1976's second Genesis album, Wind & Wuthering, is similar to A Trick of the Tail but is not as immediate and effectively acts as the transitional album betraying a determination to move towards more of a pop market. It's no surprise that guitarist Steve Hackett left after Wind & Wuthering, his leaning being much more towards the prog end of the scale will have meant that the direction the band were moving in wouldn't have been to his taste. There are some saving graces on the album, opener 'Eleventh Earl of Mar' continues A Trick of the Tail's extended pastoral progisms, but for the most part it's a fairly sappy exercise, with sloppy, soppy pop songs like the ghastly 'Your Own Special Way' and the tedious 10-minute trudge of 'One for the Vine'. The OK stuff is perfectly fine but the duds are terrible and the album really suffers from the band not choosing one style over the other.
The decision was pretty much made following Hackett's departure, and the songs on 1978's And Then There Were Three are pop/rock songs with a touch of prog excess. As far as the band's prog fanbase were concerned this was pretty much the ultimate betrayal but for the world at large it was the Collins/Banks/Rutherford line-up that would make records to fit the popular taste. A lot of And Then There Were Three works really well, giving the melodic touches precedence over the excessive musicality, and there are some fine songs. 'Snowbound' is a lovely slow-burner, 'Follow You Follow Me' is a great straightforward pop song, and 'Deep in the Motherlode' makes a decent case for moving prog into a more traditional rock song structure. There are some cheesy results out of the pop over prog approach - 'Undertow', despite a supremely tight structure, is fairly grim, and 'Ballad of Big' is just dreadful. They hadn't ditched the prog entirely, and opener 'Down and Out' nicely harks back to the brittle excess of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and 'The Lady Lies', while awful, has some jazzy prog chops and tricky time signatures. It's a ropey album all told, but a lot better than Wind & Wuthering and because it was clear that the trio had made a pretty clear decision to move into a more pop/rock territory it feels a lot more confident, and the handful of good bits are really great.
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A couple of years later (after marriage crises and solo album crises) Collins, Banks and Rutherford reconvened to make 1980's Duke. Showing a proclivity to retain their prog credentials, they pieced together a thirty minute concept suite about an everyman figure called Albert. When it came to sequencing the album though they decided not to alienate their now sizeable mainstream audience and split the piece into six distinct songs, interspersed with other stand-alone tunes. As a result Duke sounds like a relatively straight pop/rock album and although opener 'Behind the Lines' kicks off with a rocking prog workout, it soon settles into a verse/chorus arrangement (it does still retain some serious Gabriel era atmosphere amongst the popism though). And there's the tone of the whole album, whenever it threatens to get too prog, it kicks back vehemently with some strident pop melody and on the whole, even more than And Then There Were Three, Duke is a pop album with prog flashes. The difficulty I have with Duke is that it's another one of those albums that looms so large over my memory of growing up that I can't hear anything wrong with it. I know that for all prog fans it's an absolute calamity and for most pop fans it's just rubbish, but it's a near perfect album for me, in the same way that Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds is. I know it's probably absolutely appalling, but I just can't hear it. So, my view of Duke is prejudiced, but to my ears, it's the only point at which Genesis' mutation into a pop/rock act really worked perfectly. The out and out pop songs ('Turn It On Again', 'Misunderstanding') are great; the bold, dark rock songs ('Duchess', 'Man of Our Times') are great; the prog-lite numbers ('Behind the Lines', the closing parts of the so called "Duke suite") are great. Pretty much all of Duke is great, and although it was the opening salvo of what was to become a cloying and horribly "adult" form of rock that the band would go on to make, on it's own Duke is a fine album. Although I should just mention that the song 'Please Don't Ask' absolutely stinks.
Now we should leave Genesis at this point but because all of the preceding albums I've only got on vinyl I thought it might be a good idea to by the CD of The Platinum Collection (2004) which covers pretty much their entire career, which of course means covering all of the terrible albums that they made in the 80's and 90's as well as the brilliant ones they made in the 70's. So, what's here? Well, we get off to a decent start with one song from 1970's Trespass. 'Knife' is certainly the highlight of that album and is a great bit of prog grandstanding from the whole band, with Gabriel in full flow. We'll skip over everything already covered, which brings us to the material from 1981's Abacab and 1983's Genesis albums. Both of these records consolidated the absolute move from prog to pop and are half OK and half utterly dismal. Only the title track and 'Keep It Dark' from Abacab make it onto the Platinum Collection and they're both great rock songs from an alright album. By contrast the whole first two thirds of the Genesis album makes an appearance and it's fairly rough. 'Mama' is dark and gloomy but daft (Collins' mad "ha-ha" noise is really silly), 'Home by the Sea' is rubbish and 'Illegal Alien' is inexplicable. 'That's All' is OK though I guess. Then it's all the third-rate garbage from the Invisible Touch, We Can't Dance and Calling All Stations albums, and that's all not worth discussing.
