Speaking exclusively in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale tomorrow, Peter Gabriel has revealed he’s working on the follow-up to his acclaimed 2023 album I/O. “It will be called O/I,” Gabriel tells MOJO’s Mark Blake in our new Genesis cover feature. Adding, perhaps unnecessarily, “… that’s I/O backwards.”
Elsewhere in the piece, featuring exclusive interviews with Gabriel and his former bandmates Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and Steve Hackett, the members of Genesis discuss the earliest days of the group: from Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford meeting at the exclusive Charterhouse boarding school in Surrey and touring the UK in the back of a bread van before bringing in West Londoner – and a former Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! - Phil Collins on drums.
Collins, who took a dip in Gabriel’s parents’ swimming pool in his Y-fronts before his audition, speaks of acclimatising to a group of “bottled up” of public schoolboys (or as Gabriel describes them to MOJO: “silver-spooned toffee-nosed buggers”), and why he felt the band’s debut album Trespass, recorded before he joined, sounded like “a blancmange”.
“It was sort of formless,” Collins tells MOJO. “At my audition we’d listened to some of Trespass, and it wasn’t one thing or the other. There were harmonies that reminded me of Crosby Stills & Nash, but when it was meant to be hard, like on The Knife, it didn’t sound like they really meant it.”
With Collins on board, Genesis became one of the best loved – and most eccentric – prog rock bands of the era. A collaboration that peaked on their final album with Gabriel, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, which celebrates its 50th with a deluxe reissue this spring.
Amidst the deteriorating relationship between Gabriel and his former schoolfriend Banks, the singer left the band and was replaced by Collins, with Genesis going on to even greater commercial success.
While Gabriel didn’t take part in Genesis’ farewell show at London’s O2 Arena in March 2022, he told MOJO the following year why he felt he should be in attendance to watch his former bandmates. Collins’ ongoing health issues due to nerve damage meant that his son Nic took his place on the drum stool.
“Phil wasn’t in as great a shape as he used to be, but they did a great job,” said Gabriel. “Me going was a rite of passage, really. I’d been part of the creation of Genesis so I wanted to be there at the end.”
“People often imply that we planned to go more commercial. We didn’t. We just couldn’t write hit singles before…” Get the latest issue of MOJO to read the interview with Gabriel, Collins, Banks Rutherford and Hackett in full. For more info and to order a copy HERE!
