Genesis – Wind & Wuthering
“Like the dust that settles all around me, I must find a new home”
A Trick Of The Tail was a bona fide success remaining in the UK charts for 39 weeks. With the album done they needed to sort out how to deal with playing live as Collins really didn’t want to give up the drums but didn’t want to have to sing from behind the kit, knowing it would distance the band from the audience. Bill Bruford, former and future and future-former drummer for Yes and King Crimson and UK would fill the drum stool for the tour. Collins had come to know Bruford as both of them had been working on and off in the jazz-fusion band Brand X.
According to Bruford he vaguely recalls saying to him “Why don’t you stand up front and sing, and I’ll cover for you on the drums? Then, you know it won’t fall apart”. It was clear from the first show with Collins as lead singer that things were very different without Gabriel. In place of costumes, they developed elaborate light shows. There were two drum kits so Phil could jump between being out front as lead singer and playing drums where he felt most comfortable, along with Bruford. The tour started March 26 1976 in London Ontario and ended 3 and a half months and 63 shows later on July 11 1976 in Luton, England. The setlist featured 5 of the 8 songs on Trick, a Medley from The Lamb (aka Lamb Stew), Cinema Show, I Know What I Like and Firth of Fifth from Selling England, White Mountain from Trespass, Supper’s Ready from Foxtrot and It/Watcher Of The Skies as an encore. Missing was The Musical Box making it the first tour it wouldn’t be played on since it was written.
Following the tour the band had again amassed quite a lot of new material to work with. Hackett wanted to record a follow up solo album but the band that would go on to have one of the biggest solo performers ever, denied his request. I think they had a keep on keeping on attitude and didn’t want to lose momentum. They worked up material in July and August and recorded the basic tracks in about two weeks at Relight Studios in Netherlands followed by more recording and mixing at Trident Studios in London, again with David Hentschel at the helm.
Wind and Wuthering was a slight shift on a moving target of what exactly the band was, which if you look at the entire arc of the band’s existence is in some ways a full circle. This album was halfway around that circle and an almost unobservable move toward something that a broader audience might find attractive. It is by far the most romantic, softest sounding album the band ever recorded. A lot of the edges of the way the band played their music were filed down a bit…not in any way neutered but more polished, like a gem. Actually, if I had to equate the album to a gemstone it would be the diamond of their catalog. Not because it is the best album they ever recorded (though to some it is), but it is the one that shimmers with the most beauty. It is as if they took A Trick Of The Tail and applied an “Entangled” filter across the whole thing and ended up with Wind and Wuthering.
The album begins with the rousing Eleventh Earl Of Mar which is blusteringly confident – like a mix of Dance On A Volcano and The Battle Of Epping Forest. Collins voice is in fine form and clearly Banks has a new set of keyboards that really help give additional textures to this record. Hackett plays a great solo and then (like many Genesis songs) halfway through it drops off into an acoustic section that was originally a Hackett written song called “The House Of The Four Winds”. It is a beautiful piece of music.
One For The Vine is the longest song on the album at 10 minutes even and starts out almost as if an extension of Mar. It is one of the great Tony Banks songs if not the best. Again, it is a beautifully constructed song with multiple sections, romantic sweeping keyboard sounds, graceful piano and a wonderful vocal by Collins at his most fragile. His falsetto on this song compared to Squonk from the previous album is worlds apart and really shows him developing his voice in leaps and bounds. The song itself is a creative take on a looped timeline of christ like prophesy executed deftly and with no irony or judgement. It is an amazing lyric which is in complete synergy with the music and the song just flies by. I once asked other fans a couple of years ago what the title referred to and someone (Ricky Glover) explained “Tony B. was signing some autographs after the Duke show in Atlanta, and another fan asked him a similar question about OFTV. He said something like “….that was borrowed from a crew member [and he said a name of someone] who insisted on ‘toasting’ for every drink of wine. He would say ‘one for the bottle’ ‘one for the cork’ ‘one for the grapes’ ‘one for the vine’….and we just used that.” He went on to talk about the ‘religious imagery’ that Genesis used a lot, and how that was a ‘little manipulative’ to get to people’s mind. He sorta mumbled to himself “….silly people”. The above noted reference relating to the part of the lyric that goes “He walked into a valley, All alone There, He talked with water, And then with the vine”.
