Anthony Phillips (year unknown)
In 1967, guitarist Anthony
Phillips founded the original rock/progressive group Genesis with singer Peter
Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, and bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford at
Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, England. He recorded their first two albums,
From Genesis to Revelation (1969) and Trespass (1970). He would leave shortly after Trespass. (Phil Collins had not joined
the band by the time Phillips left).
For a few years, Phillips
wasn’t active in the rock music scene, but in that time, he learned more
instruments—keyboards, bass, and drums—and studied classical music. He and Mike
Rutherford worked on Geese and the Ghost
(1977), Phillips’s first solo album. Geese
and the Ghost also featured vocals from Phil Collins. Phillips’s music was
a mixture of various musical genres: progressive rock, experimental, pop, and
classical oriented. Phillips recorded over thirty-one albums from 1978 to 2012.
Harvest of the Heart (2014) is a five-CD anthology of his solo
career.
In addition to his
active solo music career, Phillips expanded his musical horizons and composed
music for nature documentary films as well as library music. According to
writer Nate Patrin, library music “(a.k.a. production or stock)” is defined as
“music recorded in a multitude of contexts and styles by work-for-hire
musicians, owned by music-library labels, and lent out to commercial
enterprises in TV, radio, and film.”” [1] In October 2017, Phillips rereleased Slow Dance, a classical-oriented piece album with bonus tracks and a 5.1 remix. He
just rereleased his pop album, Invisible
Men (1982).
In this candid
conversation, we look at Anthony Philips’s time in Genesis, his solo career,
his forays into film and library music, and his current reissues. I want to
thank Billy James from Glass Onyon PR for setting up the interview, but most of
all, I want to thank Anthony for his time.
Jeff Cramer: What encouraged you to get interested in music?
Anthony Phillips:
Gosh, well, I think it’s because there were other guys I knew who were learning
to play the guitar, and people are always looking for something to kind of
excel at, right? I was sort of okay at sports, but I’m not quite good at
football or cricket. So, I thought, “Well, guitar is a nice thing to do.” The
Shadows were around, and they were doing appealing instrumentals, but I think
the big thing was the Beatles. I mean, the Beatles exploded with all this kind
of raucous color but also melodic as well. There was so much energy and melody
like I’d never heard before. It was mind-boggling. I had always loved hymns. We
weren’t a particularly a religious family or anything, but I love melody. I
think it was a culmination of other guys playing the guitar and then the
Beatles. Then all of that came off in their wake, you know, like the Rolling
Stones and whatnot. It was a great time to be around because the sixties was a
time of enormous change and innovation. I consider myself very lucky to have
been learning at the time when there were so many great musicians whose careers
have carried on. People kept saying, “Oh, the Beatles have only got two or
three years.” How wrong they were.
JC: How did it build up to Genesis?
AP: Well, I was
in a cover band with three other guys doing the Beatles’ “Slow Down.” Peter
Gabriel and Tony Banks were in another band. Genesis wasn’t really a band as in
everybody was singing and playing their
live instruments together. We
got together as a group of songwriters, really. I was writing stuff, and Peter
Gabriel and Tony Banks were doing stuff together. We sort of came together when
Mike [Rutherford] and I were doing
some demos and asked Tony to cover our keyboards. Then Tony said, “We can get
Peter to do some vocals.” Jonathan King produced us. King is very much a pop
producer. We did a couple of singles with him, which weren’t personally my favorite,
but he did let us do an album, the very first album, From Genesis to Revelation (1969). We were still in high school
and
we didn’t have much arrangement skill.
From Genesis to
Revelation (Anthony, bottom left)—1969
We didn’t have much control over the album, and the whole
thing ended up being unhappy. [To hear Genesis’
“The Silent Sun,” click here.] After we graduated high school, we were at a crossroads, questioning,
“Should we give this one up? We’ve had a couple of singles and an album, or do
we try and go from songwriters to actually playing our instruments properly on
stage and take the band route?” It was a close decision, and it very nearly
didn’t happen. Mike and I had done a fair bit of live playing at parties and
stuff, but the others hadn’t really. Strangely enough, it was such a shame that
Peter Gabriel was not a natural performer.
