genesis: duke

Gosh I love this album. Gonna be a tough one to vote

TURN IT ON AGAIN

Excellent album. It's Duchess for me, Heathaze is a close second.

Duchess, but only recently noticed that Man Of Our Times RULES

Voted for the hit to piss off the proggy folks... :)

lol geir polled this way back when, not sure why it never came up in a search

"Duke"'s Poll (Genesis, not Ellington)

can't argue with those results

Dutchess but also heathaze and most of this album, even Misunderstanding.

I painted a 6-foot replica of this album cover in the hallway outside my dorm room back in 1987.

It's hard to beat the energy of "Behind The Lines" for an album lead-in, but i find the triad of Duchess/Guide Vocal/Man of the Times to be one of the Collins-era high points. "Turn It On Again" and "Misunderstanding" will garner many votes because of their crafty pop constructions, even if they lack much substance to chew on. So, i suppose, i'll cast a lonely vote for "Guide Vocal".

Agree with Alfred on "Behind the Lines."

But I actually - gasp - like "Misunderstanding" more than "Turn it on Again."

Haven't listened to this in, ulp, 37 years. I'd forgotten how much the LP sounds like it was recorded on a 4-track. Really simple arrangements throughout, one part each, as if they just re-did the original jam sessions when it came to record. Never sounds too thin though. Outside the singles, love "Guide Vocal" and "Cul-De-Sac". But voted "Please Don't Ask" in the end; peak hello-you-must-be-going Phil IMO.

I went for "Misunderstanding".

"I'd forgotten how much the LP sounds like it was recorded on a 4-track" haha, this is true; it's also a testament to how strong the writing on most of the record is that it succeeds so well with a stripped down approach; compare it to And then there were three which is murky, cluttered, and filled with not very good material.

nah ATTWT is a way better album than Duke

... looking further into The Archives 2, anyone interested might consider swapping out tracks as follows:

"Misunderstanding" for it's B-Side, Evidence Of Autumn.
"Turn It On Again" for the "Duchess" B-Side, Open Door.

The 2 replaced songs are fine songs, they just never really fit into the album for me (even if TIOA did once occupy the center transition of The Story of Albert). Sure it may make the middle of the album a little less catchy (and a lot more sappy), but, damn, this is the way i'll listen to Duke for the rest of my days.

Y'know, I think I will listen again to every '80s Genesis/Phil Collins LP from Duke to ...But Seriously this week. Yes, including No Jacket Required - I guess one more go 'round with that won't hurt, even if it leaves me with the same opinion it's always done.

Okay, so scratch what I said earlier about me only needing Foxtrot, A Trick of the Tail and a singles compilation. I've got Duke on now and I'm already beginning to wonder why I don't play this more often - I'd forgotten how much parts of 'Man of Our Times' remind me of Gary Numan. Genesis actually assimilated aspects of New Wave music into their sound quite well, which I guess makes sense when you think the members were still only between 29-30 years old when they made it. When I first started listening to Genesis' albums, it was of course when I was in the middle of a full-blown prog phase where I wanted everything to be 20 minutes long, be conceptual and have fast, technically precise musical parts, but I must confess - listening to this album now, it actually fits in more snugly with a lot of the stuff that I've been listening to over the last couple of years than I previously thought. As a result, I can easily see myself listening to '80s Genesis far more these days. I'm actually glad I decided to throw this on tonight. It'll be Phil's solo stuff that'll be the real test, though.

*it=this record.

"nah ATTWT is a way better album than Duke"

NO

yeah no fuckin way

Some of Phil's solo stuff is legitimately slammin.

no jacket required has Take Me Home on it, there is nothing wrong with that song.

Almost everything Phil plays on up to and including No Jacket is worthwhile, imo. Virtually nothing since, really, save a few Genesis songs and one or two guest spots, maybe. Regardless, he's the epitome of a guy who has done so much almost undeniably good stuff that still unjustifiably gets people shrugging and saying, "yeah, but so what, what else has he done?"

