The record in context

In the summer of 1977, Genesis were coming apart in the most civilised way imaginable. Guitarist Steve Hackett, who had released a solo album in 1975 and grown frustrated at how little of his writing the band used, quit while the group were mixing their second live album, Seconds Out. His departure was not announced until 8 October, by which time Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford were already out promoting the record as a trio — and already insisting, with a confidence that surprised even their manager, that they could carry on. They had been the backbone of Genesis classics like the “Apocalypse in 9/8” section of “Supper’s Ready” and the instrumental core of A Trick of the Tail; they agreed not to audition a replacement guitarist, and Rutherford, the band’s bassist, simply took on every guitar part himself. It was a gamble. Genesis had already survived the loss of Peter Gabriel two years earlier. Losing their second defining instrumental voice in three years looked, from the outside, like the beginning of the end.

The three remaining members retreated first to Shepperton Studios for six weeks of rehearsals, then to Relight Studios in Hilvarenbeek, in the Netherlands, where they recorded the new album in September and October 1977 — the basic tracks, Rutherford later recalled, took just two weeks — before mixing at Trident Studios in London with co-producer David Hentschel. And they made a deliberate decision about the music itself: away from the sprawling, epic structures that had defined their progressive rock years, toward shorter, tighter, more direct songs. Punk and new wave were rewriting the rules of British rock around them, and Genesis responded not by imitating the punks but by clearing their own decks. Collins later acknowledged that the move made it look as though Genesis were trying to become a singles band chasing commercial credibility — but he maintained the new material was “fundamentally the same” band, just speaking more plainly. Banks found recording as a trio easier and more pleasurable than before, each member with a clearly defined role and fewer personnel clashes. Rutherford discovered that three people left more air in the basic tracks, and that the air could be filled with overdubs. Rutherford was also determined not to imitate Hackett’s distinctive guitar tones, choosing instead to forge his own leaner style — which is why the album is dominated by Banks’s keyboards, with sparser and simpler guitar parts than any Genesis record before it. Even the sleeve told the story of transition: designed, like their previous three albums, by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, the cover was shot with time-lapse light trails to represent “comings and goings,” the changing of personnel rendered as streaks of light.

Out of those six weeks of rehearsals came exactly one song written from scratch in the room: “Follow You Follow Me.” Everything else on the album had been brought in individually — Banks wrote four songs, Rutherford three — but this one grew out of a jam, and it went through numerous iterations before the band settled on the three-minute arrangement. The music was credited to all three members, but the words belonged to Rutherford alone, and they were inspired by his wife. He later said it was the easiest set of lyrics he had ever written, taking him “about ten minutes.” Co-producer Hentschel was dismissive of the little love song. But when an early mix was played to the staff at Atlantic Records, the label heard what the producer had missed: a potential hit single. The song was remixed, released on 24 February 1978 as the lead single from …And Then There Were Three…, and deliberately placed last on the album so the record would close on a lighter note. Within weeks it was Genesis’s first UK Top 10 hit, peaking at No. 7 and spending four weeks in the top ten, and their first US Top 40 single, reaching No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album itself reached No. 3 in Britain and No. 14 in America — their highest US chart position to that point — and went platinum, though the critics were divided: traditionalists lamented the loss of complex progressive textures while others praised the new pop accessibility. Follow-up singles “Many Too Many” and “Deep in the Motherlode” kept the album on the charts through the summer. The 1978 world tour, their first with live guitarist Daryl Stuermer, confirmed them as an arena act. The band that was supposed to be finished had just had the biggest hit of its life.

Listen closely

Start with the guitar, because everything about this record begins there. The song is built on a hooky Mike Rutherford riff — a repetitive, palm-muted figure bathed in a flange effect — and it is worth remembering what Rutherford was proving by playing it. He had just taken over all of the band’s guitar duties from one of progressive rock’s most distinctive stylists, and rather than attempt a Hackett impression, he deliberately forged something plainer: a rhythmic pulse instead of a showcase. Around that pulse, the other two built the track the way only they could. Tony Banks later described “Follow You Follow Me” as the band’s only truly group-written piece — Rutherford’s riff, Banks’s chords, Collins’s rhythmic focus, coming together organically in rehearsal. Listen for how little anyone shows off. Banks, a keyboardist capable of cathedral-sized arrangements, contents himself with warm, uncluttered chords. Collins, one of rock’s great drummers, plays for the groove. The whole performance has the relaxed confidence of three musicians who have stopped trying to impress each other and started trying to move a room.

Then listen to the words, all of which Rutherford wrote in roughly ten minutes — a fact that tells you something important about what the song is and isn’t. This is not a lyric that was laboured over; it is a lyric that arrived. “Stay with me, my love, I hope you’ll always be right here by my side, if ever I need you” — it is almost shockingly direct for a band whose singer had once performed in a fox head while narrating a twenty-three-minute epic about the Battle of Epping Forest. Rutherford later called the song “catchy without being soppy,” and that is exactly the tightrope it walks: tender without ever turning sentimental, simple without ever sounding simple-minded. He told an interviewer it was the easiest lyric of his life to write, and you can hear why — it has the unforced quality of something said rather than composed. When Pete Townshend praised the song on a radio broadcast, as Rutherford recalled in his 2014 memoir The Living Years, it was the seal of approval from rock’s most demanding songwriter: the prog band had written a love song a Who could respect.

Now listen to Collins sing it, because his vocal is the quiet masterstroke of the record. He does not belt, he does not emote, he does not reach for the rafters the way he would on later ballads. He sings “Follow You Follow Me” the way someone talks to a person they have loved for years — warm, unhurried, completely without strain. It is worth remembering that during these same sessions, Banks had to reassure Collins that he really could sing the word “mama” in the chorus of “Many Too Many” — the band were asking their drummer-turned-singer to carry an intimacy he had never been asked for before, and he was still learning how much of himself a lyric could hold. On “Follow You Follow Me” he finds it immediately. Hentschel’s production keeps everything close and dry: the voice sits inside the groove rather than on top of it, the harmonies arrive like friends joining a conversation, and the whole three minutes feel less like a performance than a room you have been invited into. That intimacy was the real departure. Genesis had spent a decade building cathedrals of sound; here, for the first time, they built a front parlour — and discovered millions of people wanted to sit in it.

Finally, listen to what the song made possible, because “Follow You Follow Me” is the hinge on which the entire second half of Genesis’s career swings. Before it, they were a cult progressive band with a devoted following and a ceiling; after it, they were a band that knew it could write a three-minute single without betraying itself, and everything that followed — Duke, Abacab, the self-titled 1983 album, Invisible Touch — follows from that proof. The song never left the live set for long, because it does something no other Genesis song does: it lets the arena sing a lullaby. Nearly fifty years on, its achievement looks even larger than its chart positions. A band that had lost its frontman and then its guitarist, written off twice in three years, answered with the gentlest thing it had ever recorded — and the gentlest thing turned out to be the strongest. “Follow You Follow Me” didn’t just save Genesis commercially. It taught three progressive rock musicians that tenderness, played with absolute conviction, could fill a stadium.