Driving the Last Spike/Genesis

When composing a song, Phil Collins usually doesn't start with a particular theme in mind--he just lets the ideas and words flow freely as he's working out the melody.  "If you go right back to Face Value, I never sat down and wrote anything for that record," Collins says in the band's 2007 book Genesis: Chapter and Verse. "In The Air Tonight was totally improvised.  I sang what came out of my head and wrote it down afterwards.  And because it worked for that first record, that's what I've always done.  When I'm singing along the phrases come out."

For Driving The Last Spike, from the 1991 Genesis album We Can't Dance, Collins went the extra step of doing some research.  The song takes an epic look at the dangers and hardships that went into the construction of the British railway system during the 19th century, told from the point of view of a workman who took part in that process.  "To write 'Driving the Last Spike,' I ended up getting hold of a book about the navvies," Collins said.  ["Navvy" is a British term for an unskilled manual laborer, particularly someone who builds roads, canals, and railroads.]  He elaborated in an interview with Music Express Magazine [via genesis-path.net]:

The song's working title was "Irish," and that came from me making up words and phrases as I listened to the music...There's an Irish-sounding bit in the arrangement, so I thought about labourers and the working class.  And then as I browsed through a book called The Railway Navvies, I formulated this idea about the Irish workers who helped build the British railway system at the turn of the century.  I mean, when you're on a train and you're looking out of the window, you don't think about being 150 feet up in the air on a viaduct between two hills and how the track actually got there!

"I don't know why but I just thought there was a story to be told there," Collins says of the song in Genesis: Chapter and Verse.  "And that was one of only a few story lyrics I ever wrote."

Celebrate Your Neanderthal DNA: A Trick of the Tail/Genesis

Neanderthals made the news last week.  Genetic researchers announced their discovery that Neanderthals, who died out about 30,000 years ago, mated with modern humans, settling once and for all the most salacious unanswered question in modern science.  For people alive today who are descended from ancestors in Europe or Asia, this means that up to 4% of their genes are Neanderthal in origin.  This got us thinking about William Golding's 1955 novel The Inheritors, which depicts the final encounter between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens and the end of the Neanderthal line.  (It was reportedly Golding's favorite of all his books, and that includes the classic Lord of the Flies.)  It also got us humming the Genesis song A Trick Of The Tail, from their 1976 album of the same name, which was inspired by Golding's novel.  Genesis Forum Italia quotes band member Tony Banks: "I got the idea for the lyric after reading William Golding's The Inheritors. It's about a race who were on earth before man and it's the story of the last survivor of this race. The very last chapter deals with our reaction to him whereas the rest of the story is his reaction to us."  The song's connection to the book is more thematic than literal.  It isn't about cavemen; as Banks says, "It's about an alien with horns and a tail who appears in a modern city and how people react to him."  We wonder if Banks might have been influenced as much by the book's cover art as by the book itself--when The Inheritors was first published, the jacket bore the image of a famous prehistoric cave painting known as The Sorcerer, which depicts a mysterious shamanistic figure with antlers and a tail.  It's comforting to know that Neanderthals have a future, and not just because their genetic descendants are walking around today.  Rumors abound that the new Iron Maiden album The Final Frontier, due later this summer, includes a track called "The Inheritors (William Golding)."  This hasn't been officially confirmed, but consider this:  The album is being produced and mixed by Kevin Shirley--aka The Caveman--and his Caveman Productions.

The Cinema Show/Genesis

There are references to Romeo and Juliet in "The Cinema Show," from the 1973 Genesis album Selling England by the Pound, but this appears to be ironic shorthand for a pair of lovers rather than a specific allusion to Shakespeare's play. Instead, the literary work at the heart of the song is the "Fire Sermon" section of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. The song depicts, in turn, a young woman and a young man preparing for a date at the end of a workday, with the young man anticipating a sexual conquest. As in the poem, the song filters the episode through the perceptions of Tiresias, a figure from Greek mythology. Born a man, Tiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years before being changed back to his original gender (and concluded from the experience that women derive more pleasure from sex than men do). So, the lines: I have crossed between the poles, for me there's no mystery/Once a man, like the sea I raged/Once a woman, like the earth I gave/But there is in fact more earth than sea. In alluding to Tiresias, Eliot was specifically drawing from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Submitted by William Scheckel and by Laura in Space