Well done son, now pass the earplugs
THe rock ’ n’ roll memoir is a glutted market, declared Mick Jagger. You can see what he means. Scarcely a week goes by without some old rocker fondly if blearily recalling their days of youthful dissipation.
However, The Living Years isn’t really like that. Mike Rutherford may have been a key member of two hugely successful rock bands — Genesis and Mike + The Mechanics — but this is far from being a routine canter down the path of excess. Instead it’s something much more interesting and unexpected — a delicately drawn account of his relationship with his father.
It was a relationship in which they spent long periods facing each other across an apparently unbridgeable generation gap. Captain William Rutherford was a distinguished naval officer who had won a DSo in Korea. As a child, Rutherford felt the two of them had nothing at all in common. In his cavalry twill trousers and his brown suede shoes, his father represented ‘everything I didn’t want to be’.
It was only after his death in 1986 that he started to see how alike they were.
As he was going through his father’s things, he found a trunk full of meticulously filed papers in plastic folders. Looking at them, Rutherford thought of his own filing system — ‘I’ve always surrounded myself with plastic folders’ — and realised he’d inherited the same obsessive desire for order.
There was something else he and his father shared: a natural reserve. At various points in the book, Rutherford reminds us that he’s not good at showing his feelings. This is a colossal understatement. In many respects he’s the archetypal buttoned-up englishman, albeit one who happens to be a rock star.
His father’s death left him completely disorientated: ‘I felt as though I’d lost my compass point.’
However collected he may have seemed on the surface — on the night after his father’s funeral, he had to appear onstage in front of 20,000 people — on the inside he was awash with regret. ‘My biggest was not telling him what a wonderful man he’d been in my life.’
Throughout his childhood, music was Rutherford’s one emotional outlet. Sent off to prep school at seven, he went through the agonies of homesickness before finding solace listening to the Top 20 on the radio. At his public school, Charterhouse, he formed a band with three other boys — Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks and Anthony Phillips — that became Genesis. However much Captain Rutherford may have disapproved, he was staunchly supportive of his son. When Genesis were offered a recording contract, he insisted on hiring City lawyers to make sure they weren’t being ripped off.
From the start Genesis were different. As well as being public school boys, they had a fullyfledged loon for a lead singer in Gabriel — one who delighted in appearing onstage with a long shaven strip down his head and his face caked in white make-up.
Various drummers came and went before Phil Collins arrived — at which point Genesis’s fortunes started to improve. Suc- cess brought all the usual temptations, but while Rutherford succumbed to some of them — he had brief encounters with several groupies and once fell asleep on stage because he was so stoned — he never lost his innate caution.
Throughout it all, his parents would loyally come to see him — his father first inserting his earplugs, then looking on in wonder as his son did battle with a 30ft inflatable penis on stage.
When Peter Gabriel left the band in 1975, the music papers consigned Genesis to the dustbin. Instead Phil Collins took over as the lead singer and they became more successful than ever.
Reduced to just three members in the late Seventies, they clocked up their first U.S. platinum album. Then came Rutherford’s ‘side project’, Mike + The Mechanics. That didn’t do badly either — they went on to sell 12 million albums.
Their biggest hit, The Living Years, was cowritten by Rutherford as a tribute to his father, and became a kind of anthem for bereaved sons.
HoWeVeR refreshing it may be to encounter an emotionally repressed rock star, there were several times during this book when I wished Rutherford had been a bit less reserved.
No one, not even his most devoted fan, could claim that he’s a natural anecdotalist and what stories he does tell have a slightly furtive air as if they’ve somehow slipped through the net.
We learn that Collins is a decent bloke with no ego — and that’s about it. As for Tony Banks, he apparently went through a period of weighing himself before and after he went to the lavatory. There isn’t even much about Rutherford’s wife, Angie, to whom he’s been happily married for 37 years.
Yet in a way this starchiness works in the book’s favour. Whenever Rutherford’s emotions do break through, they seem all the more honest, raw and engaging.
No doubt there will be rowdier rock autobiographies published this year, but I doubt if there’ll be a more touching one.