Esta pregunta y su respuesta me parecen fundamentales:
RA: In another interview, you referred to Genesis as “a very competitive band, very gifted— but with those gifts, there’s a certain price.” Did that statement relate to your earlier comment about the editorial nature of the band in the realm of songwriting?
SH: Well, I think that you couldn’t always get cooperation from Genesis. I think that there was a tremendous amount of power play going on, which eventually led to the loss of Anthony Phillips, Peter Gabriel, and then eventually Phil Collins. It’s because whatever it is, whatever drives people to make great music, and spurs people to excellence, there can be a down side of all that; that’s what I was trying to say, although that remark was quoted out of context. The side of it is that sometimes you have to work with very difficult people and just because you’ve come up with a great idea, or someone else has, it doesn’t mean to say it’s going to get done. I would watch gems being thrown into the pot with other people, and then we would end up not recording that stuff, and it used to drive me up the wall, I used to think that there was an agenda at work here. At the end of the day, when we had a meal, many years after the event, maybe three or four years back, I remember Tony Banks … 20 of us sitting around, people who had been involved with the band over the years, and he raised his glass and said, “Oh well, we managed to sack the lot of you.” So that was the agenda all along! And, I think, well, yeah, but if you did that, then what about a guy like Peter Gabriel, who managed to come up with stuff that was not just influential musically but was a humanitarian and managed to move mountains, managed to get behind WOMAD to bring the rest of the world into the picture, and now we think of the mainstream encompassing bands from all over the globe. So, I think, my God, what a terrible loss. I tried, at the time, to convince Pete to stay with the band, but he knew that his best ideas were going to get blocked, and he was not allowed to have a parallel solo career. Tony and Mike would not (tolerate) that, and they wouldn’t (tolerate) it with me either. One of the things that is not in the documentary that we both said to camera is the reasons why we left, quite apart from what Mike Rutherford says later on, “we always encouraged solo careers”, well, that’s not true! They stood in Pete’s way, they stood in my way. At the end of the day, for Pete and I, our allegiance was to music, and not to what many people might think of as the world’s best band. You could justify that, certainly. Tons of talent, but not enough heart.
