Authors: Mike Rutherford
This was a great outcome for me – vindication at last – and it also led to the start of a slow improvement in my relationship with my father. But there were other important events also now occurring. The Anon had petered out but a new band was taking shape . . .
I hadn’t really come across Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel that much at Charterhouse: we were in different houses and boys didn’t tend to mix. Sometimes I would see them in Record Corner, the record shop in Godalming, listening to music through headphones in one of the little booths, but because Record Corner was strictly off limits – you needed a chit even to walk into town – it wasn’t really the place to bond. (Charterhouse boys always got jeered a bit in Godalming but it didn’t bother me: I would see the town boys with their long hair and feel we were all in the same game. Music seemed to me to do an important job in bridging divides.)
Everything about Peter Gabriel in those days was soft and round. You could tell he wasn’t a sportsman. He had a circular, slightly chubby face and his school jacket always seemed too small for him, but although he was quiet, he had an air of confidence about him. At Charterhouse there were guys who were trying to be cool, those who were cool without trying, and those who were never going to get there. Pete was none of those. He was comfortable in his skin. He made his own hats and dyed T-shirts in sinks; he was quite free-spirited, but very worldly too.
Tony was also quiet but he was edgy and skinny and had a quick, worried step – he’d never stride anywhere. He came from a classical background whereas Pete loved R & B, Nina Simone and Otis Redding. As well as the piano Pete played the drums at Charterhouse. He was never destined to be a great drummer but he had a very strong feel for rhythm. His drum kit was his pride and joy and he’d lend it to anyone who managed to twist his arm but he’d always stand alongside with his eyebrows furrowed while it was being played.
It was during the 1967 Easter holidays that Ant and I together with Pete and Tony recorded a demo tape in the attic of another Charterhouse boy, Brian Roberts. He was the kind of guy who you knew from a young age would be a BBC technician in later life. A boffin. He always had a white shirt with a stain on it and greasy hair.
Brian had transformed the attic of this house into a recording studio. It just had egg boxes on the walls and a two-track tape recorder in the corner, but was still pretty cutting edge in those days. It was more than enough for our purposes.
Ant, who had been planning to sing on the tape, had invited Tony to come to Brian’s and play keyboards. Tony had then invited Pete to come because he knew Pete had a better voice than Ant. (Funnily enough, I don’t remember Ant having a hump about being replaced as singer: he knew it was for the common good.)
Given that Ant and I were into the blues – John Mayall and Eric Clapton – as well as the Stones and the Beatles, we were quite a diverse lot. I’ve always thought that half the point of being in a band is that the guys you’re playing with are different to you: they bring something to the music that you can’t.
We recorded five songs that afternoon, four by me and Ant, and one, ‘She Is Beautiful’, by Peter and Tony. Theirs was definitely the best. It had a moody sadness to it, a hint of darkness – probably because it had been written for Peter’s voice which always had that feeling.
Sometimes you just need a lucky break. That first tape we made in Brian Roberts’s attic had our best songs on it, but if you took away Pete and Tony’s song it wasn’t as good. Yet Jonathan King must have heard there was something there.
Jonathan had been at Charterhouse a few years before us and had come back to the school for an old boys’ day. At the time he’d just had a huge hit with ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ and had written and produced another hit, ‘It’s Good News Week’, for Hedgehoppers Anonymous, which was released on Decca. He was also a bombastic self-promoter who talked the talk and wore noisy, very flamboyant clothes. I’m also sure he fancied Pete – we all thought that. But he did have an ear for a song.
I don’t know why it got left to our friend John Alexander, another school friend, to put the tape in Jonathan’s car while he was down at Charterhouse – I think in the end John Al was the only one who had the nerve. He was one of those lucky boys who’d got away with long hair because nobody realized it was long. It was thick, black and curly and he had a chunk of it that he could tuck behind his ear and pull out when the masters weren’t around. He undertook the clandestine operation on Jonathan’s car and managed to leave the tape along with a note: ‘These are Charterhouse boys, have a listen.’ And Jonathan must have done because soon after that he invited us up to London to meet his business partner, Joe Roncoroni.
