Invisible Touch (1986) – Genesis

Phil Collins: ‘The mid-1980s was the biggest we ever got.’¹

In the mid-1980s, the gap between Genesis albums had become bigger. Phil Collins had started his solo career at the beginning of the decade and after the Genesis album Mike Rutherford had formed his chart-topping band ‘Mike and the Mechanics’ together with vocalists Paul Carrack and Paul Young. Tony Banks, having published solo albums since 1979, was the only one of the trio to not have significant chart success.

In 1985, Genesis went into their ‘Farm’ studio, again with producer Hugh Padgham, to write and produce their next album. The result was the powerful, vibrant album Invisible Touch, released in 1986. Out of the eight tracks, five became hit singles: ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’, ‘Land of Confusion’, ‘In Too Deep’, ‘Throwing It All Away’ and the title track ‘Invisible Touch.’

Invisible Touch

The lead single ‘Invisible Touch’ is often ‘regarded by the loyal progressive-rock aficionado as a betrayal‘, as it represents Genesis ‘at its most commercial.’² The song was, just like all the songs on the album, a product of group jamming. Paul Gomersall, the engineer who assisted Hugh Padgham on Invisible Touch remembered the band’s way of writing songs:

‘Mike would come up with some sort of wacky drum loop. He’d bring his drum machine in, or Phil would, and they’d work around that. Mike is very experimental. I think he sees himself as more like a Brian Eno sort of person who makes interesting sounds and rhythms. Tony’s stuff was more chordal. Half the sound of Genesis is the chords that Tony comes up with.’³

The song ‘Invisible Touch’ was written during such a jam session when Mike Rutherford played the guitar riff that became the basis of the song with an echo effect and Phil Collins started singing ‘She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah!’ Phil then wrote the lyrics about loving a mysterious person who gets under one’s skin, dominates one’s life and although it might be bad, one cannot keep away from them.

Like the rest of the album, the song ‘Invisible Touch’ is dominated by e-drum sounds used in 1980s pop music. The drum machine in the background was inspired by Sheila E.’s and Prince’s ‘The Glamorous Life’, released in 1985. These ingredients, along with Mike Rutherford’s bass line, Tony Banks’ keyboard solo and the key change in the outro, turn ‘Invisible Touch’ into a very energetic, joyous pop song.

Phil Collins: ‘Invisible Touch is my favourite Genesis song.’⁴

In concert, the band never performed ‘Invisible Touch’ in its original key, but down a half-step or more to save strain on Phil Collins’s voice. Still, he would turn it into a celebrated sing-a-long with the audience.

Mike Rutherford also mentioned that ‘Invisible Touch’ was one of his favourites to play live, as ‘it’s a wonderful song: upbeat, fun to play, always a strong moment in any gig.’⁵

For many ‘old-school fans’, the album Invisible Touch was a total sell-out and the song itself became a target of hate. It was their first and only number one hit in the US single charts and was even mentioned in American Psycho when lead character Patrick Bateman names it as the group’s ‘undisputed masterpiece.’

Tonight, Tonight, Tonight

‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’ is according to music journalist Chris Welch the band’s ‘most memorable pop ballad‘, with ‘a nagging electronic theme‘ and lyrics that ‘are alternately obscure and direct.‘⁶

The album version is 9-minutes long and includes various elements from the band’s career. Again, the song was a result of jamming (the working title being ‘Monkey/Zulu’) and one can hear how Tony Banks took the lead and improvised the long passages, including a middle section with ‘a series of suitably weird instrumental effects.’⁷ The abstract, but very direct lyrics by Phil, some of which were improvised too, are about drug abuse.

Mike Rutherford: ‘It’s more of the old-style Genesis in that it covers a lot of ground musically and has a fairly involved instrumental passage in the middle. We’ve done songs like this from the word go. The initial bit came from an improvised jam and the song and solo part in the middle were obvious from a longer section when Tony was just improvising sound over a rhythm being played by Phil and I and he just assembled a composed solo part.‘⁸

Mike Rutherford about Tony Banks: ‘He’s the most adventurous in terms of song format, he’s always trying to not get stuck into a verse, chorus, middle eight, he’ll always push us a little bit to question whether we couldn’t explore a bit more.‘⁹

Land of Confusion

Mike Rutherford wrote the lyrics for this rare politically themed song about the tension between nations, calling it ‘a political song about the mess we landed in. I’ve always shielded away from doing what I call a preachy song, a protest song, but it seemed to work. Maybe because the music was quite angry it made it work.’¹⁰

The music was written by all three members together.

