The British band Genesis had a long history before it entered its present state of dormancy. In previous articles, I have discussed the only two members of the group to remain for its entire existence, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, and next year I intend to cover the best known of the other members of the group, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Hackett. Another somewhat less well known former member who played an important role in the group’s formative years was Anthony Phillips (born December 23, 1951), who along with Banks, Gabriel and Rutherford was a founding member of Genesis. Though his early departure meant that the vast majority of the band’s best songs were written and recorded without any input from him, it seemed appropriate to do a brief overview of the early years of Genesis with an emphasis on the significance of Phillips in this period.
As noted in my article on Rutherford, he and Phillips became good friends at school and started playing music together, just as their schoolmates Banks and Gabriel did. Soon after arriving at the school in 1965, Phillips formed a group called Anon (sometimes referred to as “The Anon”, even by Mike Rutherford, though Phillips insists that there was no “the”) with bassist Rivers Job, vocalist Richard MacPhail, and drummer Rob Tyrell. Rutherford joined soon after, and the band, whose only recorded song was Phillips’s "Pennsylvania Flickhouse" (a R&B style tune very different from later Genesis songs, though Phillips maintains that the studio demo was not the best version of the song), played together with various lineups until the end of 1966 before splitting up. Rob Tyrell afterwards joined Sour Milk Sea, whose lead singer for its last few months of existence was Freddie Bulsara – later known as Freddie Mercury. Phillips, meanwhile, had started to spend more time playing music with Banks and Gabriel, and began attempting to write songs with Rutherford. Sometime in 1967, Phillips and Rutherford got together with the intention of recording some songs, and Phillips asked Banks to come and play piano. Banks suggested that he and Gabriel also record one of their songs and that Gabriel do the singing, as he had the best voice. So Genesis was born.
The four schoolmates managed to attract the interest of Jonathan King, a pop impresario who had once attended their school, with their demo. King signed them to a contract, gave them their name, and produced two singles and an album for them. The group’s first two singles, “The Silent Sun” and “A Winter’s Tale”, were released in 1968 and were mainly the work of the Banks/Gabriel partnership, with Philips and Rutherford only writing “That’s Me”, the B-side of “The Silent Sun”. On the group’s first album From Genesis to Revelation, recorded in 1968 while they were still at school and released in early 1969, the songs were still fairly simple and pop-oriented. According to Phillips, Banks and Gabriel dominated the songwriting on the first album, though he also contributed a number of songs, some with help from Rutherford and some on his own. An early composition by Phillips was the instrumental “Patricia”, which had appeared on the group’s first tape. Lyrics were later added, apparently by Gabriel, and the song was recorded as “In Hiding” on From Genesis to Revelation. Another song written mainly by Phillips that appeared on the album was “A Place to Call My Own”. According to Tony Banks, this song was one of the first long songs with separate sections done by the group, though they only used the last section on the album. (Note: Though the releases of From Genesis to Revelation that I know of credit all the songs to Genesis, several sources give individual songwriting credits for the songs; only a few of these individual credits are directly backed up by quotes that I’ve seen from the band members, though the few direct statements they have made about the authorship of the songs are not inconsistent with the individual credits given)
After their first album failed to make any impact, the members of Genesis, after some hesitation, made the decision to devote themselves to developing their music. According to Rutherford, Banks and Gabriel were the more hesitant ones, while he and Phillips were more certain that music was what they wanted to do, with Phillips perhaps being the most determined. Phillips and Rutherford began writing songs together on 12-string guitars, creating a sound that became one of the group’s signature sounds, along with Banks’s keyboards. The Phillips/Rutherford team, or Phillips alone, wrote a number of important songs in this period. Phillips had written “Visions of Angels” on piano at the time of the first album, and Phillips and Rutherford wrote “Dusk” and “White Mountain” together, as well as parts of “Stagnation”, though Banks and Gabriel also contributed to the latter. All these songs appeared on the group’s second album, Trespass, released in 1970. But according to Banks, another key early track, though one that was not released until it appeared on a later box set, was “Going Out to Get You”, and while all of them worked on it, Phillips wrote the song part of it. The unreleased song “Pacidy” also may have been a Phillips/Rutherford collaboration, as part of it was included in a piece on a Phillips solo album called “Field of Eternity” and credited to Phillips and Rutherford. Phillips no doubt wrote or co-wrote a number of the other early unreleased songs by the group, but no information on the other songs is available.
