You can’t really argue with the statistics, can you?

The Invisible Touch album, released in June 1986, sold six million copies in the USA alone and was on the Billboard 200 chart for eighty-five weeks. The eponymous single was a US number one. Both single and album didn’t perform too shabbily around the rest of the world either. Nor did the singles released subsequently – four in the USA, all of which reached the top ten. And, according to Wikipedia, the accompanying ten-month world tour grossed around $60 million – that’s roughly $160 million in today’s money.

No surprise, then, that Mike Rutherford wrote in his autobiography that this was “probably our hottest moment in terms of commercial success”. The only questionable thing about that comment is the inclusion of the word ‘probably’. And yet it is impossible to talk about Genesis in the 80s without also mentioning Phil Collins and his phenomenal popularity as a solo artist at exactly this time.

When the Mama tour ended in late February 1984, Collins’ solo single Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) had already been released as a single in the USA. It reached number one (one place higher than in the UK) and was the first of seven US chart-topping solo singles (six more than Genesis achieved). His 1982 cover of the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love had been a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic, but 1984’s Against All Odds began an extended period of extraordinary mainstream success for Collins that lasted into the following decade.

Easy Lover, a duet with Earth, Wind and Fire vocalist Philip Bailey, was another 1984 smash hit single, and his third solo album, No Jacket Required, went on to sell perhaps as many as twenty-five million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.

It’s no wonder that the chapters of Collins’ autobiography covering this mid-80s period are called Hello I Must be Busy and Hello I Must be Busy II: he was all but impossible to avoid, a workaholic and hit machine incarnate. In addition to producing albums for Bailey and his close friend Eric Clapton, he toured the world to promote the No Jacket Required album (including playing two nights at Madison Square Garden)…

…contributed drums to the Band Aid charity song Do They Know It’s Christmas? at the end of 1984 and then played at both Wembley Stadium (with Sting) and Philadelphia (with Led Zeppelin) at the Live Aid concert in July 1985…

…reached number one in the USA (again) with another duet – this time Separate Lives, with Marilyn Martin – guest-starred in an episode of hit TV show Miami Vice…

…and got married for a second time. (NB He admits in his autobiography that “large chunks” of the lyrics of the 1986 song Invisible Touch were written about his first wife, from whom he separated in 1980.)

Collins wrote in his autobiography that if ever he was going to quit Genesis to focus on his solo career “in theory this would be the time”. He was, in a nutshell, more popular than Genesis, who very obviously had not played at Live Aid, unlike a sizeable proportion of the top-tier acts, old and new, in the rock and pop universe.

Tony Banks, meanwhile, had released his second solo album in 1983 and was also involved in writing film music. Rutherford had formed the band Mike + the Mechanics in 1985, having decided that he no longer wished to release material as a solo artist following the release of his second solo album in 1982.

But Collins didn’t leave in 1985. He had missed the band’s “magical way of working in the studio”, he wrote later. So had the other two. Rutherford described the new album, which was recorded between October 1985 and February 1986 in the band’s home studio in Surrey, as “effortless to make”:

Phil had a little drum machine … and we’d start with a nothing-very-much loop and jam over it. Phil would sing whatever came into his head, and Tony and I would pile in fearlessly with any old chords and noise and racket. And out the songs came.

So, how does Invisible Touch measure up as a Genesis album? Okay, you can’t argue with the stats, but is it actually any good?

It isn’t rubbish, obviously – this is Genesis we are discussing – but regular readers of this Genesis Bootlegs blog series will know that I am not a huge fan of the band’s 80s output: Abacab, Genesis (the 1983 album) and Invisible Touch sit comfortably at the bottom of my Genesis album ranking list. Indeed, I am not a fan of 80s music more generally, at least the mediocre fare served up by the rock titans of the 70s who continued on into the following decade.

And with its catchy chorus-driven arrangements, vacuous lyrics (“There’s too many men, too many people / Making too many problems / And not much love to go round”) and heavily processed sound – what the presenter of YouTube’s Classic Album Review show regularly refers to as “those 80s affectations” – Invisible Touch is very much an 80s album.

Perhaps even more to the point, at least three songs on the album – In Too Deep, Anything She Does and Throwing It All Away – would not sound particularly out of place on No Jacket Required.

On the other hand, plenty of Genesis fans disagree, citing in particular the album’s two longer songs – Tonight, Tonight, Tonight (8 minutes 53 seconds) and Domino (10 minutes 44 seconds) – as evidence of a residual prog-esque complexity in at least some of their music.

