Calling All Stations is the last Genesis album, and the only one without Phil Collins — a darker, moodier record fronted by the young Scottish singer Ray Wilson. Released in 1997, it was commercially and critically bruised, yet it contains some of the most ambitious music the band had made in years.

The short version

Calling All Stations (1997) is the fifteenth and final studio album by Genesis, made after Phil Collins left to concentrate on his solo career. Founder members Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford carried on, recruiting Ray Wilson, formerly of Stiltskin, as lead singer, with session drummers Nir Zidkyahu and Nick D’Virgilio filling the stool. Longer, gloomier and grittier than their 1980s pop, it entered the UK chart at number 2 before sales collapsed, and the band broke up soon afterwards.

And then there were two

Genesis had twice absorbed the loss of a defining member, when Peter Gabriel left in 1975 and Steve Hackett in 1977. When Phil Collins departed in 1996, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford saw no reason to stop: they had songs they liked, and they had done this before. They auditioned singers and settled on Ray Wilson, whose band Stiltskin had topped the UK chart a few years earlier, choosing him over David Longdon, later the frontman of Big Big Train. Wilson arrived once most of the writing was finished, though he earned co-writing credits on three tracks. With no drummer in the ranks, the pair brought in Nir Zidkyahu and, on some songs, Nick D’Virgilio of Spock’s Beard.

The sound

This is a sombre, weather-beaten Genesis. Ray Wilson’s husky baritone is a world away from Collins’s bright, familiar tenor, and it suits an album preoccupied with isolation and failures of communication — the title itself a signal sent into static. The pop instincts of Invisible Touch are set aside: four tracks run past seven minutes, Tony Banks’s keyboards dominate the textures, and Mike Rutherford turns in some of his best recorded guitar work, occasionally recalling Hackett. There are 1990s alternative-rock shadings too. It is not a return to their 1970s prog, but it is the closest they had come in years.

Reading up on British prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

The brooding title track opens with a defiance that colours the whole record, and ‘Congo,’ the first single, offers the album’s catchiest hook. ‘Shipwrecked’ and ‘Not About Us’ are the most conventional songs, while ‘Alien Afternoon’ — notable as the first Genesis studio track to feature two different drummers, one on each half — unfolds strangely and beautifully. Best of all is ‘The Dividing Line,’ a taut, menacing seven-minute piece with thunderous drumming that even sceptical listeners tend to praise. ‘One Man’s Fool’ closes the album, and the band’s recording career, on a suitably expansive note.

Reception and legacy

The album entered the UK chart at number 2, but sales fell away quickly, and in America it flopped badly. Reviews were often harsh: critics missed Collins’s melodic instincts, his humour and his inimitable groove, and questioned whether this was Genesis at all. The 1998 European tour went ahead, and Wilson won over many who saw him, but the American dates were cancelled and the band quietly dissolved afterwards, reconvening only as a touring act with Collins years later. Time has been a little kinder: defenders point to Rutherford’s guitar, Zidkyahu’s drumming and the album’s dark, unfashionable ambition.

The verdict

Calling All Stations is for the curious rather than the newcomer — start with A Trick of the Tail or Selling England by the Pound. But it is far from the disaster of legend, and it deserves a fairer hearing than it got. Approached as an album by Banks and Rutherford with a fine, unfamiliar singer, rather than as a Genesis record with something missing, it has real atmosphere and genuine ambition. Come for ‘The Dividing Line’ and ‘Alien Afternoon,’ and hear a great band bow out on their own terms, in shadow rather than sunshine.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →