Anthony Phillips will possibly always be associated with Genesis even though he left the band more than forty years ago. He was however a founder member and also played on the first two Genesis Albums From Genesis To Revealation and Trespass. Since then of course he has carved out his own niche in the music industry releasing solo albums and also composing for film and television projects.
His first four solo albums (Geese and the Ghost/Wise After The Event/Sides/1984) are now available directly from the Gonzo website in expanded editions with a bonus disc containing many rarities and outtakes. Here is an interview Ant did with Jon Kirkman in late 2003 for the newsprint magazine where Ant discusses both his solo career and his time with Genesis.
Interview with Anthony Phillips
December 2003
Anthony Phillips was the original guitarist in Genesis until a combination of stage fright and illness forced him to quit in 1970. For many fans of Genesis that was the end of Anthony’s involvement with the band he formed at school with his friends. The truth is however by the mid seventies Anthony was working again with the various members of Genesis and more noticeably with Mike Rutherford. Anthony’s proper debut came in 1977 with the release of The Geese and The Ghost, which bore all the trademarks of the early Genesis sound. 2004 will see the re release of The Geese and The Ghost and Wise After The Event. Here Anthony talks about his solo career and his days with Genesis or should that be The Janitors? Read on…
JK A lot of people will remember you from Genesis.
AP The Janitors as we were known, one of the first singles we did before we ever got anywhere was announced by I think Jimmy Saville as the Janitors or was it the Genitals (I didn’t say that!)
JK You made two albums and played a few gigs with Genesis and then left. Why was that?
AP All sorts of reasons culminating in a bad bout of stage fright really. I was probably, along with Mike Rutherford one of the keenest to go on the road and was very buoyant about the whole thing. The group was made up of two song-writing pairs Rutherford and myself and Gabriel and Banks. It worked pretty well and when it worked, it worked incredibly well. For me the things I did with Mike were more precious and more special because it was more intimate and somehow it got lost within the group. We all lived together in a cottage and got on top of each other and never got away and we’d argue and all the rest of it. So there was an awful lot of tension in the band. We were too young to realise that you have got to have a separate business and personal life. We had women saying that it’s got to be the group or me, you know this kind of stuff and we were far too intense and too navel gazing really but it is so not true that I left for musical reasons because we all has similar tastes and similar styles. They were fantastic musicians and great composers but I guess the tension got to me. There was an awful lot of pressure at gigs, it got to the point where if you made one mistake it would blow the big record company audition stuff because all the record companies were coming and watching us. I just used to get terribly, terribly tense about the whole thing and eventually my body just cracked under the whole thing. I got bronchial pneumonia and I thought, “Well hang on, this life is not what it is cracked up to be” and I think for the majority of the people it isn’t. It’s not a very natural life and you have got to be incredibly tough and very single minded. We virtually saw no friends at all and had no separate life and at the age of seventeen or eighteen you have to be so determined and I guess I didn’t have the stamina and I did not want to be so narrow I think.
JK Well you left Genesis and for a lot of people there was a big gap, it was virtually seven years between leaving Genesis and the Geese and the Ghost. Fill us in briefly as to what you were doing then.
AP People look at seven years and think, “What the hell was he doing?” Well it is much more easily explained really. The first two to three years – well I spent a year moping if you like – I was totally unqualified as a musician, so I learned how to play the piano properly, learned how to sight read, classical guitar and all that kind of stuff because I wanted to have all that power at my fingertips. I started teaching part time but what isn’t known is that the Geese and the Ghost was started- I was doing things with Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins in ’73, we did a single called the Silver Song which was dedicated to the second Genesis drummer Jonathan Silver which never came out, I was doing things with them quite actively – we began the Geese and the Ghost in ’74 although it did not come out until early ’77
JK The Geese and the Ghost album came out in 1977, not a particularly good year for an album like the Geese and Ghost to come out if you think about what was going on musically with punk and everything else. Looking back on it, are you happy with the album now?
AP Not really because we had to do it on a bit of a shoestring. A lot of the music was concurrent with some of the Genesis stuff. Mike and I wrote a lot of the 12 string stuff in 1969/70 and a lot of the songs that I wrote on it were just after I left in ’70 so the music was quite old so it would have been nice if we had done it earlier. It got terribly protracted, we’d began it in ’74 but when The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway became a double album we got tripped up on that and had to wait and it kept being broken up. The flow got lost, we were recording it on fairly primitive equipment and then on Tom Newman’s barge on the Thames, which kept being rammed, by other barges and we couldn’t fit the timpani on and we had to use the guided tour lot next door. So it was quite fun but it was never going to be gleaming quality and of course we hit a brick wall because as you say punk came out. It was the classic case of being in the right place at the wrong time and very difficult to get any music like that out if you weren’t a massive household name. It was picked up by somebody in the States unsurprisingly by which time I had given up on it really, not a easy thing when you have spent two, three, four years planning something and this is your big return to the business and then nothing happens. I was very pleasantly surprised when it came out, not ideally happy with it but of course delighted when it did see the light of day. A lot of people seemed to like it despite the quote “a semi-garage production”, as somebody referred to it as. The same album, in two American reviews was called a mellow rock classic and then somebody else called it “music to wash dishes to”.
