Review: Genesis live in Berlin – the right band at the right time

Genesis start their European tour in Berlin, on a crisis-ridden continent.

The year 1986 was so long ago, and suddenly it’s very close again. Wackersdorf, La Belle, air raids on Libya, and of course Chernobyl. Genesis contributed “In the Glow of the Night” to the Raymond Briggs film adaptation “When the Wind Blows”. An animated film about an elderly British couple’s final weeks after being hit by an atomic bomb; the song, composed by Tony Banks, is about the fear of leaving the house because everything around you is radioactive. These were Cold War issues in the 1980s.

In the meantime, songs like “In the Glow of the Night” no longer seem museum-like; they describe current fears of nuclear war, even of a new “balance of terror,” the MAD doctrine. When Sting posted a re-imagining of his 1985 play Russians on social media on Sunday, he received tens of thousands of likes within minutes. Lines like “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy? There is no monopoly on common sense / On either side of the political fence” are quoted and multiplied on the internet.

The year 1986, with “When the Wind Blows”:

Sting’s friends from Genesis are the right band at the right time. Everything just feels right. With the Ukraine war raging, Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and collaborators including Daryl “Red and White Fender” Stuermer kick off their European tour here, which kicked off Monday night. “In the Glow of the Night”, strictly speaking sequence one of the long, two-part “Domino” song, is a set highlight and will remain so for the following concert weeks. So does “Land of Confusion”, also a Cold War play from the same era, with lines like “I won’t be coming home tonight /My ​​generation will put it right / We’re not just making promises /That we know we ‘ll never keep’, which in 1986 reflected that long-forgotten mixture of (expedient) patriotism, fear, defiant confidence and cynicism; Feelings like those that arise again today in the face of war. In the Splitting Image video for Land of Confusion, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were pitted against each other. Genesis last toured in 2007. So much closer to 1986 than today, and yet their themes in 2022 are more modern, more urgent. The euro fun of “We Can’t Dance”, their last album together, could only have happened in 1991, after the end of the Soviet Union.

Regardless – well, if I have my way: Genesis could have performed all the other six songs from “Invisible Touch”, which includes the milestones “In The Glow of the Night” and “Land of Confusion” (in the end they are at least five). One weighs the rival setlists – are Phil Collins’ solo concerts better, or those of his band Genesis? The trio not only delves into the Collins-fronting Genesis years, which are almost indistinguishable from his solo years (thankfully), but also into the Peter Gabriel era, with renditions of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”, and, a not entirely unimportant statement due to the prominent placement as the final piece, “The Carpet Crawlers”.

The two concerts in the Mercedes-Benz Arena are the largest indoor performances in the city since the beginning of the corona pandemic, which has a certain drama. The 2G Plus event will then be safely evaluated. 45 minutes before the start of the concert, the tour manager invites you to a kind of fireplace room in the multi-purpose hall to give a speech for all accredited journalists. He says Genesis only had five days to rehearse. The admission for the concert was granted at such short notice. He also says that never before has so much electricity been generated at a concert in the Mercedes-Benz Arena as at Genesis. More than once at Madonna in Berlin. OK.

Now there is war. And Phil Collins has pulled himself together for a concert tour one last time. Since the start of The Last Domino? tour last year, everything that can, and perhaps should, has been written about Collins’ frailty. Pity, compassion and awe at the courage of the 71-year-old, a pop star who has aged before his years, but not through a lifetime of drug crashes, but simply because he was unlucky with his body. One who, until the end of his live career, can only sing if he sits on a chair beforehand. Long-distance diagnosis isn’t really a thing, but Collins seems to have suffered a second, rapid aging flare-up since his 2016 stage comeback. Six years ago it was compact, now it has collapsed. He sang on the “Not Dead Yet” tour rather moderately. Now he doesn’t sing well at all.

But it doesn’t matter. The tracksuit he’s wearing on stage is his work suit. Collins sings, “I can’t feel a thing from my head down to my toes,” from “That’s All,” and it’s no longer about being abandoned like it was in 1983, he means struggling with the body. Then Collins sings: “The only thing about me is the way I walk” from “I can’t dance” and he no longer means the monkey dance from 1991, he means again the fight with the body. Unintentionally, every old text now has a new meaning.

No Genesis song ever released contains the word “fuck”. Phil Collins now sings it on “Invisible Touch”. The original goes like this: “And though she will mess up your life”. Instead of “mess” he now sings “fuck”: “And though she will fuck up your life”. The reason for this must be private.

The Last Domino? Tour is a tribute to a lifetime achievement. And the unlikely, sad fact that the old, beautiful songs of Collins’ band are no longer contemporary documents of a political era that seemed to be forgotten forever. This is how Phil Collins sang in 1986 about the day after the bomb could have been dropped, and this is how he sang it on Monday night: “I remember long ago / When the sun was shining /And all the stars were bright all through the night /In the wake up this madness, as I held you tight /So long ago.”