(#289: 15 October
1983, 1 week)
Track listing:
Mama/That’s All/Home By The Sea/Second Home By The Sea/Illegal Alien/Taking It
All Too Hard/Just A Job To Do/Silver Rainbow/It’s Gonna Get Better
Last time I wrote about Genesis, I was immediately
upbraided by a reader because of what they termed the “obligatory Patrick
Bateman reference.” While I am as acutely aware of the dangers of reflex
critical laxity as anyone, it has to be said that the fictional rock and jazz observer
had an outlook on the group that was perhaps not as unique as his creator made
it sound; the fact that their albums continued to top our charts throughout the
eighties – and beyond – suggests that an awful lot of people, with the accent
on the adjective “awful,” were in agreement with his views.
That having been admitted, I must observe that even Mr
Bateman could not find much to say in favour of their twelfth studio album and
third number one, an album eponymous because it was the first time all three
members had been jointly credited with writing all its songs – the modus
operandi appears to have been that each musician would come in with relatively
vague musical ideas which he would then proceed to knock into shape with his
two bandmates, and probably with the help of the producer, who once again is
Hugh “Gated” Padgham; and certainly the vagueness pervades practically all of
the music. “…though it’s a fine album,” Bateman says, “a lot of it now seems
too derivative for my tastes.”
There would appear to be no pressing need for Genesis’ existence. The childlike shapes
which decorate, and more or less constitute, the cover are elements of a
Tupperware “Shape O Toy Ball,” the idea behind which was that you had a blue
and red ball with cut holes into which you had to insert the shapes for it to
make any sense. This is fitting, as the music largely resembles the soundtrack
for a Tupperware party; big in Surbiton, sneered at in Stockwell.
I say “largely” because I am sure that Genesis regarded “Mama,”
the album’s lead single, as an unutterably courageous avant-garde gesture, a
challenging comeback record which would subvert everybody’s expectations of the
group. And almost against all odds – that is a deliberate reference – it rose
to #4 in the UK singles chart and remains their biggest hit here, more or less twice
as big as “Follow You, Follow Me” or “Turn It On Again,” though is never played
on oldies radio.
But the song remains ludicrous and unconvincing. When the
highlight of your new album is the drum programme which opens it, you know you’re
in trouble, and although it briefly grinds along, in tandem with whining
high-pitched synthesiser lines, in ways which suggest it should be sampled in
hip hop without delay – in retrospect, one can detect a certain influence in Kanye
and Jay-Z’s “No Church In The Wild” (but then that song also features Phil
Manzanera) – but in the year of “Deep In The Woods” it was clear that it wouldn’t
do. The group work very hard to create an air of menace and some architectural
logic, but we had already heard the gated drums kicking in halfway through the
song gambit on “In The Air Tonight,” and Collins is perhaps the least
convincing psychopath in rock; he is certainly not Peter Gabriel (and overall
the song carries an aura of wanting to “do a Peter Gabriel”) and his Tommy
Cooper-via-ET cackles are not scary
but merely embarrassing (as is the video). It is, admittedly, an improvement on
“Mother,” if you recall that timeless Andy Summers classic from Synchronicity (another Padgham
production), but look how low the bar has been set; furthermore, the subject of
“Mama” is not about the protagonist’s mother or the principal subject of Hello, I Must Be Going!, but a
prostitute. “Roxanne” it is not (all I can say about the video is: you DO have
to turn off that red light).
Still, it’s about as good as Genesis gets. The intention behind “That’s All” was to create a
simple Beatles-style tune – already you see the paradox – and although Collins
rolls off a few good impressions of Ringo’s drumming in the middle-eights,
Banks’ stilted keyboards prevent the song from ever taking off, as do Collins’
cross imprecations (“Taking it all ‘stead a take a ONE BITE!”), and overall it
does not raise itself above the level of a (below par) mid-seventies Wings
album track.
