The record in context

By the end of 1978, Genesis had every reason to fall apart and no intention of doing so. The …And Then There Were Three… tour had confirmed them as an arena act, but the schedule had nearly destroyed Phil Collins’s marriage — his wife Andrea had warned him that if he committed to the full tour, she would not be there when he returned, and by the end of the year she had moved with their children to Vancouver. Collins followed, determined to rebuild his family, and told Banks, Rutherford and manager Tony Smith that the band would simply have to organise itself differently. It was never a resignation, but it forced a pause. Banks and Rutherford suggested an extended hiatus: Banks recorded his solo album A Curious Feeling at Polar Studios in Stockholm, Rutherford recorded his Smallcreep’s Day at the same studio, and Collins — after the attempt to save the marriage failed and he returned to Britain in April 1979 — gigged with Brand X and began demoing songs at home in Shalford, Surrey, on piano, synthesisers and a newly acquired Roland CR-78 drum machine. For the first time in a decade, Genesis were three solo artists with separate lives.

The break turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to them. In the autumn of 1979, Banks and Rutherford moved in with Collins in Shalford and began rehearsals with no preconceptions — and discovered, to their surprise, that absence had made the collaboration electric. Rutherford later described it as “getting back to the basic stage of ideas being worked on jointly,” and called the writing process for Duke, alongside the later Abacab sessions, a “rethink” of the band’s whole approach: a return to group writing and improvisation after years of individually composed songs. Collins felt the three of them interacted “as a group much better,” sensing “a side to us coming out which wasn’t on the last album; the playing side.” Banks noticed Collins “coming up much more to be a kind of equal” as a songwriter — he contributed “Misunderstanding” and “Please Don’t Ask” to the record. They took the material to Polar Studios in November and December 1979, co-producing with David Hentschel for the last time, and emerged with an album that bridged everything they had ever been: the ten-minute “Duke’s Travels”/”Duke’s End” suite for the old prog faithful, and a clutch of sharp, short singles for the new pop audience. The sessions even found Collins programming a Roland CR-78 drum machine on “Duchess” — the first time a drum machine had appeared on a Genesis record, a small harbinger of the electronic textures that would soon define the band’s sound. Even the cover art signalled renewal: drawn by French illustrator Lionel Koechlin and borrowed from his book L’Alphabet d’Albert, its cartoon duke had nothing to do with any song, which Collins cheerfully admitted. Duke, released in late March 1980, spent two weeks at No. 1 to become Genesis’s first-ever UK chart-topping album, reached No. 11 in America, and went platinum on both sides of the Atlantic, spinning off further singles in “Duchess” and Collins’s Beach Boys-tinged “Misunderstanding,” which reached No. 14 in the US. The comeback was complete before most people had noticed the band had been away.

“Turn It On Again” was not supposed to be the single. In its original form it was a short connecting piece buried in the middle of a thirty-minute sequence the band called the “Duke Suite” — “Behind the Lines,” “Duchess,” “Guide Vocal,” “Turn It On Again,” “Duke’s Travels” and “Duke’s End” — which told the story of a fictional character named Albert. The band ultimately decided against sequencing the album that way, partly to avoid comparisons with their twenty-three-minute “Supper’s Ready,” and liberated the suite’s strongest sections as standalone tracks. “Turn It On Again” itself was stitched together from two scraps: a piece Rutherford had discarded from his Smallcreep’s Day sessions and a separate fragment from Banks. In its first incarnation it was much slower, until Collins suggested trying it at a faster speed — and then, famously, pointed out something Rutherford had never noticed about his own song. Released as a single on 3 March 1980, a few weeks before the album, it reached No. 8 in the UK, becoming the band’s second Top 10 hit, and earned them a performance on Top of the Pops. A prog band had just released a pop single in a time signature most pop musicians couldn’t count — and the public loved it anyway.

Listen closely

Start by trying to clap along, because you can’t — and that is the whole point. The verse and chorus of “Turn It On Again” alternate bars of 6/4 and 7/4, which adds up to thirteen beats per cycle, and at the song’s driving tempo those thirteen beats are felt in eighth notes: 13/8. The story goes that Rutherford wrote the riff believing it was in perfectly ordinary 4/4. It was Collins who broke the news. “Why don’t you try it in a faster speed?” he suggested — and then: “Do you realize it is in 13/8?” Rutherford’s reply has become Genesis folklore: “What do you mean, it’s in 13? It’s in 4/4, isn’t it?” “No, it’s 13.” The intro and bridge, for good measure, alternate 4/4 and 5/4 — nine beats a bar. This is a rhythm section showing off in the most English way possible: by pretending nothing unusual is happening. As the band’s own official history puts it, the song feels so effortlessly catchy that listeners don’t even notice the odd rhythm until they try to clap or tap their feet along with it. That invisibility is the musicianship. Anyone can write in 13/8; it takes a great band to make 13/8 feel like 4/4.

Listen next to how the track is built, because the arrangement is a masterclass in controlled force. The song was originally written and recorded in B major, and it opens with that insistent, churning riff — Rutherford’s guitar and Banks’s keyboards locked together like gears — before Collins’s drums detonate underneath. There is no fat on it anywhere: the verses snap forward, the chorus lifts without ever loosening its grip, and the whole thing is over in under four minutes. It sounds simple, and it is anything but. Every accent has to land in exactly the right place or the thirteen-beat cycle stumbles, which means the performance is an act of high-wire precision disguised as bar-room swagger. Collins’s vocal rides the top of it with total authority — this is the sound of a singer who had spent the hiatus becoming a frontman in his own right, and who now knew exactly how much weight his voice could carry. When the band later had to transpose the song down — to A for the 2007 reunion tour, to G for the 2021 tour — it was an acknowledgement of what the original vocal demanded: full-throated, full-tilt commitment, night after night.

Then listen to what the song is actually about, because the lyric is darker than the riff lets on. Rutherford wrote the words, and they describe a man who does nothing but watch television — so obsessively that he comes to believe the people on the screen are his friends. It is a portrait of loneliness in the age of broadcast, written years before the internet would make the condition universal: a man alone in a room, “turning it on again” because the glowing faces are the only company he has. There is something quietly devastating about setting that lyric to the most propulsive music Genesis had ever recorded. The band is at its most physically exciting; the narrator is at his most emotionally stranded. Whether Rutherford intended it as social commentary or simply as a character sketch, the song captures a very modern dread — the substitution of connection with content — and it does so without ever slowing down enough to moralise. You can dance to a song about a man who has forgotten how to live. That tension is what makes it linger.

Finally, listen to the song’s afterlife, because “Turn It On Again” became something bigger than a single: it became the band’s signature. It has been played on essentially every Genesis tour since its release. In the 1980s the band took to attaching a medley of 1960s pop songs to its live performance — a crowd-pleasing detour they later admitted was a poor decision, restoring the song to its album form for the We Can’t Dance tour. In 1999 they named their greatest-hits collection Turn It On Again: The Hits; in 2007, when Banks, Rutherford and Collins reunited after a decade apart, they named the entire reunion Turn It On Again: The Tour. Think about what that choice says. Of all the epics, all the ballads, all the number ones that followed, the song the band chose to sum up its identity was the one about the lonely man and his television set, in thirteen-eight time. It is Genesis’s whole story in miniature: the prog complexity smuggled inside the pop single, the darkness humming underneath the euphoria, three musicians playing something fiendishly difficult as though it were the easiest thing in the world. Turn it on again, indeed — they never really turned it off.