Spitting Image and the music video

‘Land of Confusion’ became very famous for its promotional video, which not only showed Rutherford, Collins and Banks as puppets created by the British television comedy ‘Spitting Image’, but also politicians such as Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Leonid Brezhnev, Margaret Thatcher and of course Ronald Reagan, in whose nightmare all these caricatures appear.

The idea for the music video came as Genesis video director Jim Yukich saw Phil Collins being caricatured on the TV show ‘Spitting Image’, ‘a series of satirical programmes […] since 1984, in which lifelike but grotesque puppets act out scenes relating to topical events and people in the news, including especially politicians and members of the royal family‘.¹¹

On the show, Phil’s puppet was performing a parody of his chart-topping love ballads, ‘Oh, You Must Be Leaving’ while weeping constantly.

The main protagonist in ‘Land of Confusion’ is Ronald Reagan, then president of the United States, who is in bed with his wife and a monkey. The monkey is a reference to the movie Bedtime for Bonzo, in which Reagan shared a bed with a monkey.

The video also features puppets of famous musicians Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson and other celebrities. The music video won Genesis their first and only Grammy Award in 1987 for ‘Best Concept Music Video’.

Tony Banks: ‘What other video can boast having all these stars, like Madonna and Prince?’¹²

In Too Deep

In 1985, Phil Collins had been commissioned by Ray Cooper of Handmade Films (George Harrisons’ film company that he had set up to produce Monty Python) to write a song for the film Mona Lisa, starring Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson.

While on solo tour in Australia, he wrote the chorus of what became ‘In Too Deep’, but when the film was due to be released, Phil did not work on a solo album, but on a Genesis album. The three wrote the rest of the song and created a warm pop ballad, in which Phil shines on vocals while Tony is playing piano and Mike’s adds well-placed and delicate guitar accents. Submitting it to Ray Cooper, he naturally liked it very much, and inevitably ‘In Too Deep’ became a hit outside of the movie as well.

Tony Banks remembered not knowing what to do in the music video, which just shows the band playing because it was no funny song. Perhaps they should have included clips of Mona Lisa in between.

Anything She Does

This very fast song is dominated by Tony Banks’ synthesizers and the brass sounds with which he emulates horns, and Phil’s drums. The ending is deliberately chaotic.

With Tony Banks’ lyrics being about page three-girls, Genesis wanted to have British comedian Benny Hill as his character Fred Scuttle for the music video. Phil got the task of ringing him up. At this time, Hill wanted to get away from his image as ‘dirty old man’. The script saw the band rehearsing backstage at Wembley Stadium and him being the door man on duty while all the women lined up to try and get past him. Hill agreed on the condition that his character tried to chase the girls, but never got one. Phil was very happy for the signed photograph he got in the end.

Domino

Domino’ is a 11-minute epic in two parts (I. ‘In the Glow of the Night’, II. ‘The Last Domino’), which are very different from each other. Part One begins slowly and pretty until an abrupt ending and a musical explosion lead to Part Two in double tempo with a heavy beat.

Being the album’s long song, the lyrics about the desperation and loneliness in war time were written by Tony Banks.

Mike Rutherford: ‘His words are the reason why he’ll never write a hit single.’¹³

Phil Collins: ‘We were always a group of songwriters who would write 3-, 10- and 20-minute songs. We still write 10-minute songs, like ‘Domino’, but unfortunately, the three-minute songs have gotten better and become hits. I don’t feel we’ve bastardized the way we were, as we still work the same way. Diehard fans will say, ‘Rubbish. ‘The Carpet Crawlers, ‘I Know What I Like’ – that was progressive!’ But I don’t see that. We’d have killed for hit singles back in the early days!‘¹⁴

Mike drew a comparison to the costumes of Peter Gabriel: ‘Looking back, people forget the show’s an hour and three quarters maybe and the costumes were probably 15 minutes of the whole thing. When we started having hit singles with MTV and videos, a hit single overshadowed the whole album and people started sort of saying ‘You stopped doing long songs.’ We never did, really, every album had a sort of 15-minute-long song on it till the very end. But they were album tracks, so they weren’t on television, they weren’t on the radio, but live they were a big part of the set.’¹⁵

Throwing It All Away

‘Throwing It All Away’ is based on an intensive guitar riff by Mike that is repeated throughout the whole song. He also wrote the simple love-song lyrics.

