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BANDS RARELY END WELL, AS COUNTLESS
MOJO cover stories have made clear. And often, after they end, things only get worse. “Do you know what decade of my life I was in when Roger left our pop group? My thirties,” David Gilmour seethed, politely, to MOJO last year when his ever-deteriorating relationship with Roger Waters was broached. “I am now 78.”
If a certain middle-class propriety covered up some of Gilmour and Waters’ animosities over the decades, the same kind of decorum can also hide enduring bonds. It is 50 years since Peter Gabriel left Genesis, fracturing the key line-up of one of Britain’s most eccentric and cherishable rock bands. In the years since, there’s been little public friction between the parties, but not much demonstrable affection, either. In Mark Blake’s cover story about Genesis this month, the bandmembers talk about an emotional reticence that has coloured their interactions since the beginning. “I’m a repressed public schoolboy,” admits Tony Banks, and he’s by no means the only one.
But as we reunite Banks, Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett and the resilient Phil Collins, a different and touching story emerges – of relationships that express themselves in subtle ways, and become incrementally more profound as the years pass. It’s a great story about the ties that bind a great rock band together, and it begins with a game of table tennis…