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Fox heads, a red dress borrowed from your wife\u2019s wardrobe, the all consuming Supper\u2019s Ready, their first chart hit, how Foxtrot was the making of Genesis<\/p>\nFox heads, a red dress borrowed from your wife\u2019s wardrobe, the all consuming Supper\u2019s Ready, their first chart hit, how Foxtrot was the making of Genesis<\/p>\n
The foxtrot \u2013 the dance itself, which premiered just under a century ago \u2013 is usually defined as a smooth dance of long, continuous, flowing movements. Genesis\u2019 Foxtrot, which arrived 40 years ago, certainly has its long, continuous flowing movements, and much else besides.<\/p>\n
Today it sounds as unique, dramatic, thrilling and ambitious as ever. It\u2019s where the classic line-up of the band came fully into being; it\u2019s when they realised how much they could do, how far they could go. \u201cIt was about creating a film for the ear rather than the eye,\u201d says Steve Hackett. \u201cAnd it even got to Number 12 in the charts,\u201d Tony Banks laughs. \u201cOf course the next week it went down to Number 27 or something, but it was our first moment of scoring anything, so we felt that we were underway, that we were heading somewhere different. Foxtrot was where we first started, in my opinion, to become significant.\u201d<\/p>\n
While all of its tracks are strong and inventive, Foxtrot is unavoidably dominated by the 23-minute, seven-part suite which graced what used to be side two. Supper\u2019s Ready is one of the towering landmarks of prog, dovetailing short surreal pieces with moving neo-classical reprises and recapitulations, serene flows with shuddering staccato, parochial realism with pulchritudinous dreams. Across this fire from the skies, Peter Gabriel sings of battles between good and evil and love and war, of firemen, farmers, flowers (\u2018a flower?\u2019), and a frog who was a prince (who was a brick) (which was an egg) (which was a bird). And of 666 and a new Jerusalem. Startling then, it remains a stunning achievement of vision and scale. Roger Taylor of Queen has called it, \u201cat separate times, homely, beautiful, tortured and epic.\u201d \u2018We\u2019ve got everything,\u2019 it declares presciently. \u2018We\u2019re growing everything\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
While Supper\u2019s Ready is the main course, Foxtrot should however be appreciated as more than just a set of appetisers leading up to it. It\u2019s strange to learn that the album came about in a relatively ramshackle manner: no great master plan had been conceived.<\/p>\n
The band sought a producer who could capture their improving live sound, and to that end had meetings or sessions with Paul Samwell-Smith, John Anthony and Bob Potter. None was quite the right fit so David Hitchcock, whose work with Caravan had impressed, came in, with the more outspoken engineer John Burns.<\/p>\n
Steve Hackett was fatigued by the heavy touring schedule and still somewhat intimidated by his fellow band members\u2019 prowess (\u201cthese guys are so good\u201d, he\u2019s recalled thinking).<\/p>\n
In 2012, having just re-recorded Supper\u2019s Ready and others for his Genesis Revisited II album, he remembers the steps towards Foxtrot more fondly. \u201cThere weren\u2019t a lot of days off; we were a hard-working live band,\u201d he says. \u201cWhereas with its predecessor, Nursery Cryme, we\u2019d taken the summer off and written and recorded together as a unit, bonding the team, this time we were on the run, in and out of the studio. I remember flying back from Italy to be in there a day or two ahead of the others, who were travelling by road, just to finish off my guitar parts on the end of Supper\u2019s Ready.\u201d<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one album that doesn\u2019t sound like a rush job, it\u2019s Foxtrot…!<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe not. But when you\u2019ve done something, you know what your intention was. The perpetrators will always be looking for improvements. We generally agreed to a man that we recorded Watcher Of The Skies too fast. To my ears now it sounds like a young band desperate to get the notes right in a race to the finish. Once we\u2019d been playing it live for a while, we relaxed into it and it sounded bigger. The version that ended up on Genesis Live is more in-the-pocket. That rhythm is almost impossible for any band to play perfectly! It\u2019s full of pitfalls.Yet there\u2019s lots of weird and wonderful stuff; it\u2019s a band at its most creatively eccentric.