Genesis - Duchess (1980) Album: Duke Duchess begins after the final chord of Behind The Lines with a flowing monotonous drum machine rhythm and some percussion sounds. Tony plays just a few piano notes while Mike adds guitar bits that resemble the end of Dancing With The Moonlit Knight. The song builds slowly with lots of atmosphere until a little piano tune begins at 01:56. The drums come in shortly after and then, at 02:23, a powerful bass begins alongside Phil’s vocals, turning the whole song into a very compact strong gem. The song itself is about the ups and downs in the careeer of a female rock star called the Duchess. Her career begins hopeful and carefree; Times were good She never thought about the future She just did what she would But she really cared about her music It all seemed so important then She can only dream of success and fights through the tough music business. Her dreams of fans cheering her on stage soon becomes true But now everytime that she performed Everybody cried for more Soon all she had to do was step into the light For everyone to start to roar And the people cried, youre the one weve waited for But time and too much worrying about what her fans may want from her let the glamour fade, and soon no one wants to listen to her music anymore. And then there was the time that she performed When nobody called for more And soon everytime she stepped into the light They really let her know the score All that is left is the memory of past glory. Duchess is often linked to the career of Genesis itself. After many years of hard work and beginning commercial success (Follow You Follow Me) it may have been good for them to reflect on their career so far and to look into the future. Duchess can therefore be read as a warning not to forget where you are coming from and not paying too much attention to the taste of the masses. Perhaps there were some fears in the band at the time that they, too, would sometime sink into irrelevance. Duchess is very important for Genesis, as Tony Banks explains: “It became one of my favourite Genesis songs. I like the way it comes out of nothing and fades to nothing. … a very simple little story with very simple emotions.” After the stirring vocal part the song calms down again and returns to the drum machine and atmospheric piano notes from the intro. In March 1980 Duke became the second album Genesis released as a trio with the line-up consisting of Tony Banks (keyboards), Phil Collins (vocals, drums) and Mike Rutherford (bass, guitar). This album began their development towards more accessible pop and rock music – not without any success: For the first time a Genesis album climbed to the top of the UK charts, and Misunderstanding turned out quite a successful single in the USA. When the tour with which the promoted their previous album, And Then There Were Three, had ended Genesis took a creative break. Up to that time they had been ceaselessly either recording albums or playing concerts so that this was the first longer pause for the band. The three musicians chose different ways to spend their free time. While Phil tried to save his first marriage and even moved to Canada for a time, Mike and Tony busied themselves recording their first solo albums, Smallcreep’s Day and A Curious Feeling respectively. When he realized that his marriage could not be saved he returned to England and recorded the demos in his house that would later become his successful debut Face Value. To take his mind of things he buried himself in work. In late 1979 he got together with Mike and Tony again. Large parts of Duke were written at Phil’s. While everybody had brought in songs they had written individually for the band, on Duke they wanted to make the song-writing a group effort. One reason for this was that Mike and Tony had used the songs they had written for their respective solo albums so they came to the new album empty-handed. Phil, on the other hand, had a couple of finished songs and presented Misunderstanding and Please Don’t Ask as his contributions to Duke. The best songs (in the reviewer’s opinion) on Duke were collaborations, though, and the band were very happy with them. Tony has even described Duke as his favourite Genesis album. In the end they booked studio time at Polar studios in Stockholm, Sweden, from October to December 1979 to record the tenth Genesis album. Their executive producer for the last time was David Hentschel; he also sings backing vocals on some songs. A closer look at Duke reveals that the album is sort of divided into two parts. First there is the so-called Duke suite consisting of Behind The Lines, Duchess, Guide Vocal, Turn It On Again, Duke’s Travels and Duke’s End. It was written by the whole group. All these songs were supposedly once part of a big longtrack made up in the best tradition of Supper’s Ready of a series of song fragments. However, there does not seem to be a “bigger picture” behind the songs, and it is uncertain whether there ever was an underlying concept. The other group consists of half a dozen songs written by individual members of the band (coincidentally, each brought two songs). As a result the credits are distributed very evenly. Genesis introduced a new sound hitherto unknown in the band, not least to the instrumentation: Tony Banks frequently restricts himself to the piano and does without weird synthesizer sounds and long solos. It is mainly his Yamaha CP-80 E-piano that puts its stamp on the whole album. Mike Rutherford plays some excellent, clear bass lines and unobtrusive yet effective guitar work. Phil Collins undergoes his biggest musical development on Duke: Not only is he a composer in his own right but his expressive vocals really come through on Duke. Said Tony: “only on Duke did he become a real singer.. He particularly excels in emotional ballads, performing songs like Alone Tonight or Please Don’t Ask with a emotion and fragility unheard of before. This may well be connected to his private problems at the time. The drum work is revolutionized, too: The drums move to the fore again, and Collins experiments a lot with very earthy rhythms that are quite close to world music. Plus, Duke is the first album on which Genesis used a drum machine. Duke leaves a very coherent impression, there is far less patchwork on it than on its predecessor And Then There Were Three. The atmosphere is cool, almost sterile, an effect that is underlined both by the occasionally minimalistic music and the artwork by French artist Lionel Koechlin. It has this Albert character traipsing through a mainly white world that reminds one of The Little Prince. Duke is also a rather thoughtful album; its lyrics cover the rise and fall of careers in the show business, loneliness and missed opportunities.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 06:20:44 +0000
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