Joe was an old-school music publisher: a well-built Jewish guy who’d been publishing cabaret and vaudeville songs when suddenly pop appeared. We were naturally extremely impressed that he and Jonathan liked our songs but we were less sure about Jonathan’s idea that our next step should be to form a band. Until then our plan was to be songwriters and let someone else do the performing, something that wasn’t unusual back then.
Songwriting was (and is still) the area in which I measure success: I’ve seen many guitarists who can play fantastically well but who can’t write an original song. We wanted to be original from the word go but, unfortunately for us, Jonathan King didn’t like our kind of originality. We recorded another couple of demos for him but he was losing interest fast, so then we forgot about trying to be original and did something we knew he’d like.
‘The Silent Sun’, our first single, was written by Pete and Tony and was basically a Bee Gees pastiche. Ant wasn’t convinced by it but I thought it was a great song and Jonathan liked it as well – so much that he tried to sign us up for the rest of our lives.
I’m not sure that the contract he got us to sign with Decca was more binding than most contracts were back then, but as we were minors we shouldn’t have been signing it in the first place. That alone was enough to raise our parents’ suspicions. Between them they called in Goodman, Derek and Co. – top lawyers who had represented the Beatles – to redraft the contract.
This certainly cost our parents’ quite a bit of money but perhaps they were happy to help us out because they felt that this was their world – contracts and lawyers as opposed to gigs and guitars. A contract was something my father knew how to handle and could form an opinion on, whereas I’m not sure that would have been true for ‘The Silent Sun’. In any case, I didn’t feel worried about him going off to London in his bowler hat to meet Jonathan King. It was the school holidays and, when Dad came home and hung his coat up in the hall afterwards, I knew it’d gone well. Of course, I still had to wait for the official debriefing, for which he called me into the dining room the next day. Not that I really cared at the time: contracts, man, whatever.
Now that we were a band, we needed a name. Jonathan came up with Genesis and although I wasn’t mad about the name, it stuck. We had wasted so many hours on lists of names (Pete had come up with Band of Angels and Ant had something flowery like Champagne Meadow) that Genesis was a bit of a relief.
We also needed a look. Pete, who, like my father, believed in the right outfit for the occasion, suggested that we should all go to Carnaby Street to buy clothes for
Top of the Pops
. Pete was more aware of image than the rest of us, who hadn’t even realized that we needed an image. The fact that
Top of the Pops
hadn’t asked us on yet didn’t really come into it: it was obviously only a matter of time.
Swinging London was then at its height and Carnaby Street was the centre of the fashion world. There was something about turning the corner off Regent’s Street, going left and seeing that sign that was exciting.
Pete’s plan was that we should all have black-and-white outfits and the look is preserved for posterity in Genesis’s first publicity shot. I look dopey, if you ask me. Chris Stewart, our drummer, is the moody one, but all of us look like we seriously think it’s about to take off.
And, of course, we’d spend the next few years selling fuck all.
‘The Silent Sun’, our first single, was released on Decca in February 1968. Soon after Kenny Everett played it on the BBC, which was wonderfully legitimizing – the BBC was official, the real thing, the voice of authority. God, it sounded fantastic. I’m sure Jonathan must have had a word with Kenny – ‘Play this for me, mate.’ But when I first heard us on the radio, standing in Ant’s kitchen, I was convinced it was all about to happen. Here we go boys, I thought. Stand back.
By this time I’d left Charterhouse, although Ant had stayed on to do A levels. We were also without a drummer. One of my last jobs at Charterhouse was to fire Chris. (Which was probably a good career move, seeing as he would later write the bestselling
Driving over Lemons
.) The plan had been that Ant and John Al would come with me as backups. When I opened the door to Chris’s study bedroom and started with ‘Chris: Ant, John Al and I think . . . ’ I looked over my shoulder to discover that they’d pissed off.
New Musical Express
called ‘The Silent Sun’, ‘a disc of many facets and great depth’ although ‘it might be a bit too complex for the average fan’. We also got a good review in
Melody Maker
, which was the one we really wanted to be in.
Melody Maker
had a quality to it – musicians read it and believed it.
