It had felt like goodbye before this.
I’d seen Genesis some eight times over the years. The last was the so-called ‘Turn it On Again’ tour, a kind of delayed victory lap, ostensibly to fill the void left by the band’s last album, Calling All Stations, which they never toured extensively after its release in 1997. The album was Genesis’ only post-Phil Collins recording, and it missed him terribly not just at the mic but behind the kit too. Many felt – and I shared the sentiment – that it just wasn’t a legitimate Genesis album at all, That We Can’t Dance was the band’s true swansong, and that Turn it On Again was just a chance to reprise that opus and say a proper farewell. Others still supposed that there was some FOMO around the post-$100-concert-ticket era, a goldrush that the We Can’t Dance tour pre-dated by around an Eagles tour-and-a-half. I won’t litigate that.
The 2 September 2007 concert at Toronto’s BMO Field was a special event for me. I’d not seen my gurus in 15 years, and absent their 1997 release, there had been no new output since. So this would be a nostalgia concert, no pretense about it.
The performance was both sonically and visually glorious. The setlist was as complete and perfect as anyone could have expected, though you’d always wish they’d included something they didn’t. Phil was still taking his turns at the drumkit, still standing tall at the mic, and still entertaining the audience with energy, wit and physical acumen. Many songs, I noticed, were transposed a whole-tone lower, betraying a loss of upper range in his voice, though somehow it befit the dignity of these fifty-something oracles to mellow the intensity a bit. Each song was an emotional reunion for me, and by the end, it didn’t escape me that I might never see them again. The only fly in the evening’s ointment was that I’d been roped in to attending the concert with an acquaintance who I didn’t know well, didn’t like much, and who was a casual fan at best. Aside from that, it was a magical night, and I left there prepared to accept it, happily, as the last event of my real-time Genesis experience.
It wasn’t over.
Years passed quietly for the band, though less so for its frontman. Short version, Phil Collins suffered a long succession of plagues related to health, alcohol abuse, marital breakdowns and a crippling back condition that left him unable to play drums and barely able to walk. By his own account (as he testifies in his memoir Not Dead Yet), his woes were a perfect storm of outrageous fortune and self-inflicted misery that left him both mentally and physically diminished. He was never again going to create or perform music at the level he had before.
To his credit (or stubbornness, pick it), he continued to record and sing in performances of his solo material. Cane-aided, he hobbled onto stages, sat in chairs and sang his songs now transposed as much as a full tritone (exactly half an octave) lower. It was as painful to listen to and watch as it must have been to execute. Half his core cheered him on, the other half silently begged him to stop.
Immediately before the pandemic hit, Genesis confounded all expectations of fans and media alike (and possibly even themselves), and announced that they would play a tour of the UK, taglined ‘The Last Domino?’, the cheeky question mark intended to leave some doubt as to whether this would really be it. When COVID restrictions were eventually eased, the tour began and was immediately expanded to include North American dates, Toronto among them.
In the face of judgy chortles and rolling eyes, I found myself explaining to several friends and acquaintances why I’d ever want to see this display.
Let me be clear: I will never not go see this band. If they followed The Who‘s playbook and launched a 40-year-long farewell tour with 18 cycles through my town, I’d drop the $?00 every. single. time. I think that in Part 5 of this series I made it pretty clear what their music and creative tour de force has meant to me. Showing up for their performances is the very least I could do to show my gratitude.
And so the story comes to and end on 25 November 2021, at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. It was the first stadium-scale concert my brother and I had attended together since BTO on 16 August 1975 (we’d also gone to see, ironically, Steve Hackett in a tiny suburban theatre two years earlier). Again, a musical and visual spectacle second to none, and again, a fulsome and satisfying setlist. Phil was hobbled and seated. The songs were adjusted to his blinkered range. Chester Thompson was absent, as Phil’s son Nicolas filled in on drums. Three backup singers helped papier-maché over the blind spots in Phil’s voice. It was all deliciously imperfect and completely beautiful.
The very last song they played that night so perfectly completed my journey with them. The instruments murmured, the voices incanted, the magic poured again like lava. And the words celebrated where we’d gone together:
You gotta get in to get out…
My upper body convulsed as I wiped away tears. I felt my brother’s hand on my shoulder. Then these enchanted, beautiful gentlemen left the stage.
Thank you Genesis. You’ll never know.
