THE WAY WE WALK (DVD)

I have three live concert DVD's by Genesis: Live In London - filmed and recorded on the Duke tour in 1980, Live At Wembley Stadium - filmed and recorded on the tour in support of the Invisible Touch album in 1986 and this one - filmed and recorded in 1992 in support of We Can't Dance. Of these three DVD's, Live In London and this one are the two better ones. The set list on the Live In London DVD is very impressive, but the sound and picture quality is weak. This is not the case here, the sound and picture quality is great!

The purists who cannot listen to anything from the 80's will find very little of interest here, but for people like me who can appreciate at least some songs from the whole of Genesis long career will find much to enjoy here. This concert was also released as two separate CD's under the titles The Longs and The Shorts. Obviously, the songs featured on The Longs are the more progressive ones. However, I would not want to trade my DVD of the whole show for a CD with only the progressive songs - it is the whole of the concert that makes for the best experience. Partly because this was just what the audience saw that night and partly because the longer, more progressive, tracks sound better side by side with the shorter, more commercial, songs. Indeed, I like most of these songs!

For those purists I mentioned, the only thing of real interest here is the Old Medley, which is a 20 minute medley consisting of bits and pieces of older songs. Some of these songs are from the Peter Gabriel-era and I think that Phil sings those songs originally sung by Peter perfectly. The whole medley is indeed excellent and features bits of songs from the early 70's to the early 80's. The Firth Of Fifth- section contains that brilliant, classic guitar solo excellently played by Daryl Stuermer.

Straight after the medley comes the second best song of the whole set: Fading Lights. This song has a great instrumental break (the best they did at least since Duke) and it sounds even better live than it does on the studio album which indeed is true of almost all of the songs performed here. The sound is a bit less artificial and the songs have more of a rock edge when performed live. Driving The Last Spike, Dreaming While You Sleep, Home By The Sea and Domino are the other longer pieces performed. All of these are good and at least moderately progressive.

The shorter, more commercial songs include some good ones, some less good ones, and one or two quite awful ones. The best of these are Land Of Confusion and No Son Of Mine (the latter has a beautiful lyric!) and the worst are Invisible Touch and I Can't Dance. Annoyingly the concert is spread over two discs and most of the less good songs are on the second disc (that admittedly doesn't get played as often as disc one despite having some very good moments). The whole of disc one, on the other hand, (perhaps with the exception of Jesus He Knows Me) should be a very enjoyable viewing experience for any Prog fan.

I used to strongly dislike Jesus He Knows Me before, but after seeing Phil's introduction of the song it started growing on me. I never before reflected on the lyrics, I used to think that it was a religious song, but it is indeed a song critical of religion (or at least of commercialized religion). This song gets a nice guitar solo not present of the original version (often heard on the radio when I was very young).

In conclusion, I can say that this DVD is recommended for anyone with the slightest interest in 80's and 90's Genesis. Indeed, I get a lot more enjoyment out of this DVD than from any of the post-Duke studio albums and I think that this DVD might be a great place for a fan of earlier Genesis to start investigating later Genesis. From this perspective I am prepared to rate this with four stars.

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