The song gives Phil another opportunity to sing about the end of a relationship and again, he does what he can do best masterfully. Even though the topic is sad, the mood is very uplifting and the whole composition is a brilliant example of how concise the trio Banks/Collins/Rutherford could combine their songwriting skills. When played live, the song became famous for its call-and-response.

‘Throwing It All Away’ was live drummer Chester Thompson’s favourite song to play: ‘The crazy thing about that is that the full kit only comes in the last bit of the song, it’s mostly just hi-hat and bass drum and then you finally come in towards the end, but I just thought it was such a great feel, I loved playing that song.’¹⁶

The music video is made up of sequences filmed during the band’s 1986 tour, partly by Phil with a hand camera.

The Brazilian

The last song on Invisible Touch is the instrumental ‘The Brazilian’, which is full of strange electric percussion sounds and half-tone step and definitely is ‘the strangest and most demanding cut on the album’, as music journalist Chris Welch writes: ‘A re-affirmation of the band’s faith in its musical past, […] full of spacey sounds like a sea monster, breathing heavily and stomping up the beach.’¹⁷

Reception

Music journalist Chris Welch thinks that Invisible Touch comes closest to achieving the status of being Genesis ‘ultimate album’.¹⁸ Band biographers Bowler & Dray think that ‘certainly it was their best album since ‘Wind And Wuthering’‘ and ‘one of the very best albums of the 1980s.’¹⁹ . Some fan-reactions can be summed up nicely by Alan Hewitt, founder of Genesis’s official The Waiting Room fanzine, who described Invisible Touch as ‘the first Genesis album he ever played once and then turned into a frisbee‘.²⁰

Tony Banks: ‘On ‘Invisible Touch’, you’ve got the ‘Domino’ suite, which is 12 minutes long, and ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’, which is about nine minutes. Both are identifiably Genesis, the sort of thing that no one else does. If you add, say ‘The Brazilian’, which again is like no other group, you’ve got at least 50% of the album. There are songs like ‘Invisible Touch’ and ‘Throwing It All Away’, but we’ve always done those. It’s just that we do them better now. With the songs, say off ‘The Lamb Lies Down’, maybe they’re lyrically more complex, but in terms of the songs themselves – ‘Carpet Crawlers’ or ‘Counting Out Time’ – they’re all attempts at the same kind of things. Even ‘From Genesis to Revelation’ was all short songs, all attempts at writing hit singles. And all failed.‘²¹

The multi-platinum album Invisible Touch was the band’s most successful and granted by the critics. Songs like ‘Invisible Touch’, ‘Land of Confusion’ and ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’ dominated international charts throughout 1986/87. In the US, charts were also calculated on radio airplay, so even the song ‘Anything She Does’, which had not been released as a single, ended up in the charts. Also, the song’s music videos were running endlessly on MTV, the new medium of music television that had come up in the 1980s.

Tony Banks: ‘It’s great having hits. I was brought up in the era of hits, in the 60s the next Beatles song coming out was the sort of high point of my existence.’²²

Peter Gabriel had been equally successful at that time: The single ‘Invisible Touch’ had been knocked off no. 1 by his hit ‘Sledgehammer’ and his album So was equally successful and became his biggest-selling album. 1986 seemed to have been a good year for this former ‘art rock’ band and its members.

The Invisible Touch Tour

Mike Rutherford: ‘A lot of people came to see us in the 80s and 90s in America because of the hit singles, but I always knew the long songs would grab them. They were songs that were visually were impressive with the vari-lites. Those who came to see us because of the singles and the radio tracks went away with a different impression of us.‘²³

The successful album was followed by a massive tour that led the band through ‘large open air arenas and stadiums in Europe and the USA. The tour also took in several shows in Japan, only their second visit to that country, and finally included their first ever shows in New Zealand and Australia.’ The tour culminated ‘in a record-breaking four consecutive nights at London’s enormous Wembley Stadium in 1987.’²⁴

Phil Collins:‘The Wembley shows were very special. It was still the old Wembley; it was football territory. Everything just seemed to peak at that point. I’ve been thinking about the set of the time with ‘Home By The Sea’, where the lights were coming down.’²⁵

The record-breaking Wembley shows were filmed for a home video release, the first using Sony Hi Definition film.

