The founding line-up of Genesis consisted of guitarist Anthony Phillips, bassist Mike Rutherford, lead vocalist Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, and drummer Chris Stewart, all pupils of Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey. The five had played in the school's two active bands; Rutherford and Phillips were in Anon while Gabriel, Banks, and Stewart made up Garden Wall. During the Christmas holidays of 1966, after both groups had split, Phillips and Rutherford wrote some songs together at Rutherford's grandmother's house and asked Banks to play piano on a demo they were planning to record, and Banks agreed under the condition that they also record a song he and Gabriel had written, 'She Is Beautiful'. During the Easter school holiday they entered a primitive recording studio run by Brian Roberts in Chiswick to record the material, and they assembled a tape of six songs originally intended for someone else to perform, as the group saw themselves foremost as a collection of songwriters. Banks described the material as "straight pop music" as it was the direction the band wanted to explore, and at this point they had renamed themselves The New Anon. The group sent the demo tape to two people, one being BBC radio presenter David Jacobs, and the other was sent to former Charterhouse pupil Jonathan King, who had scored commercial success as a singer-songwriter and producer with his UK top five single 'Everyone's Gone To The Moon' in 1965, and therefore seemed a natural choice. Following a visit to the school during Old Boys Day, where the group had a friend give the tape to him, he listened to it in his car on his drive home and, despite its roughness, was immediately enthusiastic, particularly about Gabriel's vocals.
King offered his support to the band and paid them £40 to record four songs, but he pressed for more simple arrangements, and suggested that the group avoid playing electric instruments, as acoustic instruments were cheaper, rather than his personal taste. These early sessions took place between August and December 1967 at Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street, London, with the intent on releasing them as singles, and King was happy with the results enough to sign them, offering a ten-year deal with his publishing company JonJo Music, and a five-year recording deal with Decca Records. However, the group's parents expressed concern as they were aged between 15 and 17 at the time and preferred their children to pursue careers away from music. Upon their intervention, family solicitors took charge and arranged for a new, one-year deal with an optional second. King noticed the band's tendency to expand and complicate their arrangements, which he disliked and suggested they stick to straightforward pop songs, and so he either trimmed Banks's solo spots or removed them entirely, much to his annoyance. Gabriel and Banks wrote 'The Silent Sun' as a pastiche of the Bee Gees, one of King's favourite bands, and it was recorded at Regent Sound studio A in December 1967, with a section arranged and conducted by Arthur Greenslade added later in production. It was released on 2 February 1968 with 'That's Me' on the b-side as the first Genesis single, after King came up with the group's name, thinking it marked the beginning of a "new sound and a new feeling".
In May 1968, the second single, 'A Winter's Tale' backed with 'One-Eyed Hound', was released and, like their first, it flopped. Stewart then left the group to continue with his studies, but despite their lack of success King continued to support the group and, by mid-1968, suggested that a studio album might reverse their fortunes. They were a little overwhelmed with the longer available time of an LP, so King suggested the idea of a loose concept album that told a story about the Book of Genesis at the start and the Book of Revelation at the end, with linked instrumental tracks. The idea worked, and the group began to write at a faster pace, composing more than enough material to return to Regent Sound studio 2 in August 1968 to record 'From Genesis To Revelation'. With he addition of new drummer John Silver, the music was recorded in three days, and the album was put together in ten. King was the producer, and once the songs were recorded, Greenslade and Lou Warburton then added more string and horn arrangements to one stereo channel, while mixing the band's performance on the other. This was done without the band's knowledge, which they thought compromised the strength of the songs, and Phillips was particularly angered at the decision, expressing his feelings towards it by stomping out of the studio on the last day. His main issue was that due to the limitations of recording technology of the time, adding orchestration meant that everything else on the recording had to be reduced to mono.
The album was released in March 1969 and failed to chart, and even the release of 'Where The Sour Turns To Sweet' as a single failed to stimulate new interest. Prior to its release, Decca discovered that an American act had also called themselves Genesis and asked the band to change its name to avoid confusion, but King reached a compromise so the band's name would be omitted from the sleeve, leaving the album's title written in gold text in a Gothic style, in order to evoke mystery when presented in music shops. However, this reputedly back-fired when some shops filed the album in their religious music sections, since the title 'From Genesis To Revelation' was the only descriptive text on the album. The album only sold 649 copies, and so original copies are now extremely rare, and when it failed to become a success, the group decided to split and resume education. This marked the end of their association with King, who had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the band directing their material away from mainstream pop, and in September 1969, Gabriel, Banks, Rutherford, and Phillips decided to make Genesis a full-time band and write on their own musical terms. As this is yet another case of additional instrumentation being added to an album against the band's wishes, then fans have often wondered what it would have sounded like had they been left to their own devices, and so here is 'From Genesis To Revelation' as played just by Genesis, with piano and organ boosted to replace the orchestration. To distinguish this version from the original I've used the cover from the vinyl edition that was issued in New Zealand in 1969.
Track listing
01 Where The Sour Turns To Sweet
02 In The Beginning
03 Fireside Song
04 The Serpent
05 Am I Very Wrong
06 In The Wilderness
07 The Conqueror
08 In Hiding
09 One Day
10 Window
11 In Limbo
12 Silent Sun
13 A Place To Call My Own
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