Foxtrot is the fourth studio album by the English progressive rock band Genesis, released on 15 September 1972 by Charisma Records. It features their longest recorded song, the 23-minute track "Supper's Ready".
The album was recorded during the tour in support of their previous album, Nursery Cryme (1971), which saw them gain popularity, including a well-received slot at the Great Western Festival, Lincolnshire, in May 1972. The album was written over the summer of 1972 and combined songs that had already been performed live with new material worked out in jam sessions. Recording began in August with Bob Potter as producer, but sessions were prone to tension and disagreements. After a short Italian tour, sessions resumed with Dave Hitchcock as producer. The cover was the final one designed by Paul Whitehead, featuring a fox wearing a red dress. Frontman, Peter Gabriel, wore the dress and a fox's head on stage during the following tour, which gathered press attention and raised the group's profile.
Foxtrot was the first Genesis album to chart in the UK, reaching , and received largely positive reviews. It reached No. 15 in Italy, where the band had been popular for some time. The album has continued to attract critical praise and was reissued with a new stereo and 5.1 surround sound mix as part of their 2008 Genesis 1970–1975 box set.
Background By the end of January 1971, Genesis consisted of frontman and singer Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, bassist and guitarist Mike Rutherford, guitarist Steve Hackett and drummer Phil Collins. They had played around 400 gigs in the UK, but had yet to achieve commercial success. However, they had become popular abroad. Their 1970 album Trespass had reached in Belgium, while 1971's Nursery Cryme had reached in Italy. The Italian leg of the tour in April saw Genesis play to large and enthusiastic crowds, which gave the band a new sense of their audience appeal.
In May, Genesis performed a set at the Great Western Festival in Lincoln. Gabriel appeared wearing a jewelled Egyptian collar, black eye makeup, and had shaved the front of his head, which drew attention from the press, while the fact that the set included the first public performance of "Watcher of the Skies" went unnoticed. The music press's fixation on the non-musical elements of Genesis's shows would be an ongoing trend. Genesis continued to tour England extensively throughout June and July, as well as playing their first shows in the Netherlands, while simultaneously dedicating time to write and rehearse new material for a new studio album. Hackett considered leaving the band after feeling "fairly shattered" by the lengthy tour, but his bandmates persuaded him to stay.
Production
Recording Initial rehearsals were held in a rehearsal space at Blackheath in London before they relocated to a space underneath the Una Billings School of Dance in Shepherd's Bush. Some material Hackett used for his first solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte, was rehearsed by Genesis during the Foxtrot sessions but not used on the album. Material that became "Watcher of the Skies" and "Can-Utility and the Coastliners" was performed live before recording of Foxtrot started.
Genesis recorded Foxtrot in August 1972 at Island Studios in London. The recording sessions were sporadic, taking place during the brief intervals between tour dates. Genesis were set to record with producer John Anthony, who had worked with them on their previous two albums and on their new single "Happy the Man" in March, but escalating costs due to the slow progress of completing it caused disagreement between Anthony and Charisma Records, the group's label, so they looked for a new producer. Banks recalled that Charisma was anxious for the group to make a hit recording. Contrarily, Hackett's recollection was that Charisma's owner, Tony Stratton Smith, approved their making the rise to fame slowly and was willing to allow them "many, many albums to make it." Charisma's first choice for producer was Bob Potter, a young engineer who was still learning the particulars of music production but had assisted producer Bob Johnston on the recent hit album Fog on the Tyne by Charisma labelmates Lindisfarne.
