"Distant memories" - The "Genesis Archive 1967 -75 The Interviews" interview. Interview transcribed by Alan Hewitt. Interview kindly provided by Jack Beermann.

MR: A Box set is, very often, a way of buying all the albums and getting all the material in one place. This is not, this is definitely... this box set is all completely unreleased stuff. It is an "If you like Genesis, you will probably like this as well". For years we have been asked by people; 'What happened to that b-side that was released in that country and not here?' And there are one or two tracks that never came out at all and there was always a kind of pressure to do a kind of Odds and Sods album you know; the b-sides and stuff? And the reason we were against that was that when those albums come out they tend to be promoted as new albums or even if they are not, people imagine that they are new albums and that I think is a mistake. So, in a sense the Box set kills two birds with one stone; you get all that stuff out, and while you are in there looking at it; there's all this old stuff from the past: demos in fact you have got, as you probably know; four cds of stuff that hasn't been released. OK, I meant there are probably bootlegs of Pete singing "The Lamb..." but nothing well worked and mixed. So, in a sense I think if you are a Genesis fan and there is a sort of collector's interest there because of all those old demos which if you hear them, and they are very rough and I wonder who wants to hear them actually? (laughter) We haven't discussed that but I think it is interesting if you like Genesis and you see a little bit with those old demos of what we were kind of about at the start.

The cover art for the first Genesis Archive

INT: Why release it now?

PG: The Box set I think was first talked about two or three years ago and I have got no idea as to why the timing particularly now but I was quite happy for some of the old stuff to get out to fans. I think it is pretty raw and rough some of this so it is the serious collectors that are going to be interested.

TB: I think the record company pestering just got us, finally drove us to do it. Speaking personally what I had always wanted to get out was just all the b-sides and those tracks which we did in the studio to a standard and which never ended up on records normally because there just wasn't time or because that particular area was duplicated and those, to me, are worth having. The rest of the stuff on them, it is a matter of opinion really. Fans will like some of it more than others and different kinds of fans will want different bits. It was a chance to go through some of the live bits and pieces that didn't exist, that hadn't been out before and that actually proved to be quite entertaining in the end although initially I wasn't very excited by all that. And, obviously a chance to get rid of some of these very, very early demos which probably should never have seen the light of day but there had been quite a few requests for, so they are there too.

INT: You probably haven't heard a lot of this stuff for years...?

PG: I don't think I will again for years! (laughter). Yeah, and some of them... I used to hold all the tapes and when I left I felt pretty guilty about everything and one of the things that Tony took over was the guardian of the tapes but he is still convinced that I kept a few behind that I couldn't find them. There may still be something somewhere but we had a pretty thorough look. We have got jungles of tapes now and whole containers of them and they are probably all rotting. I think I may have found one thing that got used and there were a few tapes that we were specifically looking for. One was at John Silver's house in Oxford where we did this twenty minute... the first twenty minute piece which was called "The Movement" at that time, and it was all acoustic, and actually I have good memories of that and it is a shame that we couldn't find that. Then another tape was done for the beeb and it was another twenty or thirty minutes and Paul Samwell-Smith who was in The Yardbirds and then who became a famous producer had worked with us on that. And although he wasn't really into Genesis especially I think his production work and sound mixing really helped that tape, and I think that was found.

INT: How difficult was it to track down all the archive material?

TB: Well, for me not too difficult because I went into my music room and picked them off the shelf and I thought that I only got about thirty or forty per cent of what we did prior to "Genesis To Revelation" and so we are talking very early days here, well prior to "Trespass" anyhow. And I thought that... I was under the impression that other people had some too and I am sure that Peter has got some stuck somewhere in some tuck box or something that he doesn't know about that he has forgotten about. Because I think that originally when we left... he denies this of course (laughter) but when we left, when we finally left Jonjo and Jonathan King, we went into the office and we took some tapes each and I that we took a few each but he seems to think that I took all the ones that were there. In which case, the others are either lost or somewhere else. It is no great loss to be honest I think... the songs , they are... some of them are nice but the best ones probably ended up on the album "From Genesis To Revelation" and the ones that didn't; there are some that are alright but I don’t think they are our finest hour.

