The Living Years by Mike Rutherford

Author:Mike Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472110350
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

CHAPTER NINE

Headley Grange in East Hampshire was a huge eighteenth-century country house that had fallen on hard times. Then it had Led Zeppelin living in it while they recorded Physical Graffiti, which hadn’t helped. When Genesis arrived in June 1974 to write The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway there were rats everywhere, it was barely furnished and Rich, who’d been down before us to suss it out, said he’d found ropes on one of the beds.

By this point I was living in a flat in Weymouth Street, which runs across Harley Street. I’d left Gay Tom and his silver platforms in Earls Court but Bruce, my other flatmate, I couldn’t shake off. We could only afford one bedroom between us so the rota system continued, but Bruce minded sleeping on the sofa less now he knew it was just me in the bed, not Tom and one of his random blokes.

I was first to arrive at Headley Grange and took the nicest bedroom, which had a carpet and was en suite. Then when Tony and Margaret arrived, rather than do the decent thing and offer it to them, I pretended not to notice, so they ended up in a tiny little room up in the roof. (I like to think I’m more generous now, but I did once make Margaret toss for a hotel room in San Sebastian: I’d got a big room with a nice view and Tony and Margaret were overlooking a car park at the back. A straight swap somehow just didn’t occur . . .)

The Selling England tour had only been finished for two weeks when we all moved into Headley Grange. The tempo of the business was much faster back then and I personally liked the quicker turnover: it made starting on an album less of a big deal. You felt it wouldn’t be all over if you made one bad record. Having said which, making The Lamb was anything but fast – it often felt like pulling teeth.

Selling England had been our longest album to date but that had made it sound quiet on record: the longer an album was, the more grooves there would be in the vinyl, making the volume lower. For this reason we’d decided to make our next album a double one; this also had the advantage of allowing us to spread out and get more musical variety on. If we were doing a single album then everything had to sound pretty strong, but with a double album we could experiment with moods and atmosphere. Even on our first album for Jonathan King we’d included short instrumental links between tracks – which, looking back, had been pretty adventurous. On The Lamb these evolved into atmospheric jams which we all loved, particularly Phil. Like all drummers he loved improvising and never quite got that the rest of still had to play A chords or E chords if A chords and E chords were what we’d written.

The idea of having a concept came later when we the thought we might as well give the double album a bit of a story.

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