THE GEESE AND THE GHOST

Three years in the making, this first solo album by Anthony Phillips was made in close collaboration with Mike Rutherford, and features Phil Collins' vocals on a couple of tracks, and consequently is very much in keeping with Phillips' work in Genesis. Most particularly, all the features of the Trespass sound - the acoustic guitar focus, the medieval flourishes, and the occasional outbursts of more raucous and frightening noises amidst the otherwise peaceful musical landscape - are all present and correct.

Whilst at points it borders on being overly twee, by and large it's a more than acceptable return to the music world on the part of Phillips, ending a six-year drought and establishing him as a viable solo artist at a time when few prog acts aside from the established old hands were making any headway at all. Of course, the Genesis connection must have helped, but I suspect it wouldn't have been enough to save the album had it been a disappointment.

As it stands, it seems to have been successful enough to snag an ongoing solo career for Phillips whilst not quite being successful enough to avoid him second-guessing this approach on subsequent releases - witness how the poppier Wise After The Event came out in conjunction with the more similar Private Parts and Pieces. For my money, I think Geese neatly illustrates how Genesis was such a delicate balancing act of talents; on Trespass, Phillips musical ideas needed to make room for those of Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel, with even the Phillips & Rutherford penned pieces needing to include spaces for the other two to show their stuff, whereas here the show is more or less all Phillips all the time. Whilst his medieval introvert guitar act is distinctive and individual, I find it hard going without something else to add flavour - a something else Banks and Gabriel added on Trespass but which is absent here.