“IT ’ S THE STUFF OF SYMPHONIES AND CONCERTOS!”
The majesty of Supper’s Ready, the most fêted prog suite in history.
Steve Hackett: “i can’t remember whose idea it was, but we came to the conclusion that you could join any two bits of music together, no matter how disparate the styles, provided the bridge or atmospheric link was strong enough. So we were working on the idea of the musical continuum without naming it as such. And of course that journeying approach - even if it’s been much disparaged by some since – creates for the listener an adventure, an odyssey. Themes reappear. First you might hear them in a bare stripped-back way; then they return with the full Mellotron treatment. With glory! in a sense, the effect when they come back is like when memories become sweeter with time. You’ve got the stuff of symphonies and concertos.
“So there’s a nod to the past, but Supper’s Ready was quite futuristic at that point. Bands just weren’t creating pieces of music like that. i think it was then the longest piece that any rock band had ever played live. We were echoing the freedom that music (and education) had in the sixties, so you had surrealistic elements, psychedelic elements, experiments, almost obscurantist aspects.”
Tony Banks: “Most of Apocalypse in 9/8 i’d got down as keyboard solos. But then Peter started singing over them, because his lyrics required more information to get out. initially, i have to say, i was pissed off, because he was singing on ‘my’ bit! Then i realised it now had all the excitement we’d been trying to create, especially the ‘six-six-six’ section. You have a lot of drama in the chords themselves, then what he did on top just took it to another level. That half-minute or so is our peak.”
Mike Rutherford: “That was a great moment of luck. Sometimes you don’t quite know what you’re doing. The end section happened effortlessly, as good music often does. We wrote for a couple of months, but the act of doing that song seemed quite easy. if things take a long time, it’s a bad sign. When Pete put the ‘six-six-six’ vocal on, that was a bit special. i’ve had that moment twice in Genesis’s history, where the game gets raised by a voice going on a strong instrumental and it’s not how you imagined it at all. The other time was when Phil put the bit in the middle of Mama. Same sort of intensity.”
Tony Banks: “in the early seventies we were lucky.
The Beatles had started to go a bit further, then pulled themselves back. But they’d opened a door. Which was followed up by bands like Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Family. We all thought: ‘We can do what we like now!’ none of these albums sold that much, but we were building a following. nowadays try giving people a twenty-three-minute song that changes fifteen minutes in but you’ve got to hear the first fourteen minutes in order to fully appreciate that fifteenth minute. it’s quite a commitment! Different things for different times.” CR