Our Question Time with Richard Macphail at the Early Years Event 2005 brought much positive feedback, so we decided to put Armando Gallo in the hot chair, too. He accompanied the band in a way different from Richard, and much longer, too. and it turned out he has lots to tell.
Armando first presented a slideshow of many photos that had never been published before, commenting them and pointing out special things. After that he sat down to answer questions from the audience...
question: How and when did you get in touch with Genesis?
Armando: I was living in London, working as a foreign correspondent for an Italian magazine. Sometime in October 1970 I got a call from the editor-in-chief of the magazine Chart 2001 and he gave me the proposal I was waiting for. He said: “Can you write me a weekly column and two articles a week. Can you guarantee me that?” I was jumping with joy because I could finally leave my work as an architectural designer and go full-time journalist. He told me: “I don’t wanna hear any more about The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, I want you to write about new bands. I give you carte blanche to write about new bands. So, I loved Van Der Graaf Generator and I went to see them on my birthday on January 19, 1971 with a bunch of friends at the Lyceum. There I saw Genesis because they were opening for them. I didn’t like Trespass that much. I was into heavier stuff, probably, King Crimson and so on. But when I saw them, especially when Peter Gabriel went fou and nearly jumped into the crowd during The Knife I really fell in love with the band in the way that there was something there to talk about. It was one of the bands I needed to write about for the magazine. But I didn’t want to meet them! There was so much going on on the stage – when there’s something that you like so much you are afraid that if you interview them you’re going to be disappointed. The first time I met them was a year later when they were going on tour in Italy and I wanted to do an interview with them to be published a week before the tour. That was the time I shot the pictures, in March 1972. Long-winded answer.
question: One of the first pictures you showed us was taken in a basketball hall in Italy. I have seen this picture before on a bootleg called Live In Pavia. Is that the right place?
Armando: Those images you saw were Reggio Emilia. Pavia was another town. Those pictures were published in 2001 so they probably picked them up from the magazine …
question: Stolen.
Armando: Yeah… that’s what they do with bootlegs. [laughs]
question:: It seems you are quite close with individual members or ex-members of Genesis. Do you always work that way, getting in touch with them, getting closer to the people you photograph? Did you try to get in touch with the people you photograph?
question: No… that’s so many people – you cannot really know them on a personal level. Sometimes when you know people on a personal level you stop working. There are a couple of major Italian rock stars like Zucchero and Vasco Rossi that I became very good friends with and I stopped writing articles about them. Once they start telling you personal things, where do you make the cut? For instance, this morning I called Carol Willis about the band getting together and she said: Yes, there’s going to be this press conference, but I can’t tell you any more because it’s going to be hard for you not to tell … uhm… you guys [gestures towards the audience].
question:: When you showed us your slides you said that you lost interest in Genesis in 1984, so you missed them in the 80s and came back before the We Can’t Dance tour. What was the reason you lost interest in them in the 80s?
Armando: Maybe … you know when you eat a lot of chocolate you can’t touch it anymore? I researched for the book, I wrote the book, I promoted the book, I went on tour with the band. At one point I thought I had enough. I was also doing other things. When I wrote the Genesis book I kind of moved out of rock 'n roll. I moved to Los Angeles to be Hollywood correspondent for a top Italian magazine. I was doing movie stars and television people. I wrote the Genesis book – we could talk forever about it, for many reasons – it was a way for me to write about the 60s and the 70s in London without talking about myself but talking about this band that came from the 60s into the 70s. Those five years from 1970 to 1975, there was something that not many people knew. Peter Gabriel left the band and couldn’t get a publishing deal because they thought he couldn’t write songs. I thought: I have to write this book because otherwise people may never find out. I was very close as a journalist to them. I was going to write a book for Italy and I ended up writing it in English. I was already doing other things, my interest was in film and television so that’s why I stepped out.
question:: How did the band perceive you? Did they look upon you as a fan, a biographer, a journalist?