PC: I think Mike and Tony, and Peter had... and also some friends of theirs had the really old stuff and I was asked if I had any because I kept everything because I am known in the band as... or I was known in the band as the archivist. I was the one who wrote down everything on the cassettes as to rehearsals, you know taping all the rehearsals and in fact there is a lovely quote that Mike made that when I left what did they miss most about me? And they said; 'the recording of the rehearsals' as if I was... and it is actually very true I did that pretty good. But they asked me to look in the diaries and I actually had in my 1970 diary on August 8 I think it was 'got Genesis job' and so I gave them bits and pieces like that some of which they may have used and some of which they haven't.

INT: Did founder member Anthony Phillips come up with anything?

TB: Yes, he actually came up with aversion of a song that we had lost and which was recorded for "From Genesis To Revelation" that didn't end up on it which was called "Build Me A Mountain" which actually on hearing it, was quite a good song actually one of the songs I liked more than some of the others but... he has been involved and it is part of his past as much as everyone else's hence this fourth cd and he is on every track on that so he is there. And he was very important member of the group I think and that can't be overstated. I think he was the one keenest for us to go professional in the first place. He was a major contributor as a writer particularly on the twelve string sort of sound which was very much a part of early Genesis, and that very much came from him I think particularly in combination with Mike. The two of them used to play together and they used to do lots of these things that was just a lovely sound and it was great shame that he couldn't stay with us but that's the way it went.

INT: Anthony, can you take us back and tell us how Genesis got started?

AP: There was no kind of organised start to it really, it was just... Genesis began as a different thing, it began as a group of songwriters that just got round a piano or a guitar because I was in the same house as Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel and different people would come in and sit at the piano and play and others would come in and sing along; often covers but gradually Tony would start playing some of his own stuff and then realise that Peter could sing and we had no idea that he could sing because he was a drummer and had a drum kit that he would let us borrow and Mike drifted off for a while doing various other things and then he sort of came back into it and so, the way that Genesis formed, came together was a kind of because of the two song writing partnerships but with Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel being the more sort of dominant to start with because Peter was the singer and Tony was the most accomplished musician and so it sort of came together like that, much more as song writers rather than a band. In fact we signed our first publishing contract on the basis of three or four songs but mainly got the deal on the basis of a Gabriel/Banks song in 1967, I think it was, and we got paid £10 each I think, advance.

INT: What inspired you to get together as a band?

PG: I was crazy about music and particularly drums, at the time and it was sort of Otis Redding and soul music and that was part of it, and on the other hand there was church music which was another influence. And we started writing songs, and I would write with Tony and Mike and Ant were in another band also writing called Anon and we would get together for different sessions and I think that whenever you start playing music as teenager, you still stand in front of the mirror and imagine a huge audience or whatever and all the fantasies are there. I don't think we got serious about it until later on when we got a tape and listened to, and someone from a record company actually replied it felt very exciting that we would be connected to this music world where all the energy and enthusiasm seemed to emanate.

INT: Tell us about the early days of Genesis as a school band?

TB: Anthony Phillips, the guitarist was probably the main ingredient he was part of every school band that existed at that time because he was a good guitarist - he was the only guitarist but he was good as well but he was the only guy in the school who owned a guitar and an amp. So that sort of put him as quite important as a nucleus of every group and Ant used to do some work with Mike and that was one of the main groups in school. Peter and I used to play together at school; mainly old Soul music and when during one summer holiday, Ant and Mike decided that they were going to make a tape of their songs and Ant said; 'do you want to come along?' and so I said; 'OK, I'll come along' and I said, 'Shall I bring Peter because we've got a song which we'd quite like to do as well?' and originally Ant was assuming he was going to sing his own songs and he hasn't got the greatest voice in the world and he started off and I did suggest after we had done the first song on that first demo tape that I thought Peter had a slightly better voice and maybe it would be better if he sang the other songs as well as the song we were doing together and that's really how it started. We were just really... we did end up playing one gig at school but we weren't really a school group in the sense that we didn’t really spend much of our time there. We were formed much as a kind of song writing union if you like and the four of us put together initially, put together this one tape together which included songs written mainly by Ant and Mike but one song from Peter and I.

