Like the story that we wish was never ending
We know some time we must reach the final page
Still we carry on just pretending
That there’ll always be one more day to go

from the song Fading Lights

The hugely successful Invisible Touch world tour ended in July 1987 with four shows at Wembley – a then stadium record, for a short time at least – but there was a gap of almost four years before Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford came back together, in their studio in Surrey, to write and record again as Genesis.

In the intervening years there had been no indication that Phil’s solo career was slowing down or that his global popularity was on the wane. His fourth solo album, …But Seriously, and singles such as Groovy Kind of Love and Another Day in Paradise, sold in prodigious quantities. A Seriously, Live! world tour and Serious Hits…Live! album (roughly four million sales in the USA alone) maintained his astonishing run of success. He sums up his ongoing solo success in his autobiography as follows: “…on both sides of the Atlantic, I bestride the changing of the decades like a Versace-clad, five-foot-eight colossus.”

Mike’s side-project, Mike + the Mechanics, was also enjoying mainstream success, most notably with the song The Living Years, which became a massive worldwide hit. (Mike used The Living Years as the title of his 2014 memoir, in which his relationship with his father features prominently.)

Of the three, it was only Tony who continued to find solo success elusive, despite releasing two interesting (and eminently listenable) albums in this period – Bankstatement in 1989 and Still in 1991, the latter featuring contributions from Nik Kershaw and Fish (ex-Marillion) among others.

We Can’t Dance was recorded between March and September 1991. As was now routine, nothing was written in advance; songs emerged spontaneously out of group improvisations. (The sessions were filmed and released as a 46-minute documentary called No Admittance.)

It’s a given – for this fan at least – that every Genesis album from Trespass to Duke is better that any album from Abacab onwards. But, of those later albums, We Can’t Dance is probably, possibly, maybe my favourite of the four. Today, at least.

Although several tracks from the album were released as singles, We Can’t Dance feels – on balance – less commercial than either the eponymous 1983 album or Invisible Touch, less like the band are trying to craft catchy, chart-friendly songs. This may be because lead-off single No Son of Mine – its subject matter domestic abuse and family rejection – is less obvious hit material than Abacab (the song), Mama or Invisible Touch (the song).

We Can’t Dance has a warmer, more natural ambience than its predecessors (particularly Invisible Touch), perhaps linked to a change of producer. Nick Davis, who had worked separately with both Tony and Mike, replaced Hugh Padgham behind the desk, the man probably most responsible for creating the slick Phil (solo) and Genesis sound of the 80s that was so commercially all-conquering.

The album certainly opens strongly with No Son of Mine, followed by Jesus He Knows Me and then Driving the Last Spike, and the ten-minute Fading Lights bring things to a close in fine style. Tony cited the latter song in a recent interview on the Classic Album Review YouTube channel as one of his favourites from the later years.

Dreaming While You Sleep has a powerful chorus and Since I Lost You gains emotional heft when you learn that the lyrics relate to the death of Eric Clapton’s young son. (Clapton was Phil’s neighbour and a close friend.)

That said, the rest of the album – songs such as Never a Time, Tell Me Why and Way of the World – sounds decidedly middle of the road, like the product of a solo Phil/Mike + the Mechanics mash-up. Worst of all is the execrable I Can’t Dance, which deserves to sit alongside Who Dunnit? from the Abacab album at the very bottom of any self-respecting Genesis song ranking. It is an excruciatingly risible attempt to be quirky and tongue-in-cheek (ditto the silly-walk video). Harold the Barrel it most certainly is not.

We Can’t Dance is a long album, the band taking advantage of the possibilities afforded by the (then relatively new) compact-disc format. At roughly 71 minutes, it is only ten minutes shorter than Led Zeppelin’s mighty Physical Graffiti double album. Many highly regarded albums from earlier decades offer less than 40 minutes of music. Rubber Soul and Revolver by the Beatles, for example, are only about 30 minutes long.

Would a slimmed-down We Can’t Dance, with the songs that comprise the mediocre middle third released instead as b-sides and bonus tracks, have been a more satisfying album, perhaps even worthy of comparison with some of the band’s 70s output?

Okay, maybe not. But it’s a thought.

Anyway, We Can’t Dance was released in November 1991 and became another massive worldwide hit, if not quite on a par with the success of Invisible Touch – but who is counting the odd million copies here and there? Tours of North America and Europe followed in 1992, ending with a concert at Knebworth on 2 August. After a seven-week break, there were further British dates in October and November.

And so we come to the choice of gig as the stop-off point for this blog: Earls Court, London – not, strictly speaking, a bootleg.

The starting point for this entire Genesis Bootleg History series was a blog I wrote about Seconds Out. It is a magnificent album, but it is also – and this is the point – seriously misleading as a document of the 1977 live show, omitting as it does all bar one of the songs they played from the Wind and Wuthering album. And not to mention all of the between-song banter, particularly from Phil, which was such an integral part of the Genesis live experience.

By 1992, things were rather different. Advances in digital technology meant that an entire two-hour-plus show could now be recorded and released, with few if any cuts and omissions. Add in a highly polished touring machine, able to traverse continents and deliver huge shows several times a week, and it is debatable whether a bootleg from the 1992 tour will tell us much that we can’t glean from official sources.

True, the two The Way We Walk live CDs – The Shorts and The Longs – are a hideous package (seriously, what were they thinking?), but we also have an accompanying live video (released in 1993 and then reissued with extra features on DVD in 2001) of the entire show. Professionally shot footage of the entire Knebworth concert (it went out on television in Europe) is also easy to find on YouTube.

