(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 24 August 2025 4:00, UK
In 1976, Genesis were one of the most respected outfits in the United Kingdom’s blossoming prog scene. That might sound like a particularly harsh burn on the poor lads, but at the time, it meant quite a bit.
They were arguably second only to the mighty Pink Floyd in terms of bands whose ludicrously ambitious, technical take on rock ‘n’ roll was feted by both the public at large and most rock critics of the time. Far from cool, but a genuine force in the scene and deeply respected in their way. Oh, how times would change.
At the time, they’d already gone through a massive change that most would have called the biggest they’d ever go through. After all, what band loses their lead singer and survives? More than that, Peter Gabriel was their frontman. The man credited with being the creative driving force behind the whole band who could captivate any venue in the country with his powerful voice, his mystical lyrics or, failing those, his seemingly limitless supply of goofy-ass stage outfits.
1976 showed that not only could the band survive without Peter Gabriel, they could thrive without him. Drummer Phil Collins stepped up to the plate to take over as the band’s lead singer. With the two albums they released that year, February’s A Trick of the Tail and December’s Wind & Wuthering, showing that he could not only steady the ship, but captain it to even greener pastures. The latter album containing the band’s first ever charting single with ‘Your Own Special Way’.
Genesis had faced the most damaging loss a band can suffer and had gotten even better as a result. However, rough tides were ahead. Punk was an oncoming storm directed at everything progressive rock stood for. Every ounce of cred the band had earned was about to go up in smoke at the hands of The Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Slits, redefining what people looked for in pop music, let alone rock ‘n’ roll music. Surely that was a bridge too far, the band, they couldn’t survive five years into the future, let alone ten… right?!
How did Genesis create their biggest hit?
1986 feels like a different universe from 1976 in so many ways. Not only were the biggest names in music radically different, but it felt like culture’s taste in mainstream music had fundamentally shifted. Over a single decade, people seemed to appreciate radically different things than at the height of the 1970s. Genesis were no longer the band they were.
That was arguably what people were expecting in 1976. What no-one saw coming was Peter Gabriel-less Genesis, fronted by squat, balding Phil Collins, becoming one of the world’s biggest bands and it wasn’t even close.
Perhaps Collins’ solo career taking off to such mega-success is the even more insane development, but only by inches. Being the decent chap that he is, he took his newfound success and absolutely game-changing ear for a pop hook and applied it to his existing band and with 1981’s Abacab, Genesis went from cerebral prog cultists to pop superstars. By 1986, they were following up their smash hit self-titled album and were in the studio working on arguably their most important album yet.
One of the album’s centrepiece tracks is a two-part effort called ‘Domino’. While writing riffs to go into the song, Mike Rutherford stumbled upon a guitar figure that stood out to him. In an interview, Phil Collins talked about hearing that figure for the first time and a hook immediately coming to him. He said “As soon as he started playing that I started singing, ‘she seems to have an invisible touch.’ At that moment we just knew that was a great hook, and then we just sort of wrote a song around it.”
Before they knew it, they had the title track of their next album in the bag and their biggest single to date. One that would cement their success not as a flash in the pan, but a genuine evolution into the stadium-slaying 1% of rock ‘n’ roll acts. Ten years from now, will we be watching Black Country, New Road or Geordie Greep become the biggest pop act in the world in the same way? We can only hope!
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