JC: Oh, really?
AP: He is very
shy. Lots of shy people try to be themselves on stage, but it won’t work
because they’re very shy and don’t command the audience. Peter’s persona was
partly developed because of the fact that Mike Rutherford and I spent time
tuning our twelve-string guitars. So, Peter started making up wild stories and
built that whole sort of persona. Peter’s imagination is pretty vivid, and the whole
audience was spellbound with his rather bizarre stories (laughs). It gave us time to get our twelve-strings in tune.
JC: Genesis was finding its footing by the time you guys recorded Trespass, but that was the last album you recorded with
the band. In your words, why did you leave Genesis?
AP: Well, it was
stage fright. I’d had glandular fever before I went on the road, which
physically had knocked me back without realizing it. It’s this thing that stays
in your system for a long time, and it can affect your nervous system as well,
which I didn’t know at the time. I kept getting sick while we were on the road,
and it wasn’t just colds. I was very weak all the time and it was the glandular
fever. I was quite a natural, keen performer, but I just started getting stage
fright. In other words, your sort of look at your hands playing the guitar and
you’re thinking, “Hang on, how am I doing that?” Going on stage had started to
become a major challenge and eventually I just thought it wasn’t really for me.
Genesis (1970) with Anthony Phillips
(on left)
Looking back, stage fright was just an unfortunate act that happened
to me and loads of other artists. Also we had too many composers in the group. I
think you can only have so many strong minds working together; otherwise, you
get too many people trying to have their share of the cake. And then you get a
lot of anger. While that wasn’t the reason I left, it may well have contributed
possibly to some of the background, because we did have four very strong minds
and personalities, and that’s a lot. If you think of all the famous songwriting
partnerships, they’ve nearly always been two. But we had four guys. I think
that’s quite rare. It’s no wonder that there were regular departures from the
group where people perhaps didn’t feel that they were getting their full share
of the cake, or that their vision was diluted. I think it probably would have
come to a head anyway for all those reasons. [To hear “The Knife” by Genesis, click here.]
JC: After you left Genesis, you went down another path altogether. You
went on a solo career and started to learn how to play other instruments.
AP: Yeah, it was quite a passage. I was a bit of a lost soul for a while. Despite
the best efforts of one or two of the masters at high school who thought I had melodic skill or had tried
to teach me classical music, I just couldn’t really hear it.Partly
I think I wasn’t hearing the right kind of stuff. When I left, I starting to
play some more popular classical stuff—it was more melodic, arresting . . . you
know, the New World Symphony. It was a revelation for me because I had always
thought of classical music as being rather dry, arid, and rather formal.
Suddenly, here was music bursting with color and melody. I was absolutely
determined to have those skills for writing classical music, having that color
under my fingers.
And so I embarked on a bit of a road. It was a sort of
circuitous route because I couldn’t read music, so I started with a piano
teacher to just learn the rudiments. This can be very difficult for someone who
can play reasonably well by ear because then you have to train your eyes to
work and not let your ear anticipate where you’re going. I was terribly frustrated.
I would throw the music across the room quite a lot. I spent a couple years
with a piano teacher. I could play classical guitar, so I had that sort of
string to my bow—pardon the pun—but I also studied orchestration, harmony . . .
all that kind of stuff at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I think I studied that
stuff for three or four years, and I taught as well. It was
the sort of starting gates for The Geese and the Ghost, and I was armed with
a few more skills than I had before.
JC: The album, The Geese
and the Ghost, was originally supposed to be a collaboration between you and Mike
Rutherford before it become a solo album?
