A TRICK OF THE TAIL

"Peter who?" one might say! What we have here is four musicians at the top of their game producing one of the finest albums of all time. My favourite tracks are actually the quiet ones, i.e. Entangled, Mad Man Moon and Ripples, where the combination of 12 string guitars, piano and mellotron makes a quite heavenly sound. Dance On A Volcano is a superb opening track. The heavier Squonk, sitting between Entangled and Mad Man Moon, makes a great contrast with those two tracks. The closing instrumental Los Endos reprises Volcano and Squonk as well as the out-take It's Yourself. It has gone on to become a live classic. What's left? The title track is quite a jaunty little number written by Tony Banks. I'm sure I read somewhere that he'd written the basis of it many years earlier. It's pleasant enough even if not on a par with the rest of the material. Finally we have Robbery Assault And Battery, where Phil proves he can do a character based song like Peter, cf. Get 'Em Out By Friday and The Battle Of Epping Forest. This song comes in for a lot of criticism which is unfair. If you put it on any Genesis album from 1980 onwards, it would be one of the best tracks. It is a very good track, but the rest of the album is so strong that inevitably it gets overlooked sometimes, in spite of having a great keyboard solo. So at the end of the day, A Trick Of The Tail has to be awarded the full five stars.