ANTHONY PHILLIPS

The “Living Room” Concert

GSweet but slight at-home gig revisited.

iven that Anthony Phillips left Genesis a full half-century ago, when Jimi Hendrix was still alive and Heath had just displaced Wilson as prime minister, it must be strange for him to be eternally referred to as “the former Genesis man”. Still, the other members always speak glowingly of the co-founder’s brief contribution to their history, and it’s certainly helped him find an audience for his work ever since.

The “Living Room” Concert was recorded in 1993 for a US radio show and released two years later. Now remastered and with tracks which didn’t make the cut added, it’s an unplugged pleasantry from a man who disliked playing in front of live audiences. In fact he wasn’t keen even to do this at-home performance, and preparation wasn’t helped by a injury to his left hand brought on by too much practising.

You wouldn’t know that from listening, as it’s a proficiently played solo set, mostly instrumental, on guitar and piano. He chooses pieces from his best album, The Geese And The Ghost, as well as from Private Parts And Pieces,

A Catch At The Tables and others. There’s also Conversation Piece (no relation to the Bowie number of the same name), a meditative movement on a 12-string guitar. The previously unreleased tracks lack discernible charisma: Lucy: An Illusion and Let Us Now Make Love fail to outshine their titles.

Phillips himself, whose singing voice won’t worry Mario Lanza, has downplayed this as a “semi-impromptu run-through”, and the bulk of it sounds like some earnest geezer is noodling away on his acoustic in the corner of a house party. There’s a precious period charm to the Clifford T Ward-like warblings of Sistine and the counterintuitively optimistic pluckings of Reaper, and the 12 minutes of dextrously-wristed strums which constitute Henry: Portraits From Tudor Times might get you sending Anne Boleyn to the Tower Of London, while never troubling Rick Wakeman’s confidence. Purely for Genesis family tree completists, then.