Hmm. Face Value on now. 'In The Air Tonight' is still as potent as ever, and 'The Roof is Leaking' into 'Droned' is a really nice moment. The version of 'Behind The Lines' on this isn't as good as the version on Duke, though, and the second half of the record is a bit of a slog. 'If Leaving Me Is Easy' in particular is bland, go-nowhere smoothness. 'Hand in Hand' has a promising intro, but then the horns come in and it turns into chat show theme tune music.

I like his version of 'Tomorrow Never Knows', though!

I Missed Again is a jam.

I Missed Again is beautiful. I take If Leaving Me is Easy as his attempt to write a John Martyn track with keyboards.

"In The Air Tonight" was supposed to be on Duke, but Banks voted it out, apparently. Still, that tune and a handful of other singles (most notably, "Easy Lover") is the only "solo" Collins i'll go back to.

Almost everything Phil plays on up to and including No Jacket is worthwhile, imo. Virtually nothing since, really

agreed with the first point, disagreed with the second as i like most of invisible touch

Oh, my bad, I totally meant to include Invisible Touch. I forgot that came out right after No Jacket!

Hello, I Must Be Going is pretty slept on. "I Cannot Believe it's True" is a monster of a tune, best use of the EWF horns ever. Ditto for "It Don't Matter to Me". Funky Phil rules.

Well, I managed to get through those quite quickly (there's only 8 LP's, after all) ... I'll elaborate later, but basically I'd rank 'em like this:

Duke > Invisible Touch > Abacab > Genesis >>> all Phil Collins solo albums.

However, his solo work is not all terrible - there's one or two good (even great in the case of 'In the Air Tonight') tracks on each album - including No Jacket Required, which still mostly feels to me like it should come with a free briefcase and filofax. Also: horns - love 'em on Parliament and Prince records, sound incredibly tacky on Phil Collins records.

A lot of '70s Genesis fans tend to see the '80s Genesis as the moment when Phil Collins started dragging the band in a more pop direction, but I disagree with this. If anything, '80s Genesis was Banks and Rutherford dragging Collins away from blandness.

Heathaze is great, as is the whole Duke's Travels/End - but it's got to be Duchess for me. Just that transition from trippy new age drum machine reverie (sounds like some tranquil Amazonian paradise, teeming with insect life) into crashing, colossal and psychedelic anthemisms will never not thrill me. I wish it went on for hours and hours.

"I Cannot Believe it's True" is a monster of a tune, best use of the EWF horns ever. Ditto for "It Don't Matter to Me". Funky Phil rules.

Also this. The drums on IDMTM - shuffling, shifting, tumbling over each other without ever not being in the pocket, are mind-blowing.

It's an unpopular opinion, but I too prefer ATTW3. They sound far more of a unit on Duke, but the previous album to me is as underrated as it comes. Let the album gets very little love, least of all from the band

*yet

I'm happy to play the Geir role here. I like prog Genesis, not pop Genesis. Duke has plenty of fine moments, but it signalled the beginning of the end for me and I have no use for anything that came after. ATTWT is great because it merges pop concision with a prog sensibility.

pvmic

The drumming throughout Duke is pretty spectacular, particularly on the last couple of tracks.

There's a really cool drum effect in "I Don't Care Anymore" (one of my fave Phil vocal tracks). It starts out big and roomy - his Bonham sound - and then they gradually shift from the room mics to the close mics and the sound gets super tight, controlled and compressed. It's really neat.

I guess when it boils down to it - I rate Collins highly as a drummer, and as a singer I think he's got a great voice. As a songwriter though, I find him frustratingly inconsistent and I suspect a lot of the material I've enjoyed on Genesis records has come from either Banks or Rutherford.

I suspect Mike Rutherford is the secret weapon here. An at-times canny bassist & arranger, passable guitarist in the Andy Summers mold, and pretty crafty with the pop hooks. Even the big Mechanics hits, Patrick Bateman aside, have staying power.

He's a pretty boring guitarist. And while after a while the band credits all the songwriting collectively, which makes it hard to tell who does what, don't underestimate the amount of cheesy music and lyrics that have come from Banks and Rutherford. Phil gets way too much blame on that front, whether you like the cheesy stuff or not.

Was it Soto that observed Banks' uncanny ability to always pick the worst preset synth sound for every song?

