Free The Living Years by Mike Rutherford Page B

head off. I was wearing my jeans and Afghan but must still have looked liked someone trying a bit too hard to be cool because someone spiked my Coca-Cola.
    It didn’t hit me until I got back to Rich’s flat. Then it really hit me. At some point in the early hours I tried to crawl from my bedroom to the bathroom but the problem was that the corridor between the two kept getting longer and longer. Years and years passed while I was on my hands and knees and every time I looked up, I was never any closer.
    That was bad but what was worse was to come. I was due to meet my parents at eleven o’clock the next morning at the Station Hotel in Victoria: we were all going off for a family weekend in Paris.
    I arrived just a few minutes late but completely out of my tree, still dripping in sweat and shaking. Mum took one look at me and knew straightaway what the problem was.
    ‘Mikey! Darling! You poor boy! What terrible flu!’
    I’m pretty sure Dad had an idea what was going down but Mum was convinced that I needed to be put to bed with hot water bottles. Whether or not these helped I don’t know, but I had recovered enough by the morning to make the trip.
    My parents’ idea was that it would be an educational, sightseeing tour. We’d go to the galleries, the Sacré-Coeur, Montmartre and so on. What they didn’t know was how much my mind had already been expanded in the past twenty-four hours.
    * * *
    I finished my A levels in 1969 and applied to Edinburgh University to read English. It was so far away I thought no one else would want to go there so I’d stand a chance of getting in. Pete was planning to go to the London Film School, Tony was wondering whether to take a year out from his degree at Sussex University and John Silver was going off in the autumn to study in America. Only Ant was totally committed to our music but his enthusiasm was enough to inspire us to spend the summer rehearsing as a band.
    Ant and I had previously rehearsed together in Granny Malimore’s house. She was quite fierce, a tough old thing, but she’d bring Ant and me marmalade sandwiches while we took the chairs and table out of her dining room to make space. (I’m sure Dad sold it to her: ‘It’s all right, it’s just a hobby. He’s going to university in September.’)
    Luckily for Granny Malimore, during the summer most of our Charterhouse friends’ parents’ were away, so we were able to work our way round their empty houses instead.
    We normally had a two-week stint in each because that was how long our parents were away for. We spent two weeks in David Thomas’s house in South Marlborough – a stunning white mansion with a swimming pool; two weeks in Ant’s house, which was hung-tiled and covered in creeper; and two weeks at Peter’s house, in Chobham. There’s a picture of us outside Ant’s house loading our gear into Pete’s sister’s horsebox, which I think rather sums up Genesis at this point in time. Other bands were rehearsing in north London basements, while we were moving our stuff around in a horse trailer still full of straw and horse shit. No one had thought to clear it out.
    The house of Brian Roberts’s granny, where we also spent two weeks, was on a gated estate in East Grinstead. While we were there we all watched the moon landings on a tiny TV in a huge wooden frame. Brian also got a journalist from the
East Grinstead Courier
down to write a story about us for the paper:
    With a curious combination of all-acoustic sounds and vocal harmonies they have so far had three singles released on Decca and one album ‘From Genesis to Revelation’ produced by singer and controversial ‘pop’ columnist Jonathan King.
    Brian Roberts, now an assistant cameraman, said: ‘We all met at school at Charterhouse and began writing together. A group was formed from this. I began to record work and have continued to do so.’
    So far all their work has been done from the recording studio. But thinking very seriously of