INT: John, you joined this "school band" - how seriously did you all view the group and its future at this stage?

JS: We were all doing it quite seriously. The nexus of the band really, was comprised of Mike, Peter and Ant and I'd become friendly with Peter in London and I'd said that I had been a drummer in a band... in a series of bands and so he said; 'well come and meet the other guys' and we met at various flats and apartments in London and eventually I did some playing with them and we all hit it off, and we all knew that it was quite possible that we would be successful and we all wanted the success a great deal but we weren't willing to compromise on the publicity and the commercial side for that success. As to whether we knew it was going to be successful... we didn't know it was going to be successful but... a lot of it is difficult to remember but we were certainly doing everything we could to make it a success.

INT: How important was Jonathan King in getting the band off the ground?

PG: He was very important in getting it going because we had sent a couple of tapes off and had heard absolutely nothing and then we were all a bit nervous about dumping tapes so we got this friend of ours, John Alexander, to put the tape in his car and that was... when he was interested in it, that was a good exciting moment and in fact then we started to send in demos which he was less impressed with and we wanted o get an album made and so I remembered that he was totally obsessed with the Bee Gees the time and so we tried to steer one with a slight Bee Gees tinge to it (laughter). And sure enough, he responded to that! And that is what got us to make our first album.

TB: Once we had come out of school and we had interested Jonathan King in the music... he, we went through various more tapes with him and then we finally did one record with him which was "From Genesis To Revelation" which we thought was going to... well we thought, the first single, "The Silent Sun" and then the album "From Genesis To Revelation" was going to make us into stars. I didn't get any real concept of where that would lead us or anything and as it was, nothing came from any of that and I just carried on; went to university like I had originally intended. During that year at university we carried on making tapes together and everything and after that... my year at university, Ant and Mike said that they wanted to go professional because they weren't aiming for university and things. And Peter and I said that we would stay with them and help them for a summer until they found some replacements and by the end of the summer I think both Peter and I were still intending to leave and we used to share a room quite a bit and we sort of persuaded each other to stay because we thought this was a chance we had that might never come again and although it wasn't really getting anywhere we just felt that the music was exciting and we were enjoying ourselves a great deal and that we ought to try and stick at it and so we persuaded each other to stay and I just took another year off from university actually... I took my first year off from university in order to please my parents more than anything I think, I never intended to go back.

We then started making more tapes and started to play live and so that is really how it got going.

INT: Did Jonathan King actually have a lot of creative input as producer?

MR: Well, he was involved, not especially in the arranging side. We kind of arranged it and recorded it and then he came... the whole album took three days if I remember rightly. In many ways, apart from choosing songs with us I suppose his main role was to mix it and to put the string parts on which never... they weren't great some were ok but they weren't the greatest part of the album. I think it is important to remember that Jonathan was very important because he gave us a chance to indulge ourselves. In those days to be aged sixteen and to be given the chance to make an album in the summer holidays was unusual. Going into the studio at our sort of level of playing ability and unprofessionalism in many ways. No lack of enthusiasm, but to be like we were and to be given any chance to record an album was unusual and I think that was a very important part in what got us going and I know that when we recorded it we really got excited about what we could do.

JS: We were really a bunch of youngsters thrust up at a time when people didn’t get recording contracts like they did much later on and so if Jonathan King said; 'stand this way' or 'do it that way' we were really in no position to argue or indeed, consider arguing.

INT: Where did the name Genesis come from?

TB: It was Jonathan King, he did... as he has said before I think. He did come up with the name yes, I can't deny it. We didn't have... we had a record to put out called "The Silent Sun" and we didn't have a name and some of the suggestions were very kind of... dodgy at the time, I think. There were some embarrassing names, there was one, The Champagne Meadow or something... can you imagine it? Anyhow, it was '67 I've told you and he just suggested Genesis which was nice and simple and we thought 'Oh, alright' so we put it out under the name of Genesis and it kind of... it stuck.

PG: Yeah, he came up with the name, well actually his first suggestion was Gabriel's Angels which I liked, but the rest of the band somehow seemed to miss! (laughter).

INT: What are your memories of recording that first album?

