Did you know that after Peter Gabriel and then Phil Collins left the group, Genesis
added a third lead singer to its lineup?
So, who was this mysterious vocalist?
And was he a good fit?
To learn this and more about the untold truth of Genesis, keep watching.
In the 1960s, Charterhouse School, a private institution in southern England, was a breeding
ground for creative types, and many hopeful bands emerged.
Sadly, by 1967, both of the major rock bands formed by the students there had split up.
But Anthony Phillips and Mike Rutherford, formerly of Anon, kept writing together, and
when recording a homemade demo, they invited the former members of Garden Wall — Tony
Banks, Peter Gabriel, and Chris Stewart — to join them.
The musicians thought so highly of the demo that they wanted to re-record it professionally.
So, they contacted the only music industry contact they had: Jonathan King, a Charterhouse
alum who, in 1965, had a top 20 hit with "Everyone's Gone to the Moon."
He liked the tape so much that he agreed to launch the band.
King landed the group a contract with Decca Records and even came up with a band name:
Gabriel's Angels.
However, as Gabriel noted in the band's memoir, Genesis: Chapter and Verse, the other members
of the band didn't like the name.
So, as King told the BBC,
"I gave them the name Genesis because, for me, that was the start of my production career."
With Champagne Meadow the only other viable name in the mix, Genesis stuck.
The most famous member of Genesis was not an original member of the group.
After initial drummer Chris Stewart left in 1968 to go back to school, another Charterhouse
alum named John Silver replaced him and played on Genesis's first record, From Genesis to
Revelation.
Then he left, and ceded the gig to John Mayhew.
In 1970, after the recording of the band's second album, Trespass, guitarist Anthony
Phillips left the band.
Looking to restart the band in the wake of this blow, Genesis parted ways with Mayhew
because he wasn't a good fit and placed ads seeking a new drummer in Melody Maker.
Phil Collins, an actor-turned-drummer saw the ad, and arranged for an audition.
Collins told the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show:
"It was at Peter Gabriel's parents' farm.
It was a beautiful day; they were auditioning out on the patio."
Collins had arrived very early, and Gabriel suggested the drummer take a dip in his parents'
swimming pool while the other candidates auditioned not very far away.
"So I went and had a swim."
Collins explained to Ultimate Classic Rock Nights:
"I could hear anything that was going down.
I knew the tunes before I actually auditioned.
So when I came up to play, of course I walked straight into it.
I knew all the things, so I got the job!"
"I mean there was, you know, I think little doubt at the end of that session that Phil
was the best."
Genesis came of age in the 1970s.
In addition to a golden era of progressive rock, it was also the heyday of glam rock,
when male rock stars like David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and the New York Dolls challenged social
norms and traditional gender roles by wearing makeup and feminine-style clothing.
Peter Gabriel of Genesis wasn't a glam rocker, but he definitely took the idea of what a
rock frontman can sartorially get away with to the next level.
During concerts, he'd don different, specially-made costumes to better embody different characters
suggested by the band's freewheeling songs.
For example, portraying "The Watcher of the Skies" involved a batwing head-dress.
Additionally, "The Colony of the Slipperman" required a Slipperman costume that could best
be described as a demonic Mr. Bubble.
For the band's 1972 album Foxtrot, he dressed up like the red-dress-clad humanoid fox from
the cover.
Gabriel told Uncut:
"My wife, Jill, had a red [...] dress which I could just about get into, and we had a
fox head made."
Even Genesis fans were at least slightly unnerved by the ensemble.
Gabriel explained:
"The first time we tried it was in a former boxing ring in Dublin, and there was just
a shocked silence.
You could feel the horror.
I thought, 'Oh, this is exciting!'"
Probably in large part due to his memorable and dazzling stage persona, Peter Gabriel
wasn't just the lead singer of Genesis, he was the face of the band, and in the public
eye, the man and the band were almost inexorably linked.
So, when Gabriel abruptly left Genesis in 1975, the exit seemed catastrophic to the
future of the band.
Phil Collins told Prog magazine:
"For a time, I thought we'd carry on as a four-piece without any singing."
Ultimately rejecting that notion, a hunt for a new singer began in earnest.
Genesis put out word and received hundreds of inquiries and audition tapes.
Nobody, apparently, was up to the task.
However, the band soon realized that its drummer, who'd taken lead vocals on the occasional
album cut, actually had a pretty good voice.
Collins told iNews:
"We couldn't find another singer and so the rest of the band convinced me to do it.
There really wasn't another option and I drew the short straw."
After leaving Genesis in 1975, Peter Gabriel stayed on good terms with his old bandmates.
Phil Collins even played drums on Gabriel's third solo album in 1980.
But only once did Gabriel ever front a live lineup of Genesis after his momentous exit
from the group, and it was born out of a possibly life-saving gesture of goodwill.
In 1982, Peter Gabriel launched the WOMAD Festival, or World of Music, Arts, and Dance,
a live celebration and exposure platform with musical arts from around the world.
It's now a 30-year-plus endeavor, but it almost immediately died off.
Gabriel told The Guardian:
"We thought everyone else was going to be as excited as we were.
It became a nightmare experience when we realized there was no way we were getting the tickets
to cover our costs.
The debts were way above what I could manage [...]"
Gabriel considered playing some shows to work off the debt, but he wasn't yet a huge concert
draw.
But Genesis, with back-to-back hit albums Duke and Abacab was.
And so, the band added an extra stop to its tour, at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes,
England.