Well, possibly.

The – frankly gigantic – Invisible Touch tour began on 18 September 1986 in Detroit and ended on 4 July 1987 in London. It included no fewer than three North American legs (the first of which was made up of multiple nights at just seven venues) as well as shows in New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Europe – all in front of enormous audiences.

The opening North American leg included five nights at the legendary/iconic (choose your cliché) Los Angeles Forum, 13–17 October. For the purposes of this blog I used a bootleg I found on YouTube that is stated as coming from 14 October, the second night in LA. It is possibly a King Biscuit Flower Hour show, though this recording has none of the usual King Biscuit add-ons. (The excellent Genesis Movement website suggests that Collins’ dialogue from the King Biscuit performance comes from 14 October and 15 October.)

The setlist for this initial leg of the tour leaves us in no doubt that this is a show put together with the band’s massive new mainstream audience in mind. It has undergone an unprecedented – for Genesis – overhaul. The band play the entire Invisible Touch album, with the exception of just one song (Anything She Does).

This LA Forum setlist is typical:

Mama / Abacab / Land of Confusion / That’s All / Domino / In Too Deep / The Brazilian / Follow You Follow Me / Tonight, Tonight, Tonight / Home by the Sea / Second Home by the Sea / Throwing It All Away / Old Medley / Invisible Touch / Drum Duet / Los Endos / Turn It On Again Medley

Many of the songs from the previous two albums – Dodo/Lurker, Illegal Alien, Man on the Corner, Who Dunnit?, Keep It Dark, Misunderstanding and It’s Gonna Get Better – have been ditched to make way for the new stuff. What I labelled in the Philadelphia 1983 blog as Old Medley 1, which chopped and changed during the Mama tour but included early- and mid-period classics such as Eleventh Earl of Mar, Firth of Fifth and The Musical Box, has also vanished.

Nowadays we regularly see ‘legacy bands’ promoting a tour by organising the setlist around a classic album and playing it from start to finish, but playing an album in its entirety was far more unusual back in the 70s and 80s (Pink Floyd were an exception). True, the 1980 Duke tour featured roughly thirty or so minutes of back-to-back new music, but the collection of songs they played was originally conceived as a single self-contained piece of music, a Duke ‘suite’.

The decision to play almost everything on Invisible Touch means that the new setlist has a serious lack of balance to it, particularly the first hour or so. The track Domino begins a roughly forty-minute run of new music broken only by the inclusion of (the rather slight) Follow You Follow Me.

This particular recording sounds great, and the performances are as polished and professional as you would expect. Apparently, the band were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of these shows – and they don’t disappoint.

Then again, as the Britpop band Oasis (who are in the news at the time of writing this blog) proved more than once in their career (and indeed as Led Zeppelin – with somebody called Phil Collins on drums – proved at Live Aid), it really doesn’t look and sound great performing in a stadium when the band is below par for whatever reason.

And not to mention the immense logistical challenges associated with tours on this scale. The Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour and Floyd’s manager tagged along for several weeks to help them prepare for an upcoming and similarly ambitious Floyd tour. (The A Momentary Lapse of Reason tour ended up making even more money than the Invisible Touch tour.)

In fact, the performances are perhaps even more polished and professional than you would expect. Rutherford tells us in his autobiography that it was during this tour that he heard the news that his father had died. It was arranged that he would fly back to England for the funeral on 13 October and then fly back the same day to play in Los Angeles. At least some of the recording discussed here, then, is from the following night.

(Actually, the timeline he outlines in his book doesn’t seem to fit the facts. He writes that he received the news in a hotel in Chicago in the middle of a six-show run and that the funeral took place two weeks later. But their six-night residency at the Rosemont Horizon – just outside Chicago and presumably what he is referring to – was from 5 October to 10 October. LA was the very next stop on the tour, just a few days later.)

Anyway, back to the show. The newer material offers plenty of opportunities for the audience to join in, and frontman Phil is of course a dab hand at keeping them all entertained. One wonders what the LA crowd made of Collins’ reference – in his introduction to In Too Deep – to people “having it off”.

