Tonight sees the
official launch of Richard Macphail’s memoir My Book Of Genesis
at an independent book shop in West London. I am credited as a ‘with’ on the
cover, an entitlement that results from my having spent hours interviewing
Richard last year, then setting it all down on a computer for him to browse
through, re-arrange and agonise over the naughty bits.
Richard
was a school friend, aide-de-camp and tour manager of Genesis in their
formative years. He bowed out in early 1977 and after a period of ruminating on
the meaning of life received a call from Peter Gabriel who was in need of a
support mechanism to get him back on the road as a solo artist. “In many ways
the job of tour managing Peter ought to have been easier after all my
experience with Genesis but the truth is Peter became more and more demanding
as time went on,” writes Richard. “It’s important also to realise that Peter
was on his own now. Whereas before he was one of five, with responsibilities
split amongst them all, the buck now stopped at him, and this certainly made
him become more and more exacting.”
In this second extract from the book we
are on the road with Peter Gabriel in the spring of 1978, his second tour as a
solo artist, and Richard is in charge of a show that features a level on
inventiveness on Peter’s part that sometimes places unusually comic demands on his
long-suffering tour manager.
‘Big
One’ featured a long blues guitar solo in the middle, after the second verse,
at which point Peter would come off stage, disappear for a few minutes and
reappear somewhere in the theatre, usually on the balcony. He and I had
prearranged this whole stunt: I’d meet him in the wings, we’d go out of the
stage door, walk up the side of the theatre, re-enter at the front where a guy
who worked for the promoter would be ready with the doors to let us in, and
then Peter would go up the stairs to the balcony, the verse would start again
and off he’d go, singing into a radio mike. The spotlights would be on him,
somewhere in the audience, and they loved it, absolutely went bonkers some
nights.
It was all Peter’s idea of course.
He always was very imaginative in this way, always looking to be different, to
do something dramatic that audiences wouldn’t expect. By now he’d graduated
from the grey track suit into a pair of leather trousers and one of those white
judo tops, so he stood out under the spotlight. So he’d be up there, and the
audience is all of a flutter, and before they’d quite realised what was going
on, we’d scooted off back downstairs where the spots would be on him again, and
he’d walk down the aisle, still singing, and the closer we got to the stage the
greater the rough and tumble as fans got out of their seats to touch him. I was
right next to him throughout all this, and we’d usually get a couple of the
promoter’s guys and a couple of guys from our crew who’d make their way towards
us, so there’d be four or five of us around him to protect him. No one would
want to hurt him, they were only people getting a bit over enthusiastic, but
the judo shirt was usually ripped open before we could hoist him up on to the
stage to a huge cheer, and then we’d disappear. It was a great stunt and although
a few others tried something similar, Peter was definitely the first to do it
like that.
I always thought it was especially
brave of Peter considering that all those years ago at Aylesbury he made the
mistake of jumping feet first into a crowd that backed away and he broke his
ankle as a result. This made him realise that what you needed to do was to fall
back flat, and later, when he sang a song called ‘Lay Your Hands On Me’, he
would stand at the front and fall backwards, trusting his fans to catch him. It
was the most unbelievable thing to do, especially for someone who’s actually
jumped off the stage and broken their ankles doing that. But he did it and they
would pass him around. Lots of rock stars pay lip service to the idea of
‘getting down with the fans’ or ‘breaking down the barriers’ or whatever they
choose to call it, but Peter put his money where his mouth was, if that’s the
right metaphor.
It was inevitable, however, that it
would go wrong sooner or later. On one night – I think it was Pittsburgh –
Peter and I headed out of the stage door and into the street, which was always
a bit weird with all these buses and taxis everywhere and Peter in his white
top with a radio mike. As usual the promoter’s guy was waiting for us at the
front of the theatre but this particular theatre had two rows of glass doors,
both of which could only be opened from the inside.
Unfortunately, being a couple of
light bulbs short of a chandelier, this guy pushed the inner door open and
forgot that it would shut automatically behind him. He let us in through the
front doors and they shut as well so we were trapped between the two banks of
doors; no way in, no way out. Peter and I actually saw what was going to happen
before it did. ‘Don’t let it shut,’ I screamed. But I was too late. It was
fortunate this wasn’t picked up by Peter’s radio mike.
Of course, there was no one in the
lobby as they were all inside listening to the show, and there was Peter and me
and this bloke locked out. We could hear the band, just, and Peter started
singing when he heard his cue. Luckily there was a loo in the lobby, and two
guys walked out and saw us. We’re going, ‘Let us in’ and of course they
couldn’t believe what they were seeing. ‘What the fuck… Peter Gabriel’s
supposed to be on stage… what the fuck’s he doing here.’ They hesitated and
then let us in. We didn’t do the upstairs bit that night, just the walk down
the aisle, and the audience – apart from the two blokes who’d been in the loo –
was none the wiser. The band knew something was up as they could hear him
singing, all the while thinking, ‘Where the hell is he?’
We did that stunt every night on
that whole tour, US and Europe, and it never went wrong again but I included
the double-door eventuality in my preparations from then on, always checking
the front of the house before the show started. To this day, I’ll never forget
seeing that bloody door shut behind us.
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