The band did not get on with Potter because he disliked their music, comparing Banks's Mellotron opening to "Watcher of the Skies" to the soundtrack to the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and felt that the song was better without it. Potter was also aggravated about how long the band took to set up to record. The unproductive sessions were curtailed, and the band toured in Italy from 15 to 23 August 1972, before resuming work on the album at the end of the month. Potter ultimately went uncredited on the album, though Hackett has said that a substantial part of "Supper's Ready" and the entirety of "Horizons" were completed with Potter as producer. The group tried promoting the engineer at the sessions, Tony Platt, to producer, but that was abandoned owing to personality clashes. Smith then asked Dave Hitchcock to produce the album, in part because he had experience with recording epic suites like "Supper's Ready", specifically, the track "Nine Feet Underground" from In the Land of Grey and Pink by Caravan. Hitchcock was unfamiliar with Platt and preferred to have an engineer who he had worked well with in the past, so he replaced Platt with John Burns. Genesis approved of the change in engineers, with Banks later commenting: "We weren't too sure about [Platt] either." Burns continued to work with Genesis on their next three albums. Banks disliked Hitchcock's production work.
During the album's sessions, Genesis recorded the live favourite "Twilight Alehouse", which had been written and performed when founding member and guitarist Anthony Phillips was in the band (a short instrumental excerpt of the song appears on their debut album From Genesis to Revelation between "Fireside Song" and "The Serpent"). However, Genesis decided "Twilight Alehouse" was inferior to the newer material and kept it off the final track list, though Banks said in 2012 that, in retrospect, it was better than most of the songs which ended up on the album. It was put out as a limited single by ZigZag magazine and the band's fan club in 1973 and as the B-side to "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" in 1974. A piece devised by Rutherford and rehearsed by the band in a time signature was not used, but it was adapted by Hackett into "Shadow of the Hierophant" on Voyage of the Acolyte. Hackett presented an early version of his song "The Hermit", but the group passed on it. It would also be included on Voyage of the Acolyte. The group tried an early take of "Firth of Fifth" but it failed to inspire their interest. Banks worked on it over the course of the following year and it was released on their next album, Selling England by the Pound. When Smith heard the album for the first time, he said to the band's friend and roadie Richard Macphail: "This is the one that makes their career". Smith added: "I had to wipe a tear from my eye. Everything that one had believed about the band had come through". Banks was particularly pleased with Foxtrot which he thought contained no weak tracks.
Songs Side one
"Watcher of the Skies" takes its title from a line of the 1817 sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats. The song begins with a solo played on a Mellotron that the band had bought from King Crimson. Banks was "searching for chords that actually sounded good ... because of its tuning problems" and settled on the opening two chords "that sounded great ... There was an atmosphere about them". The tremendous power the chords had when played at the Palazzo dello sport, Pesaro and Palasaport, Reggio Emilia during soundchecks on 11 and 12 April 1972, during their first Italian tour, convinced Genesis that they should be used in a song. The lyrics were written by Rutherford and Banks in Naples on 19 April, inspired by the view from the roof of their hotel, the Domitiana, overlooking the Mostra d'Oltremare. They wondered what an empty Earth would look like if surveyed by an alien visitor. Banks described them as "a sort of sci-fi fantasy" inspired by the novel Childhood's End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke, and the Watcher race of extraterrestrials featured in the Marvel Comics. Rutherford thought they were "interesting words but they didn't sing very well", and Banks concurred that "some of the vocal parts are a bit embarrassing." The verse/chorus sections of the song were initiated by Collins, who wrote a staccato rhythm in that he wanted to sound like Morse code. Collins felt the need to bring in "some tricky arrangements" into the song's rhythm from seeing Yes perform live. Gabriel wrote some of the melodies in the verses and chorus, and Hackett came up with the idea of having a section where the rhythm plays without accompaniment, first very softly and then very loudly.
"Time Table" features a romantic theme that yearns for tradition, decency, and an age of kings and queens that is banished by war and conflict. It is one of the few Genesis songs from this period which was not collaboratively written; Banks wrote and presented the song as a complete piece and had the band perform it. The distinctive sound of the piano lead in the chorus was created by picking the strings with a plectrum, thereby emulating the mechanism of a harpsichord. Melody Makers Chris Welch described the track as light relief and a "gentle but stirring pop song" after the "pounding excitement" of "Watcher of the Skies". Gabriel biographer Daryl Easlea considered the song the most overlooked from the Gabriel-era of the band's history with its "sweet and touching" flavour and its resemblance to Genesis songs of the late 1970s.