In truth, much of the between-song banter feels somewhat predictable by now: they are still, for example, riffing on the “Other World” theme before Home by the Sea, though this time asking the crowd’s assistance to levitate the venue rather than merely contacting the spirits as they did on the previous tour. And a comparison with the Wembley shows at the opposite end of the world tour suggests that there isn’t a great deal of variation from one show to another. Spontaneity is perhaps the first casualty of the stadium experience (with intimacy the second). Not that Genesis first-timers in 1986–87 would have been thinking any of this, I guess.

The primary nod to the old days – “Right, now for some of that really really really old stuff” – is a medley that begins, as Genesis medleys have done since their introduction on the Duke tour, with In the Cage, which segues into In That Quiet Earth from Wind and Wuthering and then the closing two sections of Supper’s Ready (from Apocalypse 9/8 onwards). In That Quiet Earth, in particular, sounds fresh, with an earthy (no pun intended) guitar sound and some outstanding interplay on the drums between Collins and Chester Thompson.

And then we immediately switch from the (very) old to the (very) new: Invisible Touch – the song that had got them to number one in the USA and catapulted them into the pop stratosphere. The show proper ends in familiar fashion with a drum duet that leads into Los Endos, the latter as thrilling as ever despite now being the end-of-show staple for a full decade.

The encore again finds the band opting for mass appeal. Turn It On Again, as on the Mama tour, incorporates a medley of its own, but this time one that is made up of snippets of pop and soul ‘classics’:

Everybody Needs Somebody to Love / (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction / Twist and Shout / All Day and All of the Night / You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ / Pinball Wizard / In the Midnight Hour

It’s light, it’s stadium-friendly and it dials up the feelgood factor to eleven – but is it Genesis? Well, yes, of course it is – but anyone crossing their fingers for a blast of Watcher of the Skies or The Knife presumably left a tad deflated.

The Wembley shows were filmed and released on video, later rereleased as a DVD. It is well worth a watch, as long as those hideous 80s outfits they are wearing don’t scare you off. I am ambivalent about stadium shows for several reasons, but the Invisible Touch tour was undoubtedly a great spectacle, particularly once the daylight faded. And what a relief it is to see Tony Banks and his keyboards back in their proper place stage left after they were inexplicably moved to no-man’s land (ie between the two drum kits) on the Mama tour.

There were changes to the setlist for later parts of the world tour (from January 1987 onwards). In Too Deep and Follow You Follow Me were dropped completely and so the show itself became shorter. Afterglow also replaced Supper’s Ready in the main medley and Reach Out (I’ll Be There) by the Four Tops replaced All Day and All of the Night in the encore medley.

The changes were presumably to protect Collins’ voice. He wrote in his autobiography that he was having regular steroid injections as a short-term fix to get him through shows. (He also says that the injections led to health problems in later life, including brittle bones.) In addition, an adjustment to the order of songs gave the show a better balance between older and newer material.

Collins later described the Wembley shows as “tremendously atmospheric … easily the triumph of the tour”. The run of four shows (1–4 July 1987) was at the time a record, presumably just one of many that the band had set over the previous ten months and 112 shows. Rutherford put it like this: “Certain bands have certain years and 1986 must have been our year.”

And then… nothing, at least not in Genesis Land. Collins took a year off from writing and recording, instead starring opposite Julie Walters in a film about the Great Train Robber ‘Buster’ Edwards; Rutherford had further success with Mike + the Mechanics, notably the single The Living Years, which became a worldwide hit and a US number one early in 1989; Banks released an interesting but commercially unsuccessful album called Bankstatement in 1989.

Genesis did not come back together to record again until March 1991, nearly four years after the end of the Invisible Touch tour.

There is no official live album from the Invisible Touch tour, though recordings of Mama and That’s All (from Wembley) and In Too Deep (from the LA Forum) appeared on the 1992 live album, The Way We Walk Volume One: The Shorts.

As mentioned earlier, the final shows at Wembley were filmed and released on video (with, it seems, most or all of the footage coming from the middle two shows. The Old Medley was omitted). It was rereleased as a DVD in 2003 as Genesis Live at Wembley Stadium.

The final Wembley show and indeed the final show of the world tour – 4 July – was broadcast on the radio by the BBC and has long been widely available as a high-quality bootleg. Ten of the songs are now available on the BBC Broadcasts box set that was released in 2023.

In addition, The Brazilian – from 3 July – appeared as a b-side and is on Genesis Archives 2: 1976–1992, as is a version of Your Own Special Way from Sydney in December 1986 that was played with a live string section (local Musicians’ Union rules, it seems).

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