AP: The first album was incredibly exciting because it was sort of in the school holidays and it was the summer after Flower Power and so the whole thing was just impossibly exciting (laughs) indescribably exciting to be in a real recording studio and multi tracking and I had always had very basic multi tracking... double tracking facilities at home and in fact when I started I was playing the second guitar not being able to hear the first one, I was that keen. So, being in a proper studio with all this gear was just so exciting. It was tremendously optimistic.

The second album was more professional; we had been on the road for a year and it was more going through the motions so I would say it was less fun although the product was obviously much more accomplished.

INT: How do you feel you developed from the first album to the second?

AP: The first Genesis album was... we all played but not really as a good, tight unit but a bit of a loose pop band really and with the relative failure of that first album that then forced us to say 'let's try and become a fully fledged band'. I mean, going on the road changed things completely. And also we started on the road against a background that things were changing from the more sort of song orientated sort of bands like, obviously, fantastic bands like The Beatles through to the sort of Yes's and King Crimson's and so the standard of actual playing was changing dramatically and virtuosity was coming in and so when we put ourselves through the mill at this cottage for about six months we just sort of suddenly changed really, from a very raw sort of pop outfit to quite an accomplished powerful sort of electric unit. Tony Banks hated the idea of playing the organ, he was absolutely against it and he almost had to be pushed into it really because he was a pianist first and foremost but I think we just gradually accepted that this was what had to be done and I think it was good for the band. I think if the first album had been successful and there had been hits then we would have been beguiled by all that it would have been a disaster, we probably wouldn’t have made the effort to have done that work that turned the band into a powerful live unit.

INT: John, why did you decide to leave the band?

JS: The reason that I left was because I'd been offered an assisted place at a university in the States. This was at the time of the film "The Graduate" which had just come out and by the end of the summer we had already had an album and some singles out. I had already heard myself on the radio and had had the pleasure of 'phoning up all my pals and relatives and saying 'listen we are on the Radio Light Programme' or it may even have been Radio One by that stage and we had met lots of famous people. And I thought that what was ahead was a pretty hard slog and so I decided to go to university a bit later rather than stick with it and the success that eventually accrued, accrued long after I had left and was the result of many, many years of traipsing up and down the M1 in the back of a transit van.

INT: Anthony, why did you leave?

AP: Well, obviously it is a question I have been asked more than any other question in my life, including what is your name? For me, things on the road just began to go wrong a bit really and I think I realised at that point that this wasn't the life for me and the fact that we all lived together in the same cottage didn't help after a while. It was great fun in a kind of idealistic way but actually not terribly sensible for people getting on. To be honest, the pressure of it all got to me after a while you know we had all these gigs where agents would come and it all got so high powered and intense and I thought 'I'm not sure if I can deal with this' really.

Do I regret it? Well, of course in some respects but I don’t think that it is really helpful to think like that because the group needed a bit of space really. There was too much of this and somebody needed to go and obviously it was me that went first.

INT: Did those personnel changes fundamentally affect the way the band sounded?

TB: Well, yes there was a big change really. With the drummers it was slightly less of a problem because when... back to that time when Peter and I, and Ant and Mike decided to go professional the guy we had at the time was called John Silver who drummed on the "From Genesis To Revelation" album and he didn't want to go professional, he wanted to carry on his career and go to university and everything, which was fine. So, we had to look for another drummer and we looked; we auditioned various people and this guy John Mayhew was someone who turned up and he impressed us because he was someone who... he was the only guy who could do this sort of "bah boom, bah, buh buh boom", riff which was what we were really looking for a drummer to do. And he impressed us so much that we hired him and he was fine. The only problem we had with him was that he wasn't really a creative kind of drummer and we ended up really writing all his parts for him and I don't think that was a very good way to work with a drummer and we didn't feel that good about it.

