“This is where we started to become significant”
By Chris Roberts ( Prog )
published March 22, 2017
Genesis’ Supper’s Ready has been voted your number one prog anthem of all time. Here, the band look back on the track
Supper’s Ready has been voted your favourite prog anthem of all time. To see the rest of the list, click here.
‘The frog was a prince, the prince was a brick, the brick was an egg – and the egg was a bird. Hadn’t you heard?
Well, 45 years on from the creation of Supper’s Ready, you probably have heard this invaluable information. You’ve heard the 23 minutes and seven sections of the definitive Genesis track – indeed the definitive prog track, as voted for by you, our readers – and been transported by its breathtaking ambition. Its carefully cohesive meanderings lash together symphonic rock, heartbreaking melodies, surrealist lyrics and sky-high drama to build ‘new Jerusalem’.
Those involved were trying to conjure up previously-unheard music, while taking detours to rifle through the book of Revelation and pay visits to Lover’s Leap and Willow Farm. Oh, and to soundtrack an apocalypse…in 9⁄8 time.
“We wanted to go further,” says Tony Banks. “We’d all been wanting to push away from the regular structures.” With a very English, very Genesis reserve, he adds, “It turned out better than we’d thought.”
Foxtrot, the fourth Genesis studio album and the second with the classic line-up of Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins, Steve Hackett and Tony Banks, was where that ensemble fully coalesced and realised how far they could go.
“It was about creating a film for the ear rather than the eye,” says Hackett. “We felt that we were underway,” says Banks, “that we were heading somewhere different. Foxtrot was where we started, in my opinion, to become significant.” As the song goes: ‘We’ve got everything; we’re growing everything.’
While the album sounds like a meticulously confident execution of a master plan, it actually came to be in a loose, relatively rushed manner. The band’s touring schedule was exhausting, and Hackett recalls that whereas with the band’s previous record, Nursery Cryme, they’d taken the summer to bond as a group, writing and recording together, for this one they were darting in and out of the studio.
“I remember flying back from Italy to be there a day or two ahead of the others, who were travelling by road, just to finish off my guitar parts over the end of Supper’s Ready,” he says.
Various locations were used for rehearsals but the bulk of Supper’s Ready was crafted – prior to the absent Gabriel adding the words later – in, of all places, the Una Billings School Of Dance in Shepherds Bush.