Free The Living Years by Mike Rutherford Page A

made in three days working non-stop. We were staying at the flat of a friend, David Thomas, in Earl’s Court and didn’t see light the whole time.
    By this point Pete had found us a new drummer, John Silver, who was a good jazz drummer, but when we all went into Regent B studios off Charing Cross Road none of us really had any idea what we were doing. We were trying to hang on and play our parts just about well enough, which was quite a struggle in those days. I could barely play my bass. In fact, I was without doubt the least good musician in the band but at the time I was more concerned with wanting to be part of the scene than necessarily getting the music right. To be making an album at seventeen felt so up there that it didn’t matter that Regent B studios was basically a basement off the Charing Cross Road. It felt like a government building – there was a sense that you might be marched off for interrogation at any moment. As for what was going on in the control room, none of us had a clue.
    Looking back now,
From Genesis to Revelation
seems surprisingly dark: it’s folky and poppy but the atmosphere grabs you. While Ant and I were writing hippyish lyrics about trees and leaves and boats and albatrosses, Pete was already writing songs like ‘The Conqueror’:
    He climbs inside the looking glass
And points at everything he hates.
He calls to you ‘Hey, look out, son,
There’s a gun they’re pointing at your pretty face.’
    He was painting pictures with words that would capture an emotion and, without your thinking about them, go straight into your body.
    Although all the songs were credited to us as a band, the truth was we were more like two gangs of friends, Ant and I and Tony and Peter. Neither Ant nor I had really got going as songwriters at this point. Our attitude was always ‘One for all and all for one’, but
From Genesis to Revelation
was mostly Peter and Tony.
    We were all too insecure to tell Jonathan King to piss off when he suggested basing the album around a religious theme – had it been the following album, we probably would have done. At the time, though, the idea seemed like something cohesive to work with, so we went along with it. Legend has it that
From Genesis to Revelation
ended up being shelved in the religious music section of record shops as a result, but the fact is we only sold 600 copies so it can’t have been in many record shops in any case. I can’t remember ever seeing it, and I did look.
    * * *
    Although I wasn’t yet committed to the path we were taking, Ant had never had any doubt. His life was music, nothing else: it was all-consuming. As a result he was more susceptible than the rest of us to the ups and downs. When Jonathan King got Arthur Greenslade to put some weak strings arrangements on the album, I was pretty annoyed. But it just about killed Ant.
    Not that Ant or I bought records ourselves: we’d go up to Rich Macphail’s flat in London and listen to his. After Millfield, Rich had gone on to live on a kibbutz in Israel where he’d spent the past few months doing the cooking, listening to music and getting stoned. (He was eventually busted and fined, and had sailed to England via Cyprus, Piraeus, Athens, Naples, Genoa and Marseilles.)
    It was at Rich’s flat that I first heard a song in stereo. It was ‘A Salty Dog’ by Procol Harum. I put the headphones on and it was like your skull opening up: an extra dimension; a huge, pastoral picture in strings. It would have been intense even without the dope we were both smoking.
    Rich’s flat was also where I had my first acid trip, although unlike the dope that was completely unintentional.
    I hadn’t really encountered any drugs at the Marquee Club when I’d skived off from Charterhouse to see gigs there. I’m sure all kinds of things were happening at the back but I was always at the front.
    On this particular night I’d been to the Marquee to see the Cream, who’d been fantastic: the volume alone blew my