As a side note, the music on the official CDs is taken from shows in Germany (as well as three songs from the Invisible Touch tour) whereas it is their three shows at London’s Earls Court that were filmed for the video release.

Anyway, the set list from Earls Court on 8 November was as follows:

Land of Confusion / No Son of Mine / Driving the Last Spike / Old Medley / Fading Lights / Jesus He Knows Me / Dreaming While You Sleep / Home by the Sea / Second Home by the Sea / Hold on My Heart / Domino / Drum Duet / I Can’t Dance / Tonight, Tonight, Tonight / Invisible Touch / Turn It On Again

I wrote in a previous blog that the choice of Land of Confusion as the set opener for the 1992 tour is a head-scratcher, but it is obvious from the video footage that the song is going down a storm. It is easy to clap along with and the singalong ‘Whao-oh’ lines in the chorus help establish an immediate rapport between band and audience.

“Make the pain / Make it go away”, Phil belts out in Mama. It is a mammoth Genesis song of the later era, but it survives only a handful of shows before it is dropped from the set, one assumes to protect Phil’s voice. An early show in Tampa, Florida was cancelled after just two songs after Phil developed throat problems. (Side note number two: the Wikipedia entry for the The Way We Walk video indicates that several of the songs on the tour were played in a lower key to adjust to a deepening of Phil’s voice.)

Abacab – another signature 80s song – has also disappeared. Nor will it be played on either of the reunion tours.

What is striking about the set list is the number of long songs: Driving the Last Spike, the Old Medley, Fading Lights, Home by the Sea/Second Home by the Sea and Domino. That is half the set. Factor in the (relatively) stripped-back staging and lighting on this tour and we are left with a sense of a definite gear-change compared to the 1986–87 tour.

Even frontman Phil – in fact, especially frontman Phil – comes across as somewhat restrained, subdued almost. There is less of the showman schtick, less of the clowning around. Gone are the Versace suits; jeans and a plain T-shirt will do just fine for this tour.

They have all now turned forty years of age and are doubtless aware that the last pages are being written of another chapter – perhaps the final chapter – of the Genesis story. Nothing conveys this sense of an ending as strongly as the elegiac Fading Lights, which includes the line “And you know that these are the days of our lives – remember”.

(These Are the Days of Our Lives is, of course, the title of a Queen song from their album Innuendo. It is one of several things the albums We Can’t Dance and Innuendo have in common. Both were released in 1991. They are, arguably, each band’s last ‘proper’ album. And some at least of the two bands’ longstanding fans regard these albums as a return to form after a run of patchy releases in the 80s.)

Jesus He Knows Me ups the tempo after Fading Lights. It is preceded by an extended Phil monologue about televangelists, which (a) presumably went down better in some parts of North America than others, and (b) all sounds rather odd when delivered to a British audience – but he repeats it anyway.

“So we’ve taken a few parts of our past and put them together and we’ve called it Some of Our Past Put Together,” says Phil at the Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles on 18 June. His introduction ahead of the Old Medley reminds me of his “lamb stew” quip on the A Trick of the Tail tour.

The Old Medley itself – now roughly twenty minutes long – consists of Dance on a Volcano, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The Musical Box, Firth of Fifth and I Know What I Like, plus snippets of a few other songs. It all flows nicely enough, but it remains what it always was – a somewhat unsatisfactory compromise that the band have been falling back on for a decade and more.

It is an attempt to accommodate two very different eras of Genesis, enabling them to play “lots of new songs and, with a slight inevitability … some old songs as well. Some you’ll like; some you won’t. But shit happens, y’know”, as Phil tells the Knebworth crowd.

And for fans of old Genesis, that’s your lot. Afterglow has gone. It now falls to Hold on My Heart from the new album to supply the emotional punch that Afterglow previously landed. It is a bit like asking a scrawny flyweight to go toe to toe with Muhammad Ali. It is not a contest of equals.

Even Los Endos, an exhilarating end-of-show staple since 1976, has gone. The latter part of the set is dominated by newer material, beginning with Domino and then, after the drum duet, I Can’t Dance. Truly, we are ending with a moment of bathos.

Yes, it is a seriously awful song with which to bring the main set to a close. Even worse, if that is imaginable, we are also forced to watch through our fingers as Mike and Daryl march around the stage in single file behind Phil. The riff may not be hard to play, but this is a manoeuvre that requires a considerable amount of dexterity, as they take care to ensure that guitar necks do not insert themselves anywhere anatomically inconvenient.

At last the torture is over and the band exit stage right, returning shortly afterwards for the encores, the first of which features two of the band’s biggest hit singles. Tonight, Tonight, Tonight is another opportunity for the audience to join in – “Oh-oh!” – before a nifty segue to Invisible Touch. The second encore – and the end of proceedings – is Turn It On Again, as it has been since 1983. The medley of pop classics from the last tour has gone; instead, Phil namechecks the band.

The final show of the tour was intended to be at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 16 November but an earlier concert in Wolverhampton was rescheduled to the following night. So it is in the improbable setting of Wolverhampton Civic Hall in the Midlands (capacity, roughly 3,500) that our story effectively ends.

The announcement that Phil had left the band came in 1996, though he says in his autobiography that he had made the decision more than two years earlier, citing the pressures of the We Can’t Dance tour as one of the contributing factors:

As we tick off the world’s enormodomes and super-stadiums, a thought sets in: do I really want this, this pressure, this obligation? Can I keep this up – the singing, the banter, the larger-than-life performances required – right through a gruelling summer schedule, all the way to an eye-wateringly gargantuan, outdoor homecoming show at Knebworth?

from Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins

The books referred to in this blog are:
Mike Rutherford The Living Years (2014)
Phil Collins Not Dead Yet: The Autobiography (2016)