Later on when Anthony Phillips decided that he couldn't take the pressures of the road and he got too nervous about it and decided he had to leave; and when we decided to carry on I was the one who really made the suggestion that we had to get a better drummer because if we were going to carry on we needed more strength in that area particularly if we were going to have Ant, who was a very strong contributor to the writing of the group and everything. And that was when we auditioned for both a drummer and a guitarist at the same time and e we obviously found the drummer first who was Phil, and we couldn't find a guitarist and obviously, Steve came a few months later and we actually went around for quite a long time as a four piece which had... for me it was a very important period because I ended up playing all the guitar parts on keyboards as well and that was when I started playing two instruments at the same time because I was playing fuzz piano really to try and compensate for the guitar parts - not terribly successfully - but it did give you an impression of what it would be like playing two instruments at the same time which obviously became quite an important feature of Genesis after that and so that made me mature quite a bit. It also made Mike mature a lot because he had to play a lot more guitar because he was obviously primarily the bassist in the original group although he did a lot of acoustic guitar but he did a little more guitar playing when we were a four piece which we kind of kept going even when Steve joined us.

INT: Peter; I understand you auditioned for new members at your parents' house...?

PG: Yeah, well we used to rehearse there and we would take over the living room of the house which is the house that they are still in to this day and we tried to devise an audition, and auditions are terrible processes because you can't really... You can tell a certain amount but it is a bit like going for a job interview or something you don't really get to see who it is you are dealing with. At the same time, I think you can sometimes tell a good musician from the way they sit down at their instrument; before they have played a note and that was definitely the case with Phil. He had a confidence about him but we had a sort of twenty minute audition routine to try and get a few people through and some of it was learning sort of pretty complex stuff as well as just seeing what the grooves were like because we really wanted someone who could pick things up very quickly. Phil, being Phil of course started to get this, wondering what was going on and he started listening and he always arrives early - often earlier than many of the rest of us - and he was there with is friend Ronnie an hour early and he heard one or maybe two drummers run through this test. So by the time he came to do it, he knew it backwards (laughter) and it was very impressive.

INT: What are your memories of that day, Phil?

PC: Well, there was me and a friend called Ronnie Caryl who is actually in my band now, my own band. We had grown up together, I met him when I was thirteen. We went through various bands and the band we were in: Flaming Youth was kind of winding up so we decided to look around for jobs and I saw... I knew Tony Stratton-Smith who was the boss of Charisma, I had met him with previous bands at the famed Russell Hotel in Russell Square and I saw the ad in the back page of Melody Maker and thought this is probably a job I could get without doing the audition, you know. So I went to the Marquee Club one night and saw Strat and said; 'I hear there's a job going?' This band had a square round the advert which was very important at that time, and he said; 'Oh no, these guys are pretty fussy, you are going to have to go for the audition'.

So me and Ronnie went down to Chobham which was Peter Gabriel's fathers' and mother's house and I went down there in Ronnie's car with my drums in the back and Ronnie's guitar because they were also looking for a guitarist and I went down there and I was a bit early so I took a swim in the pool which was kind of 'Wow! People live like this?' (laughs) and listened to all the other drummers; the three or four drummers ahead of me you know; what they were doing, and it was kind of a set piece Genesis had found four or five pieces of music that would kind of show the drummer's versatility; memory, you know. So by the time I got to play, I knew it all and I was pretty quick anyway but I was really super slick that day because I had heard all these other guys so I went in there and pretty much waltzed through it and apparently the guys knew that I was the guy because when I sat down, because of the way I sat and the way I played... I remember leaving the audition with Ronnie, who was also auditioned by Mike and Ronnie said; 'I think you blew it there, I think you blew it'. I think I did very well and of course, I got the job and he didn't! Ronnie is still a great friend of mine; he is still in my band but he actually played a gig with Genesis later on when we still couldn't find a guitar player; he played at Princes Risborough Friars one night, and then of course, we found Steve.

INT: Talking of Friars - do you recall those early Friars gigs with nostalgia?

PG: Yeah, Friars I loved, like in a way when you go to someone's house the place is full of the people that live there and David Stopps especially and his team were some of the most enthusiastic; friendly people you are ever likely to meet and a number of artists - Bowie for instance, and Mott The Hoople and I am sure there is along list - first found a positive audience and a positive audience at Friars. It is like your first lover or something you remember well wen somebody actually likes what you are doing and responds very well to it. And although we had had good gigs in other places that was really the first place that adopted us so yeah, there are many good memories.

INT: Were you building up a good live following?