And so on to possibly the wettest album ever made, and a superb reminder of one of the best weekends of my life, it's The Green Fields of Foreverland (1999) by The Gentle Waves. The Gentle Waves was basically Belle & Sebastian's Isobel Campbell doing her own unbelievably sappy thing and it's as limp as old lettuce. You could claim that it's charming and you could claim that it has a gossamer grace, but the thing is, it is in truth utterly insipid. At the Bowlie Weekender it was an album on heavy rotation in people's chalets and was one of the reasons why Patrick, Alex and myself went Zeke mad in the middle of the night. It wasn't a nice thing to do, it wasn't charming, in fact it was pretty tossy of us, but to be honest I think it's fair to say that we were driven to it by the soppy, floppy haired nonsense that was going on around us. If any record cries out to be challenged by some vicious speed-punk it's the wet rag of The Green Fields of Foreverland. Now, I'm not going to claim that it's a bad record, it isn't by any stretch, it's actually proof of Campbell's deft way with a light indie melody, but my God, it fulfils every last jock stereotype of the indie kid, and for being so stupid as to make those horrible stereotypes true it deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of indie history.
The mighty Bobbie Gentry stands as a good contrast to Isabel Campbell. She found fame quickly and stridently, made the most of it and chose to disappear completely at the height of her success. A superb talent, a fantastic songwriter and a fascinating presence, Gentry made a handful of absolutely fabulous records. As a country artist Gentry was too oblique, as a pop artist too rough, and as a rock artist too deeply entrenched in her Chickasaw County Southern mythology, and consequently she carved out a fairly unique position for herself. Her second album, The Delta Sweete (1968) is, like her debut, a record so steeped in her environment as to make it almost palpable when listening to the album. It's a record absolutely about a sense of place, a definitive statement about experience as lived not as expressed and it cuts right to the core of what made Gentry such a unique talent - she talked about her experience, she didn't particularly try to embellish it for the sake of the audience. These songs are about southern families, shanties and shacks, poverty, childhood and mystery and as such reek of authenticity while still being fantastic pop songs. Gentry's ironic, drawling, smoky delivery just adds more flavour to the songs and her strange picking and up-strum guitar playing is fascinating. The original of the superb 'Mornin' Glory' appears on The Delta Sweete, at it's woozy, drowsy best, and there are scores of other great tunes. The hand-clapping Southern chant of 'Reunion' creates the sense of a rowdy, full family room brilliantly and 'Sermon' puts the listener in the position of the preacher's audience. It's all brilliant, evocative stuff and deserves to be much better known.
The Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell album (her third of 1968) is a sterling collection of songs, marking out a loose, casual and utterly engaging collaboration, with both Gentry and Campbell playing off each other in such a charmingly relaxed fashion that you can only imagine what fun it was to make the record. Gentry's 'Mornin' Glory' gets a jaunty, cheerful working over (as opposed to the blurry-eyed original) and her smoky, sweet voice blends with Campbell's perfectly throughout the record. There are fine versions of 'Gentle On My Mind' and 'Let It Be Me', but there are a couple of low spots in versions of 'Little Green Apples' and a bizarre choice of Simon & Garfunkel's 'Canticle'. For the most part it's an easy pop-country album, but between them Gentry and Campbell make the whole thing so much more.
Not only was Gentry a singular musical voice, she was also one of the first female country artists to produce her own records and, although this has never been confirmed, painted the brilliant, sultry self-portraits for the covers of later albums Fancy and Patchwork. But we'll probably never know, so uncompromisingly and successfully has she demanded to be left alone since quitting showbusiness in the mid-1970's. The last bit of Gentry for us is the 2000 compilation Ode to Bobbie Gentry, covering her output between 1967 and 1971. Her debut single 'Ode to Billie Joe' still sounds other-worldly with it's skeletal acoustic guitar and strings telling a spookily depressing Carson McCullers-ish tale. It's a fantastic song, an amazing calling card, but really only set out the basics of what Gentry was capable of. For the Fancy and Touch 'Em with Love albums Gentry was advised to focus on covers and apart from 'Fancy' itself, which is one of her finest, and most depressing, songs, her originals aren't included on Ode to Bobbie Gentry. Instead lots of the covers are included, and despite not having her peculiar edge of authenticity, they're big, showy and great cover versions. There are really two clear sides to Gentry, which the compilation brings out - the Vegas show style which is big and ballsy, and the denser, more personal Southern tales. The personal stuff is better, but there's very little that Gentry touched that isn't superb. Even 'In the Ghetto', and that's saying something.
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