Question Hi,I'm quite impressed by Forxtrot of Peter Gabriel's Genesis. Now I want to know why and when Peter Gabriel got out of Genesis. And hopefully I want to know the whole titles of their albums in which Peter took the vocal part.
Answer Hello Shu...
Let me get the basic information down...
Genesis albums while Peter Gabriel was lead singer, which covers 1967-1975:
From Genesis To Revelation, Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Live (or Genesis Live it's sometimes listed as), Selling England By The Pound, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Genesis Archive Volume 1 1967-1975 (4 CD box set featuring a live material, demos and b-side tracks released a couple of years ago). The band also re-recorded the Carpet Crawlers last year and released it on their Turn It On Again : The Hits album. Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins share vocals, but it's mostly Peter on lead vocals.
He left the band officially in June 1975 for many reasons, and alot of them have to do with the recording of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in 1974. He ended up feeling trapped toward the end of his time in the band, and I'll give you some reasons why he felt that way. (BTW, some of his reasons for leaving were included in his song, Solsbury Hill.)
At the time they were writing the album, Peter Gabriel and his wife, Jill, had their first daughter, Andrea. The doctors didn't think she'd make it for a while. She was in intensive care for the first two weeks of her life. There was intense pressure from Charisma, Genesis' record label at the time, to get an album out, and the band had taken on Peter Gabriel's short story of The Lamb and were writing a double album around it. The band didn't really have time to stop work and let Peter tend to his baby's health at the time and that kind bothered him. Peter Gabriel has often said he wishes he had more time to fine tune the Lamb. He wrote the lyrics while the band worked in the other room on the music. (That actually helped make the post-PG era an easier transition. They wrote all the music, and Mike Rutherford & Tony Banks had written a lot of lyrics before The Lamb, so they were well prepared to follow up without Peter Gabriel.)
Also, at one point during the Lamb writing sessions, Peter Gabriel had actually left the band to go off and work with film director William Friedkin, who at that time was coming off a big hit with The Exorcist. The band told Peter if he went off and worked with Friedkin, he was out. Two weeks after working with Friedkin, Peter Gabriel came back to the band and they continued on. That created some stress between Peter and the band.
Peter Gabriel also hated being committed to an album and then a tour right after, and then right back into the studio for an album, so on and so forth. He felt like a machine more than a person after a while.
Peter was going to leave in the middle of The Lamb tour, but Genesis' manager, Tony Smith, convinced him to stay on for the rest of the tour, since they had venues booked and tickets sold, and he could leave after the tour.
After that, the rest is history. Genesis kept up their hectic pace with albums and touring up until the early 1980's, when solo material became a big part of their musical careers, and Peter Gabriel carved out his own niche while doing all sorts of projects and collaborations.
