Mike Rutherford gives the Mechanics tune- up gig
Veteran band hasn’t done much touring, so their show is new to all their fans
When Mike Rutherford says “you become a band just by doing a bunch of shows,” there’s a willing admission: In both of its incarnations, Mike + the Mechanics didn’t really start out as a band.
In the mid- 1980s, with Genesis having evolved into an arenarock colossus, the trio’s guitarist and bassist founded the Mechanics as an outlet for songs written outside of his steadfast partnership with Phil Collins and Tony Banks. The lineup was a secondary concern. Only later would the dual- vocalist front line of Paul Carrack and Paul Young be considered central to the project.
When Rutherford reactivated the Mechanics in 2010, having dissolved the group six years earlier, he says his ambitions for the new lineup — which came to be centred on himself and vocalists Tim Howar and Andrew Roachford — were similarly open- ended.
“I wrote some songs about five years ago,” Rutherford recalled last week, “and I thought, ‘ God, these sound like Mechanics songs. What am I going to do? Well, let’s just see what happens.’”
Resurrecting the original lineup was out of the question: Young, who belted out All I Need Is a Miracle, died of a heart attack in 2000. Rutherford soldiered on with blue- eyed soul man Carrack — whose performances included the Mechanics’ defining track, The Living Years — for one last album, 2004’ s Rewired, “but it didn’t feel right. We wound it down.”
Rather than renew his partnership with Carrack (“it felt like we had come to the end of an era”), Rutherford set out to mirror the previous incarnation’s chemistry.
“I knew what I wanted, more than I did the first time: an R& B voice and a rock voice.”
With Roachford and Alberta native Howar filling those respective roles, Rutherford says, any trepidation about how the nextgeneration Mechanics would be received live quickly faded.
“I was just blown away by how much the songs connected with the audience. The Living Years and Silent Running, All I Need Is a Miracle — they were great live songs.”
Rutherford’s revelation may have something to do with the Mechanics’ patchy stage history. Notices for the group’s current tour emphasize that this is their first North American outing since the live dates for their second album, the 1988 global success Living Years. But Rutherford points out that in the interim, “we didn’t tour anywhere, really. It wasn’t just a question of not coming to North America.
“My cycle of a Genesis album and Genesis tour, that was two years; a Mechanics album — by the time we’d get around to a Mechanics tour, it was almost 3 ½ years after the last Genesis album, and so the pressure was on to start Genesis again.”
Rutherford doesn’t sound frustrated that the original Mechanics were essentially a studio act (“I had enough touring with Genesis”), and notes a silver lining for the new incarnation.
“We haven’t got history. For Genesis, obviously we toured with Phil for years, but for the Mechanics, nobody really saw us. They knew the records, but no one quite knew what we were like on stage, so in a sense there aren’t many comparisons to make.”
The recent reissue of Living Years invited one comparison between lineups, with a sleek re- recording of the title track featuring Roachford, who holds his own in delivering the distressed plea for cross- generational understanding. Looking back at the original, Rutherford recalled a sink- or- swim concern when it came to dealing with the emotional subject matter.
“My co- writer, B. A. Robertson, and I were both nervous,” said the bandleader, who used the title again last year for a memoir bridging his career and his relationship with his father. “I thought: If we get it wrong, it could be a bit crass and a bit corny. It’s one of those songs that’s either going to really work, or it’s going to really plummet. It’s not going to be just OK. And so I was slightly wary that it might not quite come together. But everything worked. … The choir, and I’d forgot that Paul Carrack’s father died when he was young — everything had a resonance.”
While the Mechanics’ tour is theoretically in support of the Living Years reissue, the set list surveys the discography up to Roachford and Howar’s introduction on 2011’ s The Road, rather than featuring a front- to- back full- album performance. There’s also a nod toward Roachford’s self- titled pop/ R& B group, and two numbers from that other band Rutherford has dabbled in ( plus a support set from Genesis sideman Daryl Stuermer).
“In the short little tours we did in the ’ 80s, I didn’t do any Genesis songs. I was making a point in that, I suppose. But now it’s very comfortable.”
As for whether Rutherford will tour again with Collins and Banks — or, to dream big, in the band’s early- 1970s quintet configuration with Peter Gabriel and guitarist Steve Hackett: in the time since the trio’s 2007 reunion/ farewell tour, the idea of reanimating Genesis has been met with subdued response ranging from exceedingly cautious optimism to a complete lack of hope.
“You never quite know what’s around the corner. Some project might appear you hadn’t thought about that gives you the reason for doing something. There’s nothing planned. But we’re all still alive. That’s a good start.”
Mike + the Mechanics perform Wednesday, March 11 at 8 p. m. at Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts, with Daryl Stuermer. Tickets cost $ 46.20 to $ 60.75. Call 514- 842- 2112 or visit pda. qc. ca.