PC: Yeah, there were pockets of real strongholds with Genesis and the fans in the clubs. You know, it was very obvious that this was building because... and I think we were one of the last groups to come out of that kind of clubs/Student Union/Universities/Concerts it was a steady growth and it was before MTV and before VH1 and it was down to that; it was down to what the newspapers said about you which was fortunately when they were music papers not the sort of political rags they are now. You know, it was purely about music and it didn't matter what you looked like because it was about the music. Having said that, I don't want to sound like a wounded animal; I mean, I think that what happened as a result of some of that - the Punk revolution was fantastic, but at the time it was just about what the critics, who were music critics thought of the music and how they reviewed the records and how they reviewed the concerts that made people want to go out and see these bands that they were writing about and we were fortunately involved in that, because if it was what you looked like that mattered, then we wouldn't have been heard of since! (laughs) We were pretty ordinary looking guys.

INT: Phil, you came from a very different background from the other guys. Did you find it difficult to fit in?

PC: I didn’t find it difficult in some respects; I was just glad to be in a band that was working because I looked in Melody Maker all the time to see who was on in London and I would always see Quintessence and I would always see Genesis they were both, seemingly, very hardworking bands so to me I was suddenly able to play every night. That was what was in the future, of course, but when I joined Genesis the first thing they did after I joined was go on holiday for two weeks. So I... the only "proper" job I ever did was during those two weeks when I had to earn some money so I did some exterior decorating, which I hated and then they came back from holiday and we went to The Maltings in Farnham to rehearse and write. Rehearse some old stuff and write some new stuff which was to become Nursery Cryme and during those rehearsals; they would just flare up; I guess tensions were quite high and Peter would say something to Tony that I would miss and Tony would be off; he would walk out and not come back or a few hours and vice-versa and then Mike would getup and storm out and I would just be sitting there with my sticks thinking 'What's going on?' It was a very different group to be in to the ones I had been in before but at the same time, the way they wrote was also very different and it was very interesting. It was all about the composition rather than the playing and at that time for me it was all about the playing rather than the composition so we kind of met in the middle; and I was class clown I was the joker of the pack because I didn't have any reason to be there other than the fact that I was the drummer.

INT: Did Phil bring a welcome sense of humour to Genesis?

PG: Yeah, he definitely did and I think I enjoyed his humour and when we did the dreaded tour round; the promo tours if the two of us were working on stuff there would be a lot of jokes flying around and that was good. He would duck out of confrontations sometimes but he was good with the jokes.

MR: I think we have, all of us, grown up over the years from Charterhouse; the three of us who were there at the time - and we were pretty intense young men, probably a bit too serious you know about "our art". I think life is like that; life is intense when you are a teenager and Phil came along and was a bit of a joker he had really good sense of humour and he seemed more laid back, and I think it affected us actually. He was a very important personality to bring into the band and I think it rubbed off on us too. It is amazing how a bit of humour can divert a huge argument that is about to happen.

INT: Did you find them a little serious, Phil?

PC: Deadly serious. That is an understatement to say that they were a little serious; they were deadly serious (laughs) and they had a lot of... they hadn't long left school, public school and we all know what that can do to people and I had come from a drama school, a stage school where anything went. We used to study for our GCE's with "Sergeant Pepper" on and "Younger Than Yesterday" by The Byrds and we used to have that on in the classroom while we were studying and we were at totally opposite ends of the scale from the upbringing aspect of it, so we were... I loved it.

INT: Steve Hackett, you were the next new boy. Were you aware of the band before you joined?

SH: There were a couple of bands that had names that were a bit like Genesis; there was another band called Quintessence at the time, and Genesis - and I thought at that time - 1970, it was the kind of tail end of the hippy era really - and I thought, 'Oh this band Genesis; it has got to be all joss-sticks and incense and kaftans' and all that kind of stuff and very Hare Krishna and in fact it turned out not to be like that at all, it was all very hard working, very studious, very straight ahead, very professional even from the word go, and I remember that. I remember that rehearsals started at ten or eleven in the morning and then at six o'clock everyone would clock off and up to then I had done this semi-pro stuff and we didn't get interested until the evenings because everyone was doing jobs so I thought; 'How can they down tools at six? This is all so emotional, how can they possibly do that?' Even now, I end up working until midnight if I am into it, but no the band was very much 'Oh, no that's it; time for tea, off we go...'

