The record in context

By 1983, Genesis were no longer a band with a side career in solo records — they were three solo careers that occasionally reconvened as a band. Phil Collins had become one of the biggest pop stars on the planet: Face Value (1981) and Hello, I Must Be Going! (1982) had made him a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, and his gated-reverb drum sound was the most imitated noise in popular music. Mike Rutherford was assembling what would become Mike + The Mechanics. Tony Banks, the most private of the three, was writing film scores. When they gathered at The Farm — their own converted farmhouse studio in Chiddingfold, Surrey — in March 1983, it was under new terms: for the first time, an entire Genesis album would be written, recorded and mixed in their own space, with no clock-watching and no outside landlord. Hugh Padgham, the engineer who had helped invent the eighties drum sound alongside Collins on Peter Gabriel’s third album, returned as co-producer. The band arrived, as had become their custom, with nothing prepared: no songs, no demos, no plan. Just three men, a room full of new machines, and the freedom to follow whatever came out of the speakers.

What came out first was a beat. Rutherford had been experimenting with a LinnDrum — the LM-1, the expensive American drum machine that was rewiring pop production — and he brought in a pattern he had programmed himself. Then came the decisive piece of mischief: instead of recording the machine cleanly, they fed its output through his guitar amplifier and an echo gate, distorting and mangling the electronic pulse until it sounded less like a drum machine and more like something stalking the corridors of the studio. It was the founding sound of “Mama” — a harsh, lurching rhythm that felt industrial and menacing — and it is worth pausing on who programmed it. The beat of the darkest Genesis single was not played by Phil Collins, one of the most famous drummers alive. It was programmed by the guitarist, on a machine, and then deliberately abused through an amplifier. From that corrupted rhythm, the track grew the way Genesis tracks grew in those years: Banks layering minimalist synthesiser lines in a minor key over the top, Collins finding a vocal to haunt the spaces in between. The song was credited, like everything they wrote together then, to Banks, Collins and Rutherford equally. But its DNA was pure Rutherford: a machine, an amplifier, and an idea nobody else would have chased.

Released as a single on 22 August 1983, a couple of months before the self-titled album, “Mama” did something nobody had quite expected — least of all, perhaps, the band. It reached No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart, making it the biggest British hit Genesis had ever had, and it reached the Top 10 in Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Ireland and the Netherlands. The parent album, Genesis, went to No. 1 in Britain and No. 9 in America, sold over four million copies, and eventually produced the US Top 10 hit “That’s All” as well. But “Mama” itself barely registered in the States, stalling at No. 73 on the Hot 100 — perhaps American radio in 1983 simply didn’t know what to do with a six-and-a-half-minute single that opened with a distorted drum machine and a horror-film laugh. Britain, evidently, did. The Mama Tour ran from late 1983 into 1984, ending with five Birmingham shows that were filmed and released as Genesis Live — The Mama Tour. Genesis had spent the seventies being accused of pretension and the early eighties of going soft. With “Mama,” they answered both charges at once: this was as uncompromising and as unsettling as anything they had ever released — and it was a hit.

Listen closely

Start at the very beginning, because the first thirty seconds of “Mama” are among the strangest openings of any hit single of the decade. What you hear is Rutherford’s LinnDrum pattern — programmed by the guitarist, remember, not the drummer — fed through an AMS RMX-16 reverb on its gated setting and then into an amplifier (a Fender, though Rutherford himself remembers it as a Mesa/Boogie) with an enormous amount of distortion, the whole mangled signal mixed back against the clean direct feed to give the drums their queasy character. It doesn’t sound like drums at all; it sounds like machinery malfunctioning in a cathedral. Then, over that lurching pulse, Banks begins laying down the song’s harmonic world: minimalist synthesiser lines in a minor tonality, played on an arsenal of new technology — a Synclavier, an ARP Quadra, an E-mu Emulator, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-10. The Quadra’s rhythmic pulses were triggered by the Linn’s sixteenth-note hi-hat pattern, so the electronics breathe with the machine; a low E drone hums on the Prophet-10 through most of the song like a held breath. And then, out of that synthetic fog, comes Collins’s voice, drenched in reverb, singing to someone called “mama.” The effect is genuinely uncanny: the most human element in the track is the one that sounds the most haunted.

Then comes the laugh — the most famous two seconds in the Genesis catalogue. After the first verse, Collins lets out a low, menacing, heavily reverberated cackle that sounds like it belongs in a horror film, and the whole song tilts on its axis. The inspiration, as the band and Padgham later revealed on the Genesis Songbook DVD, was an unlikely one: “The Message,” the pioneering 1982 hip-hop record by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Collins had heard something in the rap record’s street-level menace that he wanted to smuggle into a Genesis single, and the laugh is the smuggled goods — a burst of Bronx dread detonating in the middle of a Surrey studio production. Listen to what it does to everything around it. Before the laugh, “Mama” is strange but arguably just atmospheric; after the laugh, there is no doubt that something is wrong in this song’s world. It reframes the tender title — “mama” — as something closer to a plea or a threat, and it tells the listener, unmistakably, that the narrator is not well. Pop singles in 1983 did not do this. Genesis did it and took it to No. 4.

Now listen to the words, because the lyric is even darker than the laugh. The song, Collins later explained, is about a young man’s obsessive longing for a prostitute — “just about a young teenager that’s got a mother fixation with a prostitute that he’s just happened to have met in passing and he has such a strong feeling for her and doesn’t understand why she isn’t interested in him,” as he put it in a 1983 radio interview. He compared the situation to David Niven’s memoir The Moon’s a Balloon, in which the young Niven — fresh out of cadet college — falls for a 45-year-old prostitute: “He’s special to her but it definitely can’t go any further than what it is and that’s really what the song is about, with sinister overtones.” Those last two words are doing a lot of work. The narrator begs — “can’t you feel my heart?” — with the desperation of someone who has mistaken a transaction for a relationship, and the song never offers him, or the listener, any comfort. Tellingly, when the band’s manager first heard it, he assumed it was about abortion, hearing the lyric as a foetus pleading with its mother for a chance at life. Collins’s correction only made it stranger. This was Genesis, the band of “Follow You Follow Me” tenderness, releasing a single about erotic obsession with a sex worker — and putting it on Top of the Pops.

Finally, listen to the machinery, because “Mama” is the sound of Genesis becoming a different kind of band. Banks’s keyboard rig on this track reads like an inventory of the digital revolution: the Synclavier alone cost more than a house, and the band used it the way a painter uses a new pigment. When no existing sound worked for one section, they sampled a koto — a Japanese zither that happened to be in the studio that day — into the Emulator, simply because, as the session notes have it, no other sound would do. The Prophet-10’s low E drone, the Quadra pulses locked to the Linn’s hi-hat, the distorted drum machine that started it all: this is a record built as much by programming and sampling as by playing. And yet for all its cold technology, “Mama” never feels clinical — it feels feverish, which is the paradox that makes it great. The machines gave Genesis a new way to sound unhinged. The song stayed in the live set for decades afterward, through the Invisible Touch and We Can’t Dance tours and both reunion runs, because no other Genesis song does what it does: it proved that the biggest band in Britain could take the darkest idea in the room, run it through a drum machine and a Grandmaster Flash record, and turn it into a hit single. Nothing they did afterward — not even “Invisible Touch” — was ever quite this brave.