100 Great Songs to Publish a Book to, #10: Genesis, Domino

No album divides Genesis fans more than 1986’s Invisible Touch, which sold millions of copies and produced a slew of hit singles, some of which sound suspiciously similar to Phil Collins’ solo material from his hugely successful No Jacket Required album the previous year.  But if we take a step back from the teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing among the fans, there are a couple of salient points to note.

Firstly, around half of the music on this album falls into the category of Prog rather than pop.  Collins responded to attacks from older Genesis fans, who accused him of dominating the band, with the cutting observation: “I’d like to see anyone try to tell Tony Banks what to do in a recording studio,” and indeed all of the material on Invisible Touch was written by the group jointly.

Secondly, it is worth considering what Genesis would be today had Collins quit the band in the early 1980s, say, after Abacab, when his vast solo success took off.  Without 1983’s self-untitled album, this album, and 1991’s We Can’t Dance, Genesis would have remained a footnote in the history of popular music; like Renaissance, for example.  Instead, these three albums were the key to propelling Genesis into the top 30 most successful bands of all time, and drove tens of thousands to delve into the back catalogue to discover and fall in love with the more adventurous earlier work.

In the final analysis, we are left with what the band chose to release; all else is conjecture.  But the best-by-a-nose track from Invisible Touch, written from the point of view someone in an early-1980s Beirut hotel room just as the bombs start falling, takes fatalism to its logical conclusion.  You can trust Tony Banks on this, folks: we’re all the next in line, and there’s nothin’ you can do.

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