INT: Phil, as a new boy yourself, what do you recall about Steve joining?

PC: I don't know how long it was between me joining and Steve joining because we actually... it seemed to be a considerable amount of time; six months maybe between me joining and him joining and we did lots of gigs as a four piece on which Tony used to play the lead guitar parts on a Hohner Pianette with a fuzz box as a lead guitar kind of replacement. So we did that and as I said, I remember Ronnie playing and that was like a month or so after the fact that I had joined ad then we tried Ronnie again, so there were a couple of alternatives and in fact there was another guitar player, Mick Barnard, who was in the band for a considerable amount of time, so it must have been a fair amount of time between me and Steve. So, by the time that Steve joined I wasn't a new boy much anymore. Still maybe a bit of a square peg in a round hole but the edges were wearing off, you know what I mean?

So, we auditioned Steve and I remember meeting him for the first time, probably after the audition and I imagine that Mike sat with him first and then we all met him and this guy, clothed totally in black with a beard and very intense King Crimson fan and he came by and was very intense, very meticulous. So, anyway he got the job and his first gig was City University which was were I tried to test the rule about how many pints of Newcastle Brown Ale you could drink and still play the drums! (laughs) And I proved that night that you shouldn't really drink Newcastle Brown in great quantities and try to play the set but I was playing and all the strobes were going and all the drum fills were slightly left of the drum each time and of course the tempos were probably all over the place and Steve came off and was so nervous that he thought he'd blown it and I don’t think anyone was man enough to say: 'You're pissed!' and that was the only time but I remember that because it was his first gig.

INT: Do you remember your audition, Steve?

SH: I didn't really do an official audition. I gather that they had auditioned about forty guitarists and that must have been hell for everybody I should think, but I had stuck an ad in Melody Maker which was as quirky as I could word it. At the time I noticed that the ads in the back of Melody Maker were getting a bit more elaborate you know, you got guys proclaiming that they were into Pink Floyd and Prokofiev and they played oboe. So, I thought this is a stand out kind of ad, you know and I thought, 'Maybe I can do something like that?' So I did; "Guitarist/Writer seeks receptive musicians determined to strive beyond existing stagnant musical forms". And I thought that will show that I am completely crazy and that I am serious at the same time and so Peter Gabriel phoned me up and we had this very strange conversation; I was trying to make my guitar sound like a train at the time using a bow on it, before Jimmy Page was doing it in fact, I believe. I said: 'Picture this: the stage in blackout and it starts with this shunting noise?'. And we were off to this crazy start already and they said; 'Well, really what you should do is to meet Mike Rutherford, because he is our other guitarist' and I met Tony, they came round one day and I played them a bit of stuff and they said 'You have really got to meet Mike and he's not well; he's recovering'. He was sitting up in bed in his pyjamas recovering from an ulcer and I thought; 'He's twenty years old and he's got an ulcer already, this guy?' And so it was the strangest audition in the world; him sitting up I think we both had twelve string guitars and we were both swapping chord shapes and I think I got in largely because I liked chords and so did he, and so did they, and so we did 'Here's a G; here's this...' you know, it wasn’t like 'He's got the right haircut; he's got the right shoes' Shoes? Peter used to go round in borrowed shoes; at the time he wore his dads shoes for the first two years I knew him and his dad's overcoat, I mean frankly it was all a bit "War On Want" when we first all got together.

INT: Did Steve bring a new element into the band?

TB: I think slightly because Steve was more of an electric guitarist and also more into sounds actually and I think from that point of view and listening back to the tapes as well, that was his great contribution in that sense. Steve and I also used to play a lot listening to each other in a sense, often playing in unison and in harmony and when he did a funny sound I would try do a funny sound too, and so you got little interplays like that and he had an interesting style which was slightly different to what the original Genesis thing was but nevertheless it was still very imaginative and it took us into different directions probably. Perhaps he was more into true classical style a bit and that kind of rubbed off on some of the songs.

And that is where we leave this interesting look back at the formative period of the band's story. Next time we shall look at what the band had to say about the latter half of Peter's career with the band culminating with "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" and the Box Set project itself.