AP: It was really
Mike and I. I think the problem with the group of Genesis was that Gabriel had
left and the whole thing was kind of rocky. Nobody knew at that point that Phil
Collins had the potential to be a megastar who would lead at the front. I mean,
he only became a singer by default because they couldn’t find anyone else to
follow Peter. There was a hiatus where we needed to decide what to do. Mike and
I did the album, and Steve Hackett (who
replaced Phillips in Genesis) did his own solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte (1975). But once Genesis got back together,
they very much wanted a united front and didn’t want to have a lot of people
doing solo albums, which sort of made sense. The Geese and the Ghost had a lot of Mike on it, but I can
understand a group relaunching itself. It’s gonna be confusing and side
tracking to have a lot of solo projects going on. So, The Geese and the Ghost
(1977) became an Anthony Phillips solo album. [To hear “God If I Saw Her Now” with Phil Collins on vocals, click here.]
The Geese and the Ghost album (1977)
JC: I think that album does show the beginning of your solo career.
While it obviously has Genesis elements, it also has instrumentals that would
become part of your solo career.
AP: A lot of my
career was really fashioned by need and, you know, a lot of the time. One has
to remember that before you had your home studio, you very much did what the
record company wanted; otherwise, you wouldn’t record a record. There was no
way of actually recording music unless you did what the record company said. It’s
different now, because you can do it all at home on a relatively small budget. I
was lucky in my career to record things I wanted. I was able to introduce a few
orchestral elements and hopefully combine classical elements to match classical
instruments with rock ones but in an integrated way. It wasn’t the sort of rock
band on one side of the stage and the rather prim orchestra on the other. I was
trying a combination of sounds, some of which were orchestral sounds.
JC: I noticed that you have a lot of solo albums. Are there any that you would like to discuss? I
mean, we’d be here all day (laughs)
if we discussed every one of them. Are there any albums that you’d like to talk
about in particular that hold a special memory?
AP: The two rock
albums, Wise After The Event (1978)
and Sides (1979). Rupert Hine was the
producer, I think, and mixed in the results. It was great fun working with the
brilliant [bassist] John Perry and [drummer] Michael Giles—it was a
privilege to work with them. I think you sort of have to fast track into Slow Dance (1990) where I finally had
the chance to work on a large scale again. It was a wonderful outlet for larger-scale
pieces, which I had written over the previous ten years that I hadn’t been able
to record. I threw my heart and soul into them. If I had to choose, it’d
probably be The Geese and the Ghost because of the youthfulness (it was my first),
and Slow Dance because it was something
that came at the end of a period in this sort of semi-wilderness.
JC: Now, Slow Dance (1990) was
an interesting concept in itself because the album is the piece. It’s a
two-part instrumental.
Slow Dance cover
AP: Well, I think
it was a bit of guesswork to be honest. I wanted to do an album and I had an X amount of material already. I got a
new synth, which was quite cutting edge at the time; it’s called the Emax. I
assembled the body of music of different sections that I thought were strong, and
then thought, “Well, how can we combine these and try and make them work
together?” Obviously, some couldn’t work together, so that was a challenge, but
it was exciting because I was fairly convinced that some of the basic ideas
were creditable. The challenge was really to make it kind of hang together. I worked
on sections for a quite a long period of time. I mean, it’s much easier to do
an album or a song. (To hear a live
version of the “Slow Dance” opening, click here.)
JC: What made you decide to reissue the whole Slow Dance?
AP: I’m with a new
record company called Cherry Red Records, which is located in England, and they
wanted to rerelease albums I did. This is always a moot point for me. There are
some die-hard fans who are going to go out and buy these no matter what they do
to them, and therefore, going out and buying an album again with this specific
record company’s stamp on it. I don’t think it’s right. So, I was determined to
try to provide something extra. The re-releases have had a various amount of augmentation
at either end, and nearly all have had extra CD material. A lot of the albums have
been remastered. There’s also a lot of extra bibliographical material so
there’s lots to read about. I think about five or six of the albums are in 5.1,
which obviously isn’t cheap. I don’t imagine that many people have the original
albums, so I hope gradually more will buy the reissued albums, and that they
will appreciate it.
JC: I understand you’ve also done library music (“production or stock
music”). Can you talk about composing that?