I have no doubt that Banks and Rutherford have also been involved in creating some awful music, but given how much I prefer the '80s Genesis records to Phil Collins' solo stuff, I could probably put a safe bet on my favourite Genesis material either being written by Banks or Rutherford, or they were the starting point of the composition.

As a guitarist, Rutherford mostly gets out of the way, in contrast, say, to the hammy Daryl Stuermer. I'm not being critical of Phil, and I'm sure there's cheese sprayed from all directions, I just suspect that Mike's role in the band's pop turn is key. Tony's solo material, at least what I've heard of it, is tuneless and plodding, much as I love his big operatic chords and proggy arpeggios in Genesis. I guess I've come around to Mike as the band's invisible hand.

Banks was certainly their most gifted composer. Wind & Wuthering, my pick for best Genesis album ever, was mostly written by him. And his first solo album A Curious Feeling is a gem.

banks is also def mvp on the lamb imo

I tweeted this to chaki
But I often think of breaking up Yes and Genesis, and reforming: Gabriel, Hackett, Howe, Squire, Collins, and Banks

yea it's my least favorite part of the record and def should've been punted for Face Value. speaking of wasn't In The Air Tonight originally meant to be on this album? god, imagine that.

something I've noticed is how damn long every single one of Genesis's LPs were from Foxtrot -> Duke. even the doubles like The Lamb and Seconds Out. every LP is over 50 minutes long. this one is 55! you gotta crank up the bass hard!

I can't deny that Misunderstanding doesn't fit on this record, but I also can't deny that I love Misunderstanding, the first Genesis song I knew -- and it does fit, for me, into the band's work as a whole.

Phil pitched "In the Air Tonight" to the band (just like Mike Campbell pitched "Boys of Summer" to Tom Petty) and the band passed.

Phil is (rightly) defensive about his reputation for softening Genesis. For example, Mike Rutherford wrote the bulk of "Follow You, Follow Me," their first hit, and later the bulk of stuff like "Taking It All Too Hard" and "Throwing It All Away," two songs that people probably think Collins had a big hand in writing. (Fwiw, he also wrote the lyrics for "Illegal Alien.")

I like "Misunderstanding" too, even if though I don't count it among their best stuff - beyond Duke, Abacab was the last time I kind of enjoyed their pop songs before they really went bland.

I've never thought Misunderstanding doesn't fit and tbh I'm not sure what you're getting at. It feels distinctly of that period of Genesis in pretty much every regard and (this will sound clunky but) it's a textural and compositional fit for Duke imo (that said, it also reminds me of McCartney a bit - not in sound so much but just as a song).

Was listening to And Then There Were Three the other day and thought how unforgivably insipid Follow is. And I *love* their pop ballads, generally - Throwing It All Away is a genuine highlight of Invisible Touch for me - but there's something so grey and dull about it. It's no Afterglow, for sure.

IME 'Turn It On Again' is not so difficult to play, frogbs. My mates and I did a little remote version during lockdown and it was a lot of fun working it out.

Once you get into the odd signature groove, it's pretty straightforward, though I can imagine just one person deviating a bit too much throwing it off.

I don't mind "Misunderstanding" at all, and I like "Follow You," too, mawkish though it may be. Typically passive aggressive-y quote from Banks on wiki:

It was our only truly group-written number. Mike played the riff, then I started playing a chord sequence and melody line on it, which Phil then centralized around. It worked so well as a very simple thing; it was enough as it stood. I'd just written a simple love lyric for "Many Too Many", and I think Mike was keen to try the same thing. Maybe "Follow You Follow Me" was almost too banal, but I got used to it. I think we find it much easier to write long stories than simple love songs.

yea once you figure it out it doesn't deviate much but its just such an odd meter, idk my brain just isn't used to playing something like that

anyway I do like Follow You Follow Me, I'm a sucker for overtly pretty pop songs like that, but I'd make the same argument, it doesn't really fit into the album at all for me. even stuck on the end like that it just feels like a bonus track

I just love every Genesis single until Illegal Alien.