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rehearsals (and writing sessions) in a variety of locations may have coloured the album\u2019s angles and attitudes. Hackett recounts that Foxtrot was worked up in a variety of \u201cdrab, functional\u201d places, until they moved (without Gabriel, who added the words later) to the Una Billings School Of Dance in Shepherd\u2019s Bush. \u201cThere were girls dancing upstairs, learning their tap-dance and what-have-you. And the sound of that, those rhythms would come down through the ceiling. We were below in what had been a refectory, so you had a counter here and a gobstopper-dispensing machine there. It was all a bit strange, and the atmosphere influenced our subsequent efforts. Much of Supper\u2019s Ready was written in the two weeks there. With the tap-dancing upstairs, you couldn\u2019t be too serious for long, because you\u2019d hear them: clumpety clump clump. That rhythm would kick in, and we\u2019d have to break into smiles\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Watcher Of The Skies had grown out of Banks \u201cfooling around\u201d with the Mellotron. \u201cWe bought one of the ex-King Crimson Mellotrons,\u201d he notes, \u201cand Robert Fripp insisted it was the one they\u2019d used on In The Court Of The Crimson King. Mind you, he had three, and I\u2019m sure he said that about all of them when he was selling them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hackett too emphasises the importance of that instrument to the album. \u201cI\u2019d kept hammering on that we should get one, saying it\u2019d make our story-telling abilities so much greater. It meant that the band could function as a time machine, with all these various mythologies. The idea was that all the old instruments were there within the Frankenstein that was the Mellotron.It was like an alien orchestra being beamed to you by satellite. And you need to be able to smell the dust from time to time. It had a\u2026 cold warmth. I think it\u2019s actually the most influential keyboard instrument in the whole of rock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Banks reckons people had never heard \u201ca big, big sound like that\u201d before. It brought the album in with an impossible-to-ignore surge.<\/p>\n
\u201cTime Table, Get \u2018Em Out By Friday and Can-Utility And The Coastliners don\u2019t get as much attention as the others,\u201d agrees Hackett, \u201cbut they\u2019re all part of the journey.\u201d Not least because of Gabriel\u2019s always busy, multi-voiced lyrics. \u201cYes, there\u2019s important social comment on Get \u2018Em Out\u2026, and the rest is hardly boy-meets-girl, is it? And the sci-fi elements show that mythology doesn\u2019t have to be backward looking. Time Table has something: there\u2019s a magic between the piano and the six-string electric. It chimes. You get that third instrument \u2013 not piano, not guitar \u2013 where the distinction between them is blurred. The ensemble work welds instruments together, grafts them onto each other like that Star Trek mind-meld. It\u2019s not so much an album of solos.<\/p>\n
So how was the response to Foxtrot upon initial release? Were people dazzled, confused, appalled, or exhilarated? Or just indifferent?<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of those things,\u201d muses Hackett. \u201cDon\u2019t forget, we weren\u2019t The Beatles.<\/p>\n
Just before they released Sgt Pepper, they worried whether they\u2019d gone too far and whether the crowd might give them the thumbs-down. We felt in a similar position. It was early days for the band. We just weren\u2019t sure. We\u2019d really gone out on a limb with Supper\u2019s Ready, it was labyrinthine with layers, and it was by no means certain that the response would be positive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course Paul Whitehead\u2019s surrealist sleeve design is as much a part of the Foxtrot \u201cimmersion\u201d experience as that pyramid-prism is to The Dark Side Of The Moon. Gabriel certainly dived in, courageously donning his wife\u2019s red dress and a fox-head for stage shows. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting how the most cherished albums have the most cherished sleeves,\u201d ponders Hackett. \u201cI think for fans of it there was always that feeling of looking at it and thinking: I\u2019m onto something here that other people don\u2019t necessarily know about. One\u2019s taste becomes tribal: these albums become important bonding elements. Where language leaves off, music begins, and you share a dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
A dream that\u2019s lasted 40 years and counting, in the case of Foxtrot\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cMusicians do tend to disparage their early work: the need to continually move forward can be everything. I prefer to celebrate it, and look for what\u2019s right about it. If you have passion, energy and honesty you will come up with something valuable. You don\u2019t always verbalise it as a band, you try to do things instinctively, listening closely to each other without ego \u2013 and sometimes you get a great crystallisation. You may not recognise it at the time, you might think it was just a doodle, but someone else will see it as a full-blown portrait, a Mona Lisa. The musicians might still be searching, but the audience, the true owners, will say: look no further. We\u2019ve found it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fox heads, a red dress borrowed from your wife\u2019s wardrobe, the all consuming Supper\u2019s Ready, their first chart hit, how Foxtrot was the making of Genesis The foxtrot \u2013 the dance itself, which premiered just under a century ago \u2013 is usually defined as a smooth dance of long, continuous, flowing movements. Genesis\u2019 Foxtrot, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1023,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1027","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2026.ikon2023.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}