A Trick of the Tail (1976)
A Trick of the Tail is a 1976 art rock album by Genesis.
Genesis went into 1976 without the singer most people thought of as the band. Peter Gabriel had left. The voice on the seventh Genesis studio album belonged to Phil Collins, until then the drummer.
Charisma Records released A Trick of the Tail on 13 February 1976. The music stayed where it had been, progressive rock and art rock on the scale that implies, with the drum stool and the microphone now held by the same man.
Reviewers backed the record and so did buyers, on both sides of the Atlantic: number 3 in the UK, number 31 in the US. A band that had just lost its public face put out a hit rather than a holding pattern.
Come to it for the hinge in the Genesis catalogue, the album where the group answered the obvious question about its future by making a record instead of a statement. It is the entry point to everything the band did with Collins in front, and it still carries the shape of the years before him.
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A few thoughts on A Trick of the Tail
Follow the sound rather than the band. Analog days traces how the Moog escaped the laboratory and reached rock records, the equipment story sitting under every keyboard texture on a 1976 progressive album. Tony Visconti: The Autobiography covers the same decade from the other side of the studio glass, a producer's account of how British rock records got made in the seventies. Jazz-Rock maps the genre prog listeners tend to drift into next, players chasing the same length and complexity with a different rhythm section. For a film, Love & Mercy sits with a band in the studio and with the man leading it, good company for anyone drawn to the question of what a group does when its centre of gravity moves.
Genesis albums made after Peter Gabriel left
A Trick of the Tail was the first Genesis record with Phil Collins at the microphone, and the band kept the long suites and shifting time signatures instead of rebuilding around the new voice. Follow the same line forward and you hear the drummer grow into the frontman the charts knew a decade later.
Genesis records from the Peter Gabriel years
The 1976 album runs on material Genesis had been building since the Gabriel era, from the fairy-tale lyrics to the Mellotron washes behind the title track. These earlier records hold that vocabulary in its original form, and Gabriel's own 1977 debut shows both halves of the split working the same ideas in opposite directions.
Prog albums built to play end to end
Genesis sequenced A Trick of the Tail for listeners who sit with a whole side, with tracks past the eight-minute mark and a title song that takes its time getting anywhere. Other British prog and art rock albums from the same decade reward that patience, written as sides rather than as singles with padding around them.
Rock memoirs and biopics about bands that lost a frontman
A Trick of the Tail came out of a lineup crisis, and the story reads better from inside the band than from a review. Pink Floyd faced the same problem with Syd Barrett, the Stones and the Beatles ran their own versions of it, and these books and films put you in the room while it happened.