeah fuck that guy.
Speaking of which the album opens with that song. For me one of the all-time great album openers, and original producer Bob Potter wanted them to axe the intro. The song pulsates with excitement as the drum/bass combo enters following the Mellotron solo opening. The song itself is a sci-fi prog rock fantasy about what aliens would think of the Earth if devoid of life due to human destruction and the only evidence being what they left behind. Watcher is often ranked right up near the top of most fans’ favourite Genesis songs – it has complicated drumming, Hackett solos and all his glorious sound flourishes, it has Mellotron and Hammond organ, a pulsating bass line, doubled vocals by Gabriel and Collins and varying time signatures. It is challenging, interesting music that takes all they had done to date and drops it into one glorious 7 and half minute song.
We arrive at song 2 and incredibly a song that feels subpar only by comparison to what else is on this record. The kicker being it is an incredible song. It is a piano based tune that ebbs and flows dynamically but the band at this point had learned how to let a song breathe and not feel forced. It is as if they took the best parts of Seven Stones and Harlequin from Nursery Cryme and wrote an even better song. It is a real hidden gem and despite my sub-par comment is one of many many fans top songs as well. Everything works seamlessly – listen closely for all the beautiful work Hackett does that is so perfectly entwined it is almost like it doesn’t exist. That is the mastery of Hackett’s playing actually in my books – he can paint these great accents into a musical tapestry, and you don’t even know if it is actually the sound of a guitar unless you really think about it.
The third song on the album is Get ‘Em Out By Friday which is another of their epic songs in the vein of The Musical Box and Return Of The Giant Hogweed or Stagnation. This time however they have started to infuse more storytelling into the lyrics which is something that would be even more prevalent on the follow up album Selling England By The Pound and songs like The Battle Of Epping Forest and Dancing With The Moonlit Knight – all of which Gabriel utilizes different singing voices to represent different characters. It is also to some degree why the song suffers slightly under its own weight. There are a lot of lyrics and a lot of music and sometimes you wish you could separate them out a bit. If is one of the areas that the Gabriel era was challenged, and it would continue through The Lamb album as well. The idea behind this song is some kind of weird Twilight Zone social commentary on solving overcrowded housing issues by genetically engineering people to be smaller. I’d love to hear just an instrumental version of this song to have more clarity of the music that supported the story.
Side 1 ends with the song Can-Utility and the Coastliners. Another gem of a song often overlooked, but for long-time fans also a song that seems to grow in stature the more you get into the band. Maybe it is because it feels like a hidden gem as much as it is a great song. Fans like stuff they feel is something they are aware of but unknown to most – something they can call their own. I certainly do with some songs, this one included. It is also one of two songs that were written and performed to fans prior to recording – the other being Watcher Of The Skies. I’ve read that the song is about King Canute and his inability to hold back the incoming tide. I have no idea what that means, and I also have no idea what the song is actually about, even with this as a guide. What I do know is that it takes about 10 seconds to feel like the song is going to take off to the stratosphere, but it remains contained. It possesses an amazing interplay between Gabriel’s vocals and acoustic guitar. The song kicks in and grows and grows into this epic monster of a song from simple light guitar picking beginnings. There is a beautiful strumming section about 1:45 into the song that builds into this incredible Mellotron section and absolutely astounding drumming by Collins and then it just kind of drops away before steamrolling back – the section lasts through the 4 minute mark when the bass comes rolling in and hammond solo and some subtle fuzz guitar soloing before the song, through the strangest chord changes. zooms into the stratosphere. It is a crazy song that is hard to explain and really you need to pay close attention to it to really absorb everything going on in just under 6 minutes. If I had to describe it, I would say it sounds like a story written about King Arthur or a song that CS Elliot would have composed for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Side 2 starts with a little nylon string guitar solo song called Horizons by Hackett that is only 1:41 seconds long – but it is a beautiful thing. Reminiscent of The Clap on The Yes Album but way more elegant. It acts like a palate cleansing intro to arguably the greatest prog rock song ever written. I know that’s a pretty bold statement and one that is clearly highly subjective, however Supper’s Ready is very very often cited by fans of the band and fans of progressive rock music in general as the best of the best in both opinions and polls. How exactly do I break down this song – I mean people have written essays on it – I think my brother actually wrote one at one point. In its simplest form the song is about the battle of good and evil using motifs from various sources but heavily based on the Bible through it is in no way a religious song. It simply utilizes iconography such as the God and the Devil to express the idea of the yin and yang struggle between good and evil and it was inspired when Gabriel’s wife one night started speaking in tongues as if possessed and then had no memory of it happening. Probably just a bad curry but nonetheless it inspired Gabriel with the idea. The song is 23 minutes long and is made up of 7 different parts some of which re-appear in places. The origin of the music is actually from a bunch of songs that the band were working on but decided to try to stick together to form a more ambitious piece and then stitched them together with new ideas and lyrics to keep the flow and ideas cohesive. This type of thing has been done many times since by many other bands but Supper’s Ready is both the prototype and the concept at its greatest in my opinion. I’m tempted to try to articulate the song as it progresses, but it is almost too much of a daunting task to consider. I’ll say this..it is a true tour de force in music that includes many time signature changes, tempo changes, key signature changes, multi-faceted instrumentation and wild variances in mood and feel, sometimes pivoting on a dime. Also not always mentioned is that it is an incredibly fun to sing along with. You either know and love this song or you’ve never really heard it for the most part. It is so phenomenal in every way that it can actually become something that you think isn’t as good as other songs in their catalog until you listen again and realize how wrong you probably were thinking such a thing. Shame for even suggesting such a thing.
I mentioned how Watcher of the Skies which opens the album distilled down everything great they had done to date into one seven-and-a-half-minute song. The bookend of the album takes all of that greatness and blows it up into a full side of music. There is so much nuance, so much great musicianship, and soloing and vocals, lyrics etc on this one song that it is really quite astounding and why so many consider it to be the best thing the band ever did. The Apocalypse in 9/8 section with its keyboard solo and unbelievable drumming that builds to lyrics about Revelations is absolutely breathtaking and the resolution of everything that came before it in the form of the final As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs section is sublime. I can’t think of a single song that resolves quite as majestically as Supper’s Ready. The band continued to play parts of it on almost every tour they did but the last time they actually played the song in full was at the 1982 Reunion show in Milton Keynes (someone is going to correct me on this) though it was rehearsed for other tours after that.
Both Watcher Of The Skies and Supper’s Ready lent more costume ideas to the mix of things Gabriel continued to expand on in their live shows. One last comment … BASS PEDALS – enough said.
Recommended Listening – Watcher Of The Skies, Can Utility and the Coastliners, Supper’s Ready
