Shindig! Issue #180 – Genesis
GENESIS co-founder Anthony Phillips returns to the happy summer of 1968 when he and a rag-tag group of teenage schoolfriends made their first record before immediately disowning it and returning to their studies.
MICHAEL BJÖRN celebrates and re-evaluates the album’s resurrection
Jonathan King’s efforts to make From Genesis To Revelation more commercially viable misfired completely, and allegedly only 649 copies of the original pressing were sold. “I think we knew everyone that bought it,” says Anthony. “It was pathetic, really.”
“That summer, we didn’t really know what to do. It was a difficult time. We weren’t really a group, we were just songwriters,” continues Anthony Phillips. But just as with their formative first demo, Anthony and Mike again took the lead and decided to go professional. Banks and Gabriel held back — first Banks was going to leave and Gabriel persuaded him to stay; then Gabriel was going to leave, and Banks had to persuade him to stay. In the end, only their drummer John Sliver left and when he got replaced by John Mayhew that autumn, Genesis became a proper band.
That’s not to say they weren’t songwriters, on the contrary. “Mike and I had started experimenting with this ‘two 12-string guitar stuff’,” says Anthony. “It was during 1968 into ’69, running up to when From Genesis To Revelation came out, and then that lost summer, that we were feverishly trying all the stuff, which was setting up some of the bedrock that created things like ‘Dusk’, ‘White Mountain’ and ‘Stagnation’. In fact, we held quite a lot back from playing to the others back at the time, because we wanted to do our own thing at one stage.”
Much of the material was quite ambitious. “We had a piece called ‘The Movement’,” says Anthony. Allegedly it contained sections of ‘Stagnation’, ‘Foxtrot’ and ‘Get ’em Out By Friday’. There was also a more ambitious version of ‘A Place To Call My Own’, referred to as the ‘Epic’ and other forward pointing tracks, such as ‘Going Out To Get You’. The latter was recorded for an aborted single in ’71 and remained in their live set into ’72.
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