(And I don't even mind that one much. It's obvious what's awful about it but the instrumental is GREAT.)

yea for a while I had all the CDs from Nursery Cryme to Trick of the Tail and then a separate best of which was all later tracks (plus a new version of Carpet Crawlers), was kind of surprised how much I liked it

in fact I remember playing it once as the summer help for a utility company, my boss came in and went "ah yes Genesis, they were good but I actually only like the stuff they did before this, they had a different singer actually, you probably don't even know..." and I wanted to say how much I was really into those records but had to go on my route in 5 minutes so just didn't have time to get into a prog discussion, lol

Throwing It All Away is Follow You Follow Me done better (and balder)

I think PaulTMA is right. Throwing It All Away is Peak Rutherford.

He went back to its sound again for Living Years, which is another good piece of music hampered by mawkish lyrics.

something I've noticed is how damn long every single one of Genesis's LPs were from Foxtrot -> Duke. even the doubles like The Lamb and Seconds Out. every LP is over 50 minutes long. this one is 55! you gotta crank up the bass hard!

Controversial Genesis opinion: nearly all the 70s-era albums would be improved by lopping 15 minutes off the running time.

Throwing It All Away is Follow You Follow Me done better (and balder)

― PaulTMA,

otm -- one of Rutherford's better lyrics. Blame him for the sheer terror of "Land of Confusion."

xp well I definitely don't agree with that but I do find the amount of long atmospheric passages a bit curious, particularly say the end of "Moonlit Knight" which just tweedles on for several minutes. wonder who decided that was essential

Having a 1978-81 Genesis afternoon in the late summer sun.

I've always said that "Throwing It All Away" is one of Phil's deceptively simple peak drum performances, a total Bonham groove, which is unexpected for a ballad.

It's my favorite Patrick Bateman-era ballad.

In Too Deep's lovely as well, if I'm honest.

Also, Abacab onwards, Genesis albums (until the awful We Can't Dance) are a lean 47 minutes or so

We Can't Dance, Be Here Now, Disintegration, Daydream Nation - the four tenants of the 12 track, 71 minute album.

The latter-half sections of both Knight and Volcano are both Steve-driven and seemingly dropped from later live performances

well that's just 3 - Abacab, Genesis, and Invisible Touch. and I think all those are still longer than any album by say King Crimson, at least until the CD era

the outlier in their catalogue is Nusery Cryme...not even 40 minutes!! wow!

Eh, We Can't Dance is not all bad. "Driving the Last Spike," "Dreaming While You Sleep," "Fading Lights," those three long ones are pretty good, and together they run almost 30 minutes, lol. For the short ones, I don't really like the singles much, tbh, and a lot of the tracks do veer closer to Phil Collins solo dreck than most Genesis material does, but I do like "Tell Me Why" and "Living Forever," which kind of sounds like it could be slotted between self-titled and "Invisible Touch."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHx9MqCfCjw

Controversial Genesis opinion: nearly all the 70s-era albums would be improved by lopping 15 minutes off the running time.

No argument here. They all have at least that much that is a bit dull or underwhelming, especially Lamb which otherwise is my favorite album but really would've been better as a single LP (albeit one on the long side).

It's funny how they celebrated the dawn of the CD era by making shorter albums

(Until WCD obviously)

Think a lot of my emnity towards WCD comes from the fact that I'd been a Genesis obsessive in my pre-teens, but WCD had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as Nirvana's Nevermind and my finally getting into music for kids of my age, and I felt I had to reject it. But also, I remember buying the CD out of curdled loyalty when it came out, and besides the chorus to No Son Of Mine, which I loved, it all felt like middle-aged-man ballads and old people shit. And then there was I Can't Dance, which was and is execrable. Perhaps I should revisit it.

That live thing, 'The Way We Walk: The Longs' has Fading Lights and Driving... and is a good context in which to listen to the record, but not.

I saw em at Knebworth on that tour, a mate got free tickets through his sister. And it was so removed from this band that I'd had such an intense, solitary relationship with when I was 11 or so, I remember feeling really weirdly about the whole thing (also we saw Steve Punt reviewing in the VIP section for a broadsheet w/his notepad out). But I'd be up for checking it out now.

I bloody love Domino so I'm definitely open to it being good.

Halfway thru the "old medley" and loving it of course

Argh and then Phil drops some lines from Illegal Alien in I Know What I Like, like a turd slipping into the gravy

eeets noh fahn