With Your Own Special Way things started to change for the band. Some people really dislike the song and flag it as the beginning of the end and to them I say you missed out on some pretty great music if this was your line in the sand. The only thing I would say against the song is it is a bit “samey” throughout. It is pretty and catchy but it doesn’t really go very far from where it starts. Also, I’m not a big fan of all of Collins’s harmony vocals here. I waver between loving them and them driving me crazy – sometimes at the same time. His lead vocals are great though. Mike Rutherford wrote the song which was also their first proper love song. It was released as a single and was the first song to break the US Billboard chart reaching number 62. Side 1 ends with the first of three instrumentals on this album. Actually, Wind And Wuthering is probably the most musical album the band ever made if you clocked time with and without vocals.
Wot Gorilla? has the speed and vibrancy of Los Endos but with a far more jazz based rhythm that was clearly influenced by Collins ongoing work with Brand X. The band seem to argue over whether it is a good song or not. I personally love it – it ends the first half of the album on a real high note and doesn’t overstay its welcome at just over 3 and a half minutes.
Side 2 of the album starts with some epic music in the form of the song All In A Mouse’s Night. Sigh…Ok I’m not a big fan of this song…Actually I’m a big fan of the music itself which is fantastic. Apparently, it was supposed to be a big epic story type song, but they decided to abandon the idea and went with a Tom and Jerry story put to music. I really wish they had stuck with their initial instincts. Always go with your first idea is what I’ve been told. They didn’t and…well…If I ignore the lyrics, I can manage through the song cause the music itself is as good as everything else. I just don’t really care about whether the cat or mouse lives or dies…It really isn’t that interesting, and I hate mice so given a choice I know how it should have ended. The ending is great musically and sounds similar to how the album ends.
Luckily the song that follows wipes the memory of the preceding cat and mouse massacre. Blood On The Rooftops is possibly the best song Hackett ever brought to the band (actually it was cowritten by Collins). It is also perhaps the most “English” song the band ever wrote…evoking the banality of passive armchair TV news apathy. It has an incredible classical guitar intro and another stellar vocal by Phil. It is a gentle beautiful song that is deftly supported by Banks’ reserved and straight approach and ends up better for it. Rutherford’s bass line is often overlooked but it is also great.
The remaining 11 minutes of the album is pure bliss. First are the final two linked instrumentals – the shorter moody Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers…and the longer more vibrant …In That Quiet Earth. It took me until today o’clock to discover why the album was called Wind and Wuthering. It is a merger of the working titles of these two instrumentals. The first song was the “Wind” section and the second part reminded them of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte in mood. Thus “Wind and Wuthering”. The titles are actually taken from the last line of the novel “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” In That Quiet Earth builds and builds in intensity and rhythm until it basically can’t sustain itself and drops away in one of the most beautiful transitions in music with a sustained keyboard note that just drops into the final song. Afterglow is one of those tunes that can bring the hardest person to tears. It is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Slow, graceful, simple, sweepingly epic and angelic in scope. It reminds me a lot of a more mature and fully formed version of the ending of Supper’s Ready. Genesis have some pretty awesome album closing songs and Afterglow holds its own with the best of them and I believe it is also reason they used to end their live medleys with it.
So that’s it for Wind and Wuthering…. Alas this material would be the last studio recordings with Steve Hackett…well…actually not quite… I’ll talk about that in the next post when I talk about their Spot The Pigeon EP and their second live album Second’s Out.
Recommended Listening – One For The Vine, Blood On The Rooftops, Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers, In That Quiet Earth, Afterglow
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