Unfortunately, by the time Trespass was released, Phillips had started suffering from debilitating stage fright, and he eventually decided to quit the band. As he had been very important to the group, his decision almost caused the others to give up, but in the end they decided to continue, and in addition to looking for a replacement for Phillips also find a new drummer. The drummer they ended up recruiting was Phil Collins. As Phillips said, “There was a huge silver lining for Genesis which was that me leaving meant…they got Phil. I mean, it’s got to have been worth it to have got Phil.” While getting a replacement for Phillips himself took longer, the person they finally got, Steve Hackett, would also prove to be a good choice for the group. But even after Phillips had left, he still had an influence on Genesis in that some songs that he had been involved in writing remained in their repertoire and in some cases were recorded. The most notable example was “The Musical Box”, which appeared on the first post-Phillips album, 1971’s Nursery Cryme, and became one of the group’s most popular and highly regarded songs from the early part of their career. While, like all the songs on early Genesis albums, it was officially credited to the band (meaning the current group as of the time of the recording), a significant part of the music, particularly the opening sections, had been written by Anthony Phillips (possibly with Mike Rutherford), as can be heard from listening to his 1969 instrumental demo entitled F#, which was released on his Archive Collection Volume 1 (a further development of what became “The Musical Box” can be heard in the Genesis archive track “Manipulation”).
In the years after he left Genesis, Phillips and Rutherford continued to play and write together on occasion. In fact, they originally had intended to release an album together, but because of his Genesis commitments, Rutherford found it difficult to find time to work with Phillips. The music they wrote together was finally released as Phillips’s first solo album, The Geese and the Ghost, along with a number of songs and instrumental pieces composed by Phillips alone. Phil Collins also participated, doing vocals on two songs. A third collaboration between Phillips, Rutherford and Collins was “Silver Song” (named for John Silver, the drummer for Genesis at the time of From Genesis to Revelation), which was recorded to be released as a single but was then shelved, only getting released in 2007 on a re-release of The Geese and the Ghost.
Phillips was clearly very important to Genesis in its early years. He helped push the band in the direction of art rock (or progressive rock as it is now called), though it was a direction all of the group were interested in, and he was at first the most determined to make a career of music. Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford have all stressed his impact on Genesis, with Gabriel going so far as to call him “in many ways the most musically gifted of all of us” and Banks saying that “Anthony for me was kind of the group leader”. He certainly had a major role in the writing during his time in the band, probably about equal to (but not greater than) Banks and Gabriel, though Rutherford had pretty much caught up by the time Phillips left. Though even on the first two albums Banks and Gabriel stand out the most to me as performers (Phillips himself called Banks “the fulcrum of the group”), as I noted above the excellent 12-string guitar playing in tandem that Phillips and Rutherford (and occasionally Banks) did on Trespass became a signature sound of the band, one that they continued to use to good effect in later years. Since I don’t consider either From Genesis to Revelation or Trespass to be as good as the albums that followed it (though the addition of Collins and Hackett and improved performance by the others also have something to do with that), it’s hard for me to consider his departure a disastrous loss for Genesis, but there are still some good songs on those albums (Phillips's "Visions of Angels" is one of the better songs on the latter one), and “The Musical Box” is one of the group’s best early tracks. I can’t judge most of Phillips’ solo recordings, as the only album I’ve heard in its entirety is The Geese and the Ghost, though as far as that one is concerned I concur with some who point out that while it has some beautiful guitar playing and is enjoyable enough to listen to, it is somewhat lacking in drama, which is something that Banks and Gabriel in particular (and later Collins and Hackett as well, at least as performers) contributed to Genesis. For that matter, even Trespass seems weaker in part because it is somewhat softer and less dynamic than the later albums. But it’s also true that without the acoustic guitar passages contributed by Phillips and Rutherford (and later by Rutherford and Hackett), Banks’s keyboards would quickly become overwhelming. Like with most great bands, it was the balance between the different group members that made them good, and it was fortunate that the softer, more acoustic music pioneered by Anthony Phillips remained part of Genesis even after he left.
Anthony Phillips with Genesis
(All songs performed by Genesis except where otherwise noted)
Pennsylvania Flickhouse (Phillips; performed by Anon)
Patricia (Phillips)
That's Me (Phillips/Rutherford)
In Hiding (Phillips/Gabriel [?lyrics])
A Place to Call My Own (Phillips/Gabriel[?])
In the Beginning (Phillips/Gabriel[?])
Window (Phillips/Rutherford[?])
Visions of Angels (Phillips)
White Mountain (Phillips/Rutherford)
Dusk (Phillips/Rutherford)
Going Out to Get You (Phillips[song section], [?Banks/Gabriel/Rutherford])
Pacidy (Phillips/Rutherford[?])
The Musical Box (Music: Phillips/Rutherford[opening section], Banks/Rutherford[final section]; Lyrics: Gabriel)
Which Way the Wind Blows (Phillips; performed by Anthony Phillips with Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford)
Silver Song (Phillips/Rutherford; performed by Anthony Phillips with Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford)
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