But “Home By The Sea” is an eleven-minute prog-rock epic –
which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, was exactly what the world needed in 1983 –
and constitutes perhaps the least scary ghost story ever told; Collins’
protagonist is a small-time crook who breaks into what looks like an abandoned
old house, but finds himself confronted by a host of ghosts (the “home”
apparently being a haunted former prison), and, like the Hotel California, he
can never leave and has to spend the rest of eternity listening to their
wondrous stories of glory days. Now, you can read whatever metaphors you like
into the lyric – is it about a marooned eighties rock group whose adherents won’t
let them leave the seventies? Is it an allegory about an entryist political
party which finds itself so charmed by its conservative hosts that it joins in
alliance with them (and if it is, it pales in comparison with the similar
analogy with the post-war Labour administration which Charles Barr detects in The Ladykillers)? And, even if either is
true, who is bothered? After the song is done, we move into a featureless,
barren plain of instrumental prog nothingness – the “Second” section – which veers
between early Styx and 1983-period Duran Duran; as neither Banks nor Rutherford
are improvisers, nor, I suspect, do they possess a single avant-garde bone in
their bodies, we get what sounds like mediocre film soundtrack music – you can
picture Collins running through the corridors, towards the door or mirror, to
no effect – and by the time Collins returns to reiterate the third verse, it
does not give me the chills but instead inspires a sense of relief that the
song is nearly over.
Side two is bad AoR, and in general second gear Genesis. “Illegal
Alien” is wretched, with Collins’ stupid faux-Mexican
accent – rhyming “fun” with “al-i-un,” I ask you – making me wonder whether we
had, in the eighties, evolved a millimetre from the George Mitchell Minstrels,
and the truly despicable final verse involving the protagonist’s sister. Set
against that is a reasonably lively verse structure which, if you replaced
Collins with Damon Albarn, could almost be mid-nineties Blur, but alas that
promise fades early and we are instead left with rambling, inconclusive musical
sequences which typify the occasional dangers in aesthetic democracy.
“Taking It All Too Hard” is a poor example of the
Sensitive Genesis Ballad, mainly because Collins does not appeared to have
moved on a centimetre from Face Value.
“Just A Job To Do,” this record’s Genesis Got The Funk song, comes on like a
theme tune for some mediocre mid-eighties British cops ‘n’ robbers caper,
perhaps starring Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones – and we finally hear some
eighties keyboards here, but they are terrible and Ferris Bueller’s Austerity Day tacky – and while it might be about
a cop on the trail of some crook (“Even if you’re innocent” - ?), it could just
as well be about the protagonist stalking the woman who walked out on him; the
Elvis Costello reference (“I hope my aim is true”) is impertinent, and makes me
wish that I were writing about Punch The
Clock instead.
Then “Silver Rainbow” catapults us back into 1973, with
some very horrible-sounding and, even then, dated keyboards and its dopey Desiderata/Road Less Travelled lyric. It is
impossible to see what relevance this would have had to anybody in the eighties
– apart from the diehard, stalwart old-school Genesis fans who yearned to hear
the old stuff, the old style, over and over – and no backwards Fairlight
doodlebumping is going to make this any better. The record limps to an end with
the dull “It’s Gonna Get Better,” delivered with all the conviction of Osborne
in today’s Budget, ceaselessly telling us that “we” are turning the corner, his
“makers, doers and savers” – and not for one second does anyone with
intelligence believe him, nor the Genesis of three decades ago.
Then the penny drops about who, in 1983, would have
bought this album, kept it on the chart for just short of a year and turned it
double platinum – Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and Gove were all teenagers, and
the airwaves were ruled by the highly, and as it turned out, destructively,
conservative Radio 1 and their obsession with holding on to their original
audience of babyboomers, such that babyboom music was viewed as the only valid
option – Genesis, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, or their “new” “pop” replicants
(names to be named later in this tale). And so it was that a violent aesthetic
reaction had to happen; was indeed already happening by the autumn of 1983, not
that you would have known it from what were, as Peel put it at the time,
rapidly and benignly becoming “Radio 2 charts,” entirely unrepresentative of
what the people of Britain were actually listening to. Bateman, and Gordon
Gekko, were fictions, but their disciples, who missed the steamroller irony and
took them straight, as gurus or avatars, were already making themselves known,
and beginning to run things. “Collins’ voice is so positive,” says Bateman of “It’s
Gonna Get Better,” “…that he makes us believe in glorious possibilities.” That
phrase is infinitely more frightening than anything in “Mama.”