AP: Initially, I
was very privileged to work on a lot of programs that were brought back from
South America, from Amazonas, the southern part of the Amazon, by a wonderful
man who’s sadly not with us anymore. The film footage could
be very varied—anything from an animal stalking or some beautiful sunset. It
was quite taxing and the money wasn’t brilliant. Some of the producers were
very demanding and I just sort of stumbled onto library music.
Library music is very much a library of photos. You have a
great photo and you can use it over and over again. This is equivalent in
music, but as I said for reasons of budget, time, etc., the trick is to try to
write something that is quite timeless. The discipline is that you can’t really
change very much. You have a piece of music that has a sort of rough length of
between two or three minutes, and while it has some change and development, it
can’t go from a quiet twelve-string section to a loud piece with saxophones and
stuff. You’ve got to work to create and develop it, augment it slightly, but be
careful not to take any strange U-turns. I have always enjoyed it a lot because
it’s a bit like doing an album but without some of the great pressure that you
get with doing albums. And, of course, the other thing is the potential
financial reward if you do create some tracks that get used repeatedly over and
over again. The results are substantial. I’ve been very lucky. There are too
many library companies in competition, but I was very lucky. The company I was working
with got taken over by a series of bigger companies. We ended up by being part
of Universal. I’ve used the income I have made from some of my library music to
help fund some of the solo projects, particularly some of the 5.1 reissue work.
JC: Talk about the compilation of your solo work, Harvest of the
Heart.
AP: I didn’t
choose the material; the material was chosen by the record company. I think I
suggested one track that I thought was a better choice, but aside from that, it
was the record company’s choice. I said, “You know, I’ll leave it up to you
guys.” When the record company finds an artist with a big catalogue, they often
do a boxset, but my worry was that we probably had too much material on it. My
compilation was five CDs.
Harvest of the Heart
(2014) album cover
JC: (Laughs)
AP: Looking back,
it might have been better to have had a double CDs or perhaps three CDS, but
the record company knows more than I do.
JC: Are you working on any new solo projects? I mean, I know about the
reissue of Slow Dance . . .
AP: Well, yes. Invisible Men (1982) is the next one to
come up. (Invisible Men was
released shortly after this interview took place.) Funnily enough, it was a
sort of a controversial album at the time because it was pop songs. I felt a
little bit awkward about it because I didn’t feel that sort of poppy pop songs,
but record companies were like, “We need a hit, otherwise, we won’t record you.”
So, we have a nice bonus CD with proper outtakes, sometimes an instrumental, and
some other songs. I hope we’ve provided something that’s worthwhile buying, not
just something that repeats itself.
At the moment, I’m involved in quite a lot of different
things. I’m prepping up a new acoustic album. I’ve also done a lot of library
music and I’m involved in writing a piano duet for . . . I’m not allowed to say,
but it is for someone who’s very famous in the classical world.
Invisible Men album cover
JC: What is your secret to keep going?
AP: Well, I
didn’t really have a choice but to keep going. In ’91 or ’92, I had my Virgin Records
deal. Then Virgin got taken over by EMI, and EMI got rid of any artist who wasn’t
making a
lot of money and
that included me. It was around that time that a lot of the library music
kicked in. You know, necessity is the mother of invention. One of the areas
particularly perturbing is if somebody asked me to remix a library track of something
I had recorded five or six years ago; I’ve got very little chance of doing it
properly because I have to go back to an earlier computer. There are so many things
that don’t read or aren’t compatible with each other. Things are moving very fast,
and there is often incompatibility between them. So, there’s a bit of a
minefield. People who are inventing and putting out new computer stuff seem to
think there were no previous computers. None of the new computer stuff is compatible with
old computers. I
think that’s a real danger. You know, I guess the older you get, it’s gonna be
harder to keep up, but I’m still enjoying trying to keep.
[1]
Nate Patrin, “The Strange World of Library Music,” Pitchfork, May 14, 2014,
accessed October 25, 2017
