Let’s revisit one of my favorite topics: when prog goes pop. In a way, it should inform today’s discussion on Anthony Phillips’ Invisible Men. You see, not so many moons ago I dedicated a mix to one Peter Bardens, ex-Camel and Caravan keyboardist who quietly created intriguing “prog”-minded pop music. It’s a sound that I love to dig through because it melds the hyper-technical chops of the, supposedly, pretentious art school boys with the (supposedly) brainless craft of pop music writing. I do so because I believe it actually creates the opposite effect. Pop music exposes the wonderful, thought-out processes required to make something intimate and immediate out of anyone — prog included.
Anthony Phillips’s career didn’t pop out of nowhere. Prog heads, most likely, know him as the original guitarist and member for Genesis. In Pre-Hackett era, it was his vocals that would back up whatever also rans, Moody Blues-esque longform rock they were meandering about before they wisened up and went on a Foxtrot.
Grippled with stage fright and unsure of the far more dramatic direction Genesis took, Chiswick’s own Mr. Phillips followed his own beat and returned back to school to study harmony and orchestration. For the vast majority of the ‘70s, Anthony would make a living as a teacher while leaving his music career on the back burner. It wouldn’t be until the late ‘70s, in punk’s heyday, when he even entertained rejoining the music industry.
Sadly a man out of time, each album Anthony released from 1977’s The Geese and Ghost through 1983’s Private Parts And Pieces III: Antiques spoke of an artist deeply in tune with quite emotional, ornate music, made in an era where wearing your heart on your sleeve probably didn’t mean writing classically-influenced prog opuses or starry-eyed proto-ambient folk music. Unsure with his own voice and talent, he couldn’t overcome certain stigmas as his friend Peter would to become that huge, sledgehammer guitar. Truth be told, you can imagine a record label trying to find a way to market a whole album of Spanish sarabandes.
There were always slight intriguing deviations, meant to appease the record label a bit, see: 1979’s Sides. However, Anthony (for a time there) found a very specific niche that vacillated from being enjoyed by a select few who appreciated his earlier prog roots or hated by those who were more intune with his sweeter, lower-key folk music. Then, like many of you are in tune with, comes the point where one’s own art has to succumb to that great editor called “making a living.”
For years Anthony had managed to fly under the radar within the roster of various record labels releasing music that earned him enough to scrape by. Then, sometime in the early ‘80s, his own livelihood came to ahead. Facing the precarious point where he might not earn enough to pay off his day-to-day living he had to do something: sell-out. Selling out might be putting it too harshly, but Anthony saw to it that he finally had to make music that could be played on the radio and earn him some stability, financially.
Enlisting the help of friends and collaborators Richard Scott and Joji Hirota, together, they decamped somewhere in England from April through September 1982 and hashed out what they thought would be their most immediate work yet. Anthony had taken a good deal of time to actually learn how to sing, hoping to come in prepared to hit a stunner out the park. One track, the opener, “Golden Bodies”, they overheard that someone way bigger (Sheena Easton) might want to cover. Aspirations heightened, they softly released it in America, through Passport Records, and saw it flatly go nowhere. Invisible Men, ironically, became a fitting title.
Influenced by the burgeoning New Romantic scene, America’s electro scene, and outre stuff fellow simpatico brothers-in-arms Godley & Creme were doing around the time, so too would Anthony create music that sounds a bit too learned for what the pop scene was used to. I find the music beyond fascinating and (specifically) far more impressive than what, I imagine, Anthony thinks of it.
Taking full advantage of a phalanx of electronic instruments, drum machines, sequencers, and Anthony’s decidedly English-tinged guitar playing, Invisible Men shows in songs like “The Women Were Watching” and “Love In A Hot Air Balloon” strains of that wonderfully playful Art Pop that was easier for him to fall back on than go full bore into rote pop-stylistics. Only someone like Anthony could try to create a “hit” from a song dealing with the Falkland Wars disaster.
As I hear Invisible Men, I hear traces of other acts like King Crimson, Camel, Caravan, Duncan Browne and [insert your own older men trying to make a living in a young man’s world] who released their own mature strain of pop-tinged music that remains criminally underrated. As for Anthony, he’d move on to create truly sublime New Age music but this remains a very startling brilliant leftfield turn absolutely begging the question: “What if he stayed the course?”
Much like them, now I’ve learned to fully appreciate songs like “Falling For Love” and “Guru” midtempo torch songs that show a maturity in skill and craft that (perhaps) much younger bands would whisk off because such experiments show too much earnestness…or worse: middle-of-the-road.
In the end it’s “the folly of youth and all that.” For me, I can appreciate that old fart music made by old farts takes time to fully reveal itself, but when it does, as it undoubtedly will, those who’ve acquired the taste can instantly appreciate the vintage funk of fine works like these.