Sadly our next single, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, generated zero interest. The only way it was going to be played on Radio 1 was if someone took an acetate up to Broadcasting House and shoved it in Tony Blackburn’s hands as he came out. Which is exactly what Pete suggested doing. Somehow it was Tony Banks who ended up being the one standing outside the door in Portland Place. Unfortunately Tony gets a bit aggressive when he gets nervous and I think Blackburn thought he was going to be beaten up.
* * *
I was seventeen in 1968 and growing up fast. In the spring Cliff had performed ‘Congratulations’ at the Eurovision Song Contest and he now definitely looked dated to me. (To be fair, I still think he has a great voice: give him the right song. But I wasn’t ten anymore. Cliff who? It was like we’d never known each other.) I was also a year into my A levels at Farnborough Tech studying English (which I enjoyed); French (which might come in handy); and Economics (which I didn’t understand).
By my age, my father had finished his training at the Naval College in Osborne on the Isle of Wight and, later, Dartmouth. He’d already undertaken two tours on the training battleship HMS
Thunderer
and had joined the battleship
Revenge
, part of the Atlantic Fleet, as a Naval Cadet. Eight months later he was promoted to Midshipman and joined the cruiser
Danae
, which was based at Malta.
By the time he was twenty-one he’d sailed along the Suez Canal on his way to Singapore and Hong Kong, and was back on land to study for further exams at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. It wasn’t all work:
The glittering London season was underway. With my parents on occasions I did various events such as the Royal Academy, Chelsea Flower Show, the Derby, Royal Tournament, Varsity and Eton and Harrow match and so on.
To take part in these splendid events a suitable wardrobe was essential.
If going around town in daytime, a bowler hat and rolled umbrella were needed. If going out informally or to the West End at all in the evening a dinner jacket with boiled shirt, wing collar and black tie was worn. This was surmounted by an opera hat, a cunning device like a conjuror’s top hat which could be collapsed and put under a theatre seat and at a flip of the wrist sprung out into shape.
He’d also got himself a car, a two-seater Morris Cowley, which had a canvas hood and one door. On the passenger side. This meant that ‘If the passenger was a lovely girl in long evening dress and satin shoes . . . it could be the end of a beautiful friendship.’ (When I was his age I had a yellow Ford Anglia with brown rust weeping down the right wing and was stuck in Farnham.)
After my father had finished his two terms in Greenwich, he went to train in Gunnery, Torpedo and Navigation at Whale Island, where he would take command thirty years later.
[Training] ended with a nightmare three weeks of exams ranging from abstruse mathematics to drilling a company or instructing a fifteen-inch turret’s crew.
These surmounted, I was appointed to the junior staff of the Gunnery School at Chatham which, unlike Whale Island, was not an independent command but an integral part of the Royal Naval Barracks. Besides being instructors at the School, we were also Barrack’s Officers.
I was made parade training officer so – basilisk-eyed and all boots, black gaiters and silver-plated whistle chain – marched myself about the parade ground bringing alarm and despondency to the classes going through the hoop thereon.
Regarding my own future career, I’d tried to get my dad to let me study for A levels in London but after being thrown out of Charterhouse by Chare (albeit with ten O levels) my stock wasn’t high. Like most boys leaving the school I had also been sent for an aptitude test at King’s College, Cambridge, to see what kind of career might suit me. The results probably hadn’t impressed Dad much either:
Rutherford, M. J.
A fluent and perhaps rather disorderly boy, distinctly below average in IQ. If he has talents they seem likely to emerge on the arts side rather than in the sciences. My impression is that he might do much better outside the confines of conventional education.
Meanwhile Pete was studying at Davies, Laing and Dick in Notting Hill Gate, the coolest crammer in the country, and generally leading the life I wanted to lead. He’d bought a London taxi and wore a long black coat and a big scarf. His persona was changing. He was becoming more outgoing and looked part of the cool London set. As for Jonathan King – who was only a few years older than us – he was driving around London in a white Rolls-Royce and living in a mews house. (I used to wonder about his bathroom: it was all mirrors so that when you sat on the loo seat, you saw yourself going on forever and ever. We all thought he might be gay, but in those days that kind of thing wasn’t discussed.) Tony, who was a year ahead of Pete and me, was finishing his A levels at Charterhouse and getting ready to study Chemistry at Sussex University. And there I was, out in the sticks.