ANTHONY PHILLIPS

Missing Links I-IV

OVic Stench’s astonishing ambience. Captured.

f the Charterhouse Four that comprised the original Genesis lineup – Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips – it’s Phillips’ lot that seems to be the most enjoyable as the years pass. There’s certainly little question about just how prolific the guitarist has been, and as the only one of the four not to have had a No.1 single in the US, Phillips has been truly unencumbered by expectation, with a lucrative parallel career creating music for adverts and soundtracks – not to mention some residual royalties from The Knife – enabling his cottage industry to continue.

Missing Links began life as a cassette series in 1989, to gather up Phillips’ TV and soundtrack work. The popularity of the first release led to three more albums of this facet of his work; and here, in this beautifully produced clamshell set, the four collections are gathered with an extra disc of 27 further unreleased tracks. Each of the original albums (Finger Painting, The Sky Road, Time & Tide and

Pathways & Promenades) all evoke windswept plains, circling leaves, wellwrapped scarves and rising smoke from bonfires on the heath. Even on the recordings he made in the late 80s, Phillips manages to imbue enough sincerity in his material to easily overcome the standard synthesised noises du jour.

If readers have ever wondered who provided that keening, yearning music under a slow-motion bat flying across some fabulous wilderness on the telly, it’s probably Anthony Phillips. Tropical Moon Over Dorking Suite has all the grandeur of Genesis with none of the stadium pretentiousness; Sky Dawn from Missing Links IV is absolutely beautiful – just Phillips and the defining sound of his 12-string guitar, which went on to inform his old group long after he left.

With annotations by noted Phillips expert Jon Dann, Missing Links I–IV is another release which serves the much-loved multi-instrumentalist very well indeed.