JK Listening to it again recently, I think it’s an album of many layers and it reminds me very much of the Trespass album. Moving on from the Geese and the Ghost, nothing for seven years and then in the next two years three albums, the Geese and the Ghost, Wise After the Event and Sides. That was pretty quick, was that the plan?
AP Well there was no real plan. I was just very lucky that the Geese and the Ghost went down reasonably well then as you have rightly implied the market was changing. There was more pressure to do songs so whilst I thought I was more comfortable doing instrumentals, or just better all round really, I found myself being coerced into more song based things not that I was unhappy with that, I just knew it wasn’t my forte and there was pressure to try and come up with, not necessary immediately hit singles. Wise after the Event wasn’t a totally singly orientated album but by the time of Sides it very much was and that is why Sides ended up being called that. It was going to be called Balls as a piss take on the whole punk scene which would have been great if I had been ten years younger but I wasn’t. It was nonsense that people of my vintage would be expected to turn the clock back and do that kind of ersatz Who music ten years on. It would have been so fake. I do stress that if I had been ten years younger I would have been at the forefront of punk. The fact is, it was ridiculous, so we had Sides which had to be split into the more poppy things and then the more classical side of things but I was extremely lucky to have found an outlet for some pure acoustic guitar music on the same thing when Private Parts and Pieces the acoustic album was released. So I was fortunate compared to a lot of people because for a lot of people the whole ‘76/77 thing was a complete graveyard and they didn’t get a look in.
JK Listening to the Sides album recently, parts of it sound a little off the wall. I am guessing that you like doing the occasional track that is a little off the wall, yes?
AP Oh yeah I certainly did, the idea that I am only a high classicist – I used to get stuff from people who did not know my back ground and they would say that this sounds like a typical classic musician trying to do rock, well it is totally the other way round. I was very much a Beatles, Stones man who got a bit of classical stuff on top. I love both styles. I did feel pressured into trying to come up with overtly sort of hit singles on Sides, which was a little bit uncomfortable, but there’s nothing I am really ashamed of on that album.
JK There was an interesting marketing of Sides in that the album that came shrink-wrapped with Sides was Private Parts and Pieces. What was the original thinking behind what became the Private Parts and Pieces series?
AP Well I think that since the ground had been cut from under my feet in terms of acoustic stuff a bit, I remember going to Tony Smith, Genesis and my manager, and saying “Is there any way we can get an outlet for this stuff and keep it going, you know the acoustic stuff?” and he was really good and listened and managed to get Arista to agree to this. So it set up sort of two careers, a diversion, and a dual path. One a more rock based thing, heavier songs and another intimate acoustics, small scale, slightly vibey, loose productions, more kind of improvised stuff as well. I was really lucky to be able to do that and as you rightly point out it was just called Private Parts and Pieces, there was no idea that there would be volume twenty-seven thousand and all the rest of it. I was so lucky compared to a lot of people to be able to do that. Then when the door closed on the commercial stuff I was able to carry on thank God with the Private Parts series.
JK Just how much pressure was there from the record companies like Arista or RCA bearing in mind that at that time Genesis were doing very well and I suppose someone in the marketing department of these companies would say, “This guy used to be in Genesis – I see a marketing opportunity here”?
AP Of course there was but to be fair, it was difficult for them. Once the Mike Oldfield, Vangelis era had gone it was difficult to see instrumentals being easy to market unless you had a film and singles were becoming more important. My friend Andy Latimer said it all by doing that album called the Single File. If you think back to the late sixties and early seventies we all bought albums and weren’t that interested in singles but the whole market switched round, which was to, me was a most dreadfully regressive step. I understand it for youngsters but not for us. Of course there was pressure and I felt that I was trying to be something that I wasn’t. I had to stunt and regress my musical development and ran the very serious risk of not getting new fans in the process and alienating old ones. It was something that I used to wrestle with all the time. The amount of people who must have thought in 1984 what is he up to, then even more so on the Invisible Man but then I suppose in context Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks attempted very commercial albums at the same time so I suppose I was in reasonable company really.
JK When we look at the complete catalogue of your music, it must be very satisfying to look back on a body of work like that?
AP Well I’m never happy which is why you keep moving on. My New Year’s resolution is “Can do Better” Of course I am happy when I get wonderful fan letters about some of the albums saying how much it has meant to them. I have met so many people who have said to me “Thank you for helping me through my A levels and degrees”. Of course it is lovely but you always want to do more, you always want to do better and to be honest I still feel as though I have only just begun actually. Some people feel they have done it all, I don’t feel that I have done anything and I think that is a great motivation for wanting to go forward.
© Jon Kirkman 2003 and 2011.
Buy Anthony Phillips CDs directly from the Gonzo Website
http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/artists/5905/Anthony%20Phillips
No comments:
Post a Comment