REFLECTION - ROCK THEATRE

I saw this compilation album in the LP format in one record shop in 1981, with it being an LP copy which maybe was made in Germany or in Italy (I don`t remember well now). It really had then an expensive price, being imported from Europe. I never bought it, because this compilation has songs from three albums ("Nursery Cryme", "Foxtrot" and "Selling England by the Pound") which at that time I already had in the LP format. And then I did not know that the version of "Watcher of the Skies" that this album has was really the single version which was released many years later in their "Archives 1967-1975" Box Set. But i think that this compilation was maybe released when Peter Gabriel left the band in 1975, as it has in the cover a photo taken at one of the concerts of their "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Tour" from 1974-1975, or it also could have been released at the time of that tour to promote some of their previous albums (with "Trespass", also released in the Charisma Records label, being ignored, as it was "From Genesis to Revelation", which was released by another record label). So, apart from including that "Watcher of the Skies" single version, and while it also includes some very good songs from the albums that I mentioned above, I think that this compilation is now more for the most dedicated fans and collectors of the band. This album was re-issued in the CD format in Germany in 1986.

A curious thing: I remember than in the back cover of this compilation the songs "Watcher of the Skies" and "Supper`s Ready" (both recorded for the "Foxtrot" album ) are credited as being composed by "Banks / Collins / Gabriel / Hackett / Rutherford / MacPhail", with "MacPhail" being really Richard MacPhail, who at the time (1972) was really listed in the credits of that album for "equipment and stage sound (sound friend)" and not for really being a member of the band (in fact, his photo also appears in the back cover of the "Genesis Live" album with a note which says that the "Live" album was dedicated to him because he left in April 1973, with this meaning that he stopped working with Genesis then, althought he later worked for a time as Peter Gabriel`s tour manager in the late seventies) . I think that this was really a mistake done by the part of the compilators of this album, because MacPhail`s photo was included among the other photos of the real members of the band which were included in the inside of the gatefold cover of the "Foxtrot" album. So, the compilators maybe thought that he was a member of the band and that his name was included in the band`s name "Genesis"(as the songwriting credits were for that album and the others which they released between 1969 and 1974) as composer of the songs of that album. Of course, as it was done in other albums with respect of the songs from "Foxtrot" (like in the live albums "Seconds Out" and "Three Sides Live") his name does not appear among the credits of the composers for those songs.