Prologue: In the Beginning

Take a little trip back to the 1960s, the decade when British pop and rock music took over the world, when The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, The Kinks et al. established the template for how a rock band should perform, how it should behave, what it should look like. The rules tended to revolve around playing up a band's working class roots, adopting an aggressive pose, wearing a perpetual sneer on your upper lip, acting like a harbinger of the revolution.

Nowhere in those templates was there much about forming at public school where you had been sent to be trained to become leaders of the Establishment, captains of industry, upholders of the ruling class. But Charterhouse public school, the alma mater of politicians, diplomats, bishops, judges and winners of the Victoria Cross, was the primordial swamp from which two groups evolved, The Garden Wall, featuring singer and flautist Peter Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) and pianist Tony Banks (born 27 March 1950), and Anon which included budding guitarists Anthony Phillips (born 23 December 1951) and Michael Rutherford (born 2 October 1950), Phillips also popping up in The Garden Wall.

Those two pairs eventually joined forces when Phillips and Rutherford spent a school holiday trying to record some of the songs they'd written and, needing a pianist and organist to augment their sound, invited Banks along. He persuaded them to bring Gabriel along because they, too, had been writing songs and wanted to try out one of theirs.

In the Easter holidays of 1967, they decamped to a small home studio set up operated by school friend Brian Roberts to record some demos. Gabriel was late arriving, so they began by recording the songs Phillips and Rutherford had in hand, with Phillips singing before Banks chimed in with, 'We should really wait for Peter because he's got an awful lot better voice.' To his credit, Phillips agreed, Rutherford saying later in the video that accompanied the 1970-75 box set, 'If Ant hadn't realised that [Peter was a better singer] we might have missed the moment.'

It was a decision that brought almost immediate dividends. As well as filling the ranks of the civil service, Charterhouse had produced itself a pop sensation earlier in the 1960s; Jonathan King reached number four in the UK charts with his single, 'Everyone's Gone to the Moon', in 1965 and was quickly an established figure in the music scene. When word circulated that he was returning to Charterhouse for an 'old boys' day, they hatched a plot to get a tape of their songs into his hands, though their collective nerve failed them and schoolfriend John Alexander had to do the deed, leaving the tape in his Austin Healey Sprite.

King was sufficiently taken by the tape to get in touch, arrange a meeting and put them into a real studio to record four songs. Happy with the results of that, he then signed them to a ten-year publishing deal - later reduced to a year thanks to the intervention of the band's parents - for this fledgling four saw themselves as songwriters for other people in best Brill Building tradition. For all his contacts, not even King could find any takers for the songs, particularly for the second batch of material that they provided him with, songs that veered away from the more obvious pop of the initial tape. To recapture King's waning attention, Banks and Gabriel famously crafted 'The Silent Sun' in the style of the Bee Gees, sufficiently successful that he took them into the studio to record it as a single - with schoolfriend Chris Stewart (born 27 March 1951) on drums - arguing that they might be better off recording the songs themselves.

It was a sensible suggestion, for while there were occasional glimpses of what Genesis might become musically during that Decca Records era, the thing that really distinguishes them at that point wasn't the songwriting or the musicianship, it was Peter Gabriel's voice. That was the hook.

To issue a single, the band still needed a name, having toyed with such disastrous ideas as The Champagne Meadow. King suggested Gabriel's Angels, which found favour with the singer but not the rest of the group, strangely enough, before settling on Genesis, King seeing the band as the beginning of his production career. 'The Silent Sun' was released to a wave of public apathy on 2 February 1968, as was 'A Winter's Tale' on 10 May. Refusing to be disheartened, King suggested they record an album, stipulating that they should improve the rhythm section ahead of making the album. Rutherford, still finding his way on bass, was going nowhere, so Chris Stewart was eased out of the line-up; Rutherford sent off as the hangman. Stewart was to be replaced by another Charterhouse alumnus, John Silver (born 22 February 1949), a jazz fan in the main, who Gabriel later credited with being an important factor in encouraging Genesis to follow a more idiosyncratic path and to craft their own personality away from the demands of the record company.

That the newly christened Genesis were a musically ambitious bunch was immediately evident as they chose their subject matter for this debut album, using the Book of Genesis and the Book of Revelations as loose themes for the two sides of the vinyl. 'Absolutely pathetic', said Banks later in the band's Chapter & Verse book, 'but it did give us something to hang everything around'.

Recording took place during the school holidays in August 1968 at Regent Sound Studios in London, Banks playing organ for the first time, the band recording their parts inside two days under King's supervision as producer. Once they had finished their work, King sat on the tapes for a time, wondering if what he had was suitable for release. Concluding that it wasn't, in December, he drafted in Arthur Greenslade and Lou Warburton to add string and horn arrangements, the band mixed onto one stereo channel, these new embellishments, added without their knowledge, on the other.

From Genesis to Revelation was released by Decca in a pre-Spinal Tap jet black sleeve with gothic gold lettering at the top on 7 March 1969. There was no band name, research having uncovered an already existing Genesis in the United States. 'Revelation' was toyed with as an alternative until an English band of that name was unearthed. And so briefly, they were the band with no name with a record that, based on its sleeve, found its way into the religious section of most record shops, not the best way to launch a career. Famously, on release, it sold just 650 copies, Phillips ruefully admitting, 'Between us, I think we knew everybody who bought one'.

Largely ignored as part of the Genesis canon, not least because the rights still reside with King rather than the group and so it has never come under the band's umbrella, it has a certain period charm and some enjoyable songs, but it's a pretty naïve offering, one that, for the most part, is the sum of its influences and of King's contribution. Overall, the record is in thrall to the sounds of the time, the Stones, the Small Faces, even film soundtracks of the era worming their way into the songs. Noel Gallagher of Oasis has become a latter-day champion of the record, admitting his own song 'If Love Is the Law' is based on 'The Conqueror'.

There have been many re-releases over the years, perhaps the best a double CD on Edsel Records in 2005, which offers thirteen additional tracks. There is also a digital-only release from 2017, 50 Years Ago, which, while not the album itself, acts as a fine companion piece, including as it does material taken from the multi-tracks that were previously thought lost in a fire. It's a fascinating glimpse into the making of the record and one that deserves a wider release.

With the commercial failure of From Genesis to Revelation, their association with King drifted to a close and Genesis were left to their own devices as they reached the summer of 1969. This was a significant period for them, for decisions on continuing with their education or plugging into the band had to be made. Ultimately, the music won out, not least because over the latter part of 1968 and into '69, they had been finding their own sound, one that hadn't really found favour with King. Songs were getting longer, more complex, and in particular, the sound of two, sometimes three, 12-string guitars was something that gave Genesis an identity. Phillips was very much the moving force behind it:

At Charterhouse, I was in a house called Duckites, but I had pockets of friends in other houses too. Each house had its own style. The Robinites were rather cool, not exactly rebels, but among them was this guy, Tony Henderson. We were coming back from the Glade, where we used to go and smoke illegally, it was the summer of 1966, and he was in a field playing this 12-string and I just thought, 'Bloody hell, that's a great sound!' I would have heard a 12-string before that, The Beatles used an electric 12-string quite a lot, The Byrds were around, there was the odd pop track with an acoustic, but it wasn't normally in a picking, arpeggio way, it was more a strumming thing, so you didn't get the full timbre. To hear him playing that way, solo, outside in the summer, it had a magical quality to it. You have this strange, harmonic thing going on which is very, very different, and I was captivated by it and then so was Mike. In early 1969, Mike and I started playing and then writing on them in tandem, and...