FROM GENESIS TO REVELATION

"I was two or three years older than them and I was being quite dominant, because I've always been a very autocratic producer, so I wasn't actually saying to them 'Don't you think that solo's too long, don't you think it ought to be a bit shorter', I was saying 'That solo's too long, cut it down to eight bars' or whatever; and I was trimming 'em like mad because they were very self-indulgent in those days. It was the era of progressive music. People were doing 19 minute solos and huge intros, and I didn't like all that because I thought it was generally very, very boring. There was some good moments in a lot of the longer stuff, but I preferred it distilled down. So I was actually teaching them to cut things, trim everything and make it much shorter, keep everything very much sort of three minutes, four minutes, get the lyric" [inaudible] "keep the solos down and all the rest of it. Um... I had quite a lot of aggravation from a couple of them. Both Tony and Anthony used to be very aggravated that I would cut their keyboard or guitar solos to almost nothing 'cos it was too self-indulgent..." [Read it and weep. What did we lose?] "We stitched the album together slowly but surely with absolute gems on it... and certain tracks that still to this day I think are terrific songs, better than a lot of later Genesis songs in my opinion." [I note that in this retrospective appraisal of the Genesis oeuvre by those whose opinions might be considered more worthy as people who actually LIKE Genesis, the album scores so low that it's not until Abacab that it's worsted - by which time a lot of the reviewers had doubtless moved on and classify such material as 'The Later Years' and so are almost obliged to pan it in any case :)]

"I was full of ideas in those days - as usual, way ahead of my time," [said ironically perhaps, but this IS Jonathan King remember and as I am sure he knows, all irony contains a grain of truth; at least in the mind of the speaker]. "For a start I wanted them to do a concept album which I thought would be very different and unusual. I wanted to call it 'From Genesis to Revelation'," [having stated earlier in the interview "I gave them the name 'Genesis' because I thought this was the start of my production career... so it was the genesis of something great"] "... I arranged little bits in between the tracks, little string bits that linked them all together... and I thought what we do is put it in a black sleeve with no name or anything on it, we call it 'From Genesis to Revelation', people would then discover it and it would become extremely important. Of course it all went dreadfully wrong because the rest of the world hadn't caught up with my advanced ideas. This was always the case." [Yes, irony again, but he's about to underline the 'truth' behind the irony himself. Deep breath now... and...] "Genesis themselves didn't happen until YEARS later," [when no longer under the King influence and making radically different music] "although I'd started them off. The same happened to me later when I started 'The Bay City Rollers' off and gave them their first" [inaudible] "but it was years before they became truly popular..." [etc. etc. with additional examples of things that became successful after they left King behind]

"So when these albums with black covers reached all the retailers, they looked at it and thought 'This is bizarre, 'From Genesis to Revelation', must be religious music' they said, and stuck it in the bins with all the other religious music so it didn't do a thing." [There you go, budding music-shop managers, you find the appropriate place on the shelves for your stock by taking a glance at the title and the cover; the title and cover of product you had no idea you've even ordered until it reaches the emporium. And you thought it was more organised than that...] "I'm afraid that little marketing ploy was the reason it wasn't a much bigger album because it was packed with some absolutely sensational songs." [But of course, definitely not Jonathan's fault at all]

If any completionists out there want to seek out this interview, don't bother. It's supposed to be an interview about Genesis but they come in for barely a glance along the way while Jonathan King talked about Jonathan King.

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