After the end of the 1987 tour, Phil, Mike and Tony went back to their solo careers. Genesis came together in 1991 to record and release their final studio album with Phil Collins, We Can’t Dance. But that’s another story.

Sources

Banks, Tony; Collins, Phil; Gabriel, Peter; Hackett, Steve; Rutherford, Mike; Dodd, Philip (2007): Genesis. Chapter & verse. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Griffin.

Barnett, Laura, ‘Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford: How we made Invisible Touch’, The Guardian (14 October 2014).

Bowler, Dave; Dray, Bryan (1992): Genesis. A biography. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

CHESTER THOMPSON FULL INTERVIEW : HOW HE WENT FROM ZAPPA TO DRUMMING WITH GENESIS & PHIL COLLINS.

Genesis – Behind The Track (Land Of Confusion).

Hewitt, Alan, Opening the Musical Box – A Genesis Chronicle. (Firefly Publishing, 2000).

Holm-Hudson, Kevin (2008): Genesis and the lamb lies down on Broadway. Aldershot, England, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MIKE RUTHERFORD UNFILTERED: GENESIS GUITARIST/COMPOSER IN CONVERSATION.

PHIL COLLINS: HOW I GOT THE GENESIS AUDIENCES LAUGHING.

Platts, Robin (2007): Genesis. Behind the lines, 1967-2007. Burlington, Ont., Canada: Collectors Guide Pub.

Room, Adrian (1990): An A to Z of British life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rutherford, Mike, The Living Years: The First Genesis Memoir. (Macmillan, 2014).

Thompson, Dave (2005): Turn it on again. Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins & Genesis. San Francisco: Backbeat Books.

‘Tony Banks Interview from ‘Genesis Songbook DVD’.

TONY BANKS UNFILTERED: GENESIS KEYBOARD PLAYER & COMPOSER IN CONVERSATION . FULL.. 1 Hour 53 Mins.

Welch, Chris (2005): Genesis. The complete guide to their music. London: Omnibus Press.

1. Collins 2007: 263. ↩︎
2. Holm-Hudson 2008: 133 ↩︎
3. in Platts 2007: 133. ↩︎
4. Barnett, Laura, ‘Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford: How we made Invisible Touch’, The Guardian (14 October 2014). ↩︎
5. Barnett, Laura, ‘Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford: How we made Invisible Touch’, The Guardian (14 October 2014). ↩︎
6. Welch 2005: 68. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Bowler & Dray 1992: 202. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Genesis – Behind The Track (Land Of Confusion). ↩︎
11. Room 1990: 355. ↩︎
12. Tony Banks Interview from ‘Genesis Songbook DVD. ↩︎
13. Rutherford 2014: p. 150. ↩︎
14. Thompson 2005: 224. ↩︎
15. MIKE RUTHERFORD UNFILTERED: GENESIS GUITARIST/COMPOSER IN CONVERSATION. ↩︎
16. CHESTER THOMPSON FULL INTERVIEW : HOW HE WENT FROM ZAPPA TO DRUMMING WITH GENESIS & PHIL COLLINS. ↩︎
17. Welch 2005: 70. ↩︎
18. Welch 2005: 68. ↩︎
19. Bowler & Dray 1992: 201; 205. ↩︎
20. Thompson 2005: 225. ↩︎
21. Platts 2007: 134. ↩︎
22. TONY BANKS UNFILTERED: GENESIS KEYBOARD PLAYER & COMPOSER IN CONVERSATION . FULL.. 1 Hour 53 Mins. ↩︎
23. MIKE RUTHERFORD UNFILTERED: GENESIS GUITARIST/COMPOSER IN CONVERSATION. ↩︎
24. Hewitt 2000: 60 ↩︎
25. PHIL COLLINS: HOW I GOT THE GENESIS AUDIENCES LAUGHING. ↩︎