ANTHONY PHILLIPS
Slow Dance ESOTERIC
Ex-Genesis guitarist’s suite is more Elgar and Sibelius than Banks and Rutherford.
After leaving Genesis in 1970, Anthony Phillips didn’t quite know what he would do next. He spent time extending his musical training, learning new instruments, working as a music teacher and embarked on writing what would become a substantial collection of diverse material.
Phillips embarked on Slow Dance properly in 1989, when things weren’t looking too rosy for his solo career and life was made all the more difficult when he discovered, after he was well into recording and already financially and personally committed, that he had lost his record contract. He envisaged it as an ambitious instrumental composition that distilled much of what he’d learnt and had been influenced by. With pressure being applied to produce more commercial, pop-orientated solo material, and having branched out into producing library music and pitches for TV and film soundtrack work, he felt it was the right time for something that better reflected who he was as a composer.
The music itself, here split into two parts reflecting the sides of a vinyl LP, is a series of themes, motifs and aural sketches, with the second part being fractionally more lively and immediate. Moving from pastorally inclined neo-classicism with piano or Phillips’ signature 12-string guitar to stately synth-brass and string passages, it mostly progresses as slowly and often languidly as its title suggests. Anyone looking for big Genesis moments will be largely disappointed – although there is a slightly more strident passage about three-quarters of the way through the second part of Slow Dance, the easiest points of reference would more readily be the likes of instrumental Camel and a lighter The Enid. Phillips invested in new technology and new keyboards at the time and his toying with sounds and drum machines can be detected throughout. Although not immediately impactful nor particularly experimental, it becomes strangely immersive and mesmerising on careful repeated listens.