It was just like old times, too, with Gabriel even appearing in costume.
By the mid-1980s, Genesis had completed its slow transformation from weird progressive
rock band to pop combo that scored major top 40 radio hits.
Helped along by the very mainstream pop solo career of singer Phil Collins, Genesis achieved
in mid-July 1986 what it had never done before or since: It topped the Billboard Hot 100
singles chart.
"Invisible Touch" sat at No. 1.
Remarkably, at No. 2 sat Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer."
The top two songs in the country were by a band and an exile of that band.
The next week, Gabriel and his song took over the No. 1 slot from his former bandmates.
Collins told The Guardian in 2014:
"I read recently that Peter Gabriel knocked us off the No. 1 spot with 'Sledgehammer.'
We weren't aware of that at the time."
As far as dominating the pop chart is concerned, Genesis was the most popular band — if not
franchise — in the U.S. in July 1986.
Besides chart-toppers from the mothership and a solo offshoot, "When the Heart Rules
the Mind," from former Genesis member Steve Hackett's band GTR, also sat in the top 20
at the time.
"Well what has happened is you've gone from being a cult to being a big cult… to being
kind of more mass appeal."
Genesis, particularly drummer and singer Phil Collins, loves African-American musical styles.
His first solo top 10 hit was a take on the Supremes' Motown classic "You Can't Hurry
Love," and his 2010 album Going Back consists entirely of '60s soul covers.
In 1981, he recruited the brass section of Earth, Wind & Fire — the Phenix Horns — to
play on about half of the songs on his album Face Value.
Collins liked the musicians so much he got them to play on the Genesis hit "No Reply
at All."
Collins used the Phenix Horns many more times, including on his single "Sussudio," the album,
...But Seriously, and on tour.
But in 1997, Collins' accounting firm wrote to Horns players Louis Satterfield and Rahmlee
Davis to inform them they'd been overpaid $345,000 in royalties.
They'd apparently received money for every track on Collins' Serious Hits...Live! but
had only actually appeared on five.
Collins ultimately won the suit, but it only damaged his relationship with some prominent
former Genesis collaborators.
"I think in the '80s, I became very annoying."
In addition to the distinctive vocal stylings of Peter Gabriel and then Phil Collins, and
despite being a dominant band of the guitar-heavy classic rock canon of the past 40-something
years, Genesis was primarily a keyboard and synthesizer-driven band.
Tony Banks took his instruments to new and progressive places, getting strange sounds
out of them, the likes of which had never been heard.
Banks created a weird, haunting, and droning synth noise at the beginning of the band's
1991 hit "No Son of Mine," with a sound that hits somewhere between a guitar getting its
neck wrung and an elephant crying out over a deep emotional trauma.
Indeed — according to the band's memoir Genesis: Chapter and Verse, the official name
of that sound is "elephantus".
Banks got it by taking a sample of bandmate Mike Rutherford playing his guitar, then programmed
it into a synthesizer and played it on low keyboard notes.
The trick left such an impact on "No Son of Mine," that it was also nearly titled "Elephantus."
Genesis' final top 10 hit in the U.S. was "I Can't Dance," the almost-title track off
of its 1991 album "We Can't Dance."
It hit No. 7 on the pop chart, thanks in part to its humorous, self-conscious, and self-effacing
video where Phil Collins and company make fun of themselves for grappling with middle-age.
The song is full of witty lyrics, too, befitting a song that was supposed to just be a lark.
Tony Banks said in an interview,
"It was one of those bits you thought was going to go nowhere.
It sounded fun, but wasn't really special."
Originating under the working title "Blue Jeans," Mike Rutherford came up with the song's
thunderous riff after hearing the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" in a TV commercial
for jeans.
He called the riff "Heavy A Flat," and when he played the ear worm for Collins, the singer
blurted out the lyric "I can't dance!"
It was so simplistic and off-brand from what Genesis usually did that nobody thought it
would really go anywhere.
Obviously, they were wrong.
Along with Van Halen and some lesser rock n' roll warriors, Genesis is one of the few
bands to ever utilize three main lead singers.
After more than two decades with the band and an extremely successful concurrent solo
career, Phil Collins left Genesis in 1996.
Almost immediately, the rest of Genesis regrouped with a new frontman, the much younger Ray
Wilson, born in 1968, the same year Genesis released its first singles.
Wilson sang on just one album, 1997's Calling All Stations, which would turn out to be the
group's first album since the early 1970s to not go gold or platinum in the United States.
It would also go down as the final Genesis studio album, as the group officially called
it a day in 2000.
Genesis' permanent absence from the music scene proved temporary, as the group reconvened
for the two-month long Turn It On Again Tour in the summer of 2007.
According to the BBC, this would mark about the last time drummer-singer Phil Collins
would be at full strength, as he suffered nerve damage during the tour that later prevented
him from playing for significant amounts of time.
Despite other health problems that required him to walk with a cane and stay seated while
singing, Collins signed on for another Genesis reunion tour in 2020.
Collins was joined by longtime bandmates Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks and on drums, his
own son, Nicholas Collins.
COVID-19 shutdowns and lockdown orders prevented The Last Domino?
Tour from getting underway until 2021, and it wrapped up in March 2022.
That reunion tour also turned out to be a farewell tour.
Collins told the audience from the stage of the O2 Arena in London:
"Tonight is a very special night.
It's the last stop of our tour, and it's the last show for Genesis."
After more than 50 years together, and more than 20 years after its last breakup, Genesis
really did wrap it up.
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