Armando: First it was a journalist’s position, then it was an Italian that reminded them of the good times they’d had in Italy. Then it was a journalist, a photographer. I was the kind of very faithful journalist… you know, the problem with Genesis was that they were very insecure young men, I thought, and you wanted to help them out because they had something very very special. I remember I’d go and see them and write something in my weekly column for the magazine. Charisma Records thought I was Glen Colson. Glen Colson was the press officer of Charisma Records and he called me a +“bleeding night eye”+ because I was so crazy about Genesis and he could not understand why because Lindisfarne was number one. I really loved the band – if you listen to The Musical Box – just one song! – it embraces classical music, opera, everything. People born in Italy can identify with the song. There was this link there that linked up Genesis with Italy. I suggested them to their first promoter in Italy. He was looking for bands so I suggested them. He would pay them 100 pounds per gig whereas in England they would get maybe 40, 50 pounds a gig. But at least in Italy they could play nine gigs in five days. So there was a kind of mutual affection. I was the guy who’d get on a plane and see them in California. They were grateful for that. Not many people do that for a band that never sold many records. So probably a friendship developed. But there was always the reporter, the journalist, the photographer. It was a working friendship. We never went on holidays together, you know.
question: Looking back from today, your pictures seem to be the main chronicle of the visual aspect of what Genesis did on stage. Were you aware at that time or at an early point that you were doing such a work to somehow preserve this for posterity or was it just something that turned out many years later?
Armando: The second thing. I was doing between ten and fifteen articles a month, a world full of stories. I covered a lot of bands. My day was so full that I used to shoot pictures during the interview, at the concert. Then I’d look at the role of film, cut out the best pictures, put them in an envelope with my article and send them to the magazine. I never asked to get those pictures back because I never thought in 1970 that in 2006 I would be in Germany talking about Genesis. It was something for the evening after designing car parks during the day. So I sent the best pictures out. When I put the book together I thought that the Italian magazine kept all those pictures. They didn’t. Someone stole them. They disappeared. The fox – there was only one picture I could recover. The best pictures not just for Genesis but for Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson, Lake & Palmer… You know I’d like to write a book called Don’t Let The Originals Go. At the time I didn’t have the time nor the money to do dupes of the best pictures. I was very happy to be published, I got money for it. So the photos you have seen of Genesis just now are leftovers. Of course I never thought they would be legendary. I was the guy who would follow them around and see a gig once a month and see their progression. They were growing. Everytime I would see them they would be better and better. They were always very satisfied, so … I’ll shut up. [laughter] This was before digital cameras. Now, with digital cameras, you keep everything.
question: The band were very surprised about their success they had in Italy in the 1970s. Could you outline some reasons?
Armando: They didn’t know. They were booked to tour Italy in February. There was the guy who used to review albums and there was me. We really liked Genesis. 2001, the magazine was the only voice for young people. We didn’t have radio. Rock music wasn’t played on the radio in those days. People would pick up 2001 every week, it was the bible of rock n’rollers. An article in 2001 would get the crowd to go and see the band. They probably believed what I wrote, they gave me trust because I used to tell to the truth and I still try to do it. I never wrote something bad about a band. If I didn’t like a band I ignored it. When you are a correspondent you want to write about things that turn you on. I would get criticised for it: You always write good things about people. But that particular interview was probably presented so well that the album started selling. By the time they got to Italy in April ’72 they were at number … who knows it? It’s in the book! They were at #2, I think. Nursery Cryme was #4. They were in the charts. So when they came to Italy they found mass acceptance. Of course they were surprised. The best thing was, what with the Italians being so musical, they applauded at the right moments. That gave them encourament. Go to America and people go yeeeeaaahh in the middle of a moment where you should be quiet… They wrote Watcher Of The Skies and Supper’s Ready as well on their very first Italian tour. That gave them encouragement. They realised that they were doing something right. That pushed them. I quoted Mike in the book: “Armando saved us somehow.” It is in the book, you should read it. But he said that, I got it on tape and I said: Great, I’ll use it in the book. “Italy saved us.” Or Armando? Italy saved us.
question: You got to know the band when they were more or less unknown and you were also there when they had become successful superstars. Did their characters change through that?
Armando: Not that much. They grew up as men, you know. When you become famous and reach stuff, you get to know a different strata of people. They became friends of Prince Charles, for example. For some people it is very difficult not to change but they haven’t changed much. Phil Collins has become a superstar. I used to go and see him in a pub, now I got to go and see him in a fancy expensive hotel in Hollywood. But still is the same, still loves food and talks about the old days. So, did they become assholes? No. They’re still the same old guys.
question:: Was it more difficult to get closes to the band in later years versus the Trespass years?
Armando: No, because in later years they’d call me. They called me for the We Can’t Dance tour. Before I used to go and bother them, so it was “Oh, Armando is here again, there you go”…
question: If you accompany a band on their way for such a long time, isn’t is difficult for a journalist to stay neutral and professional?
Armando: I didn’t go to the We Can’t Dance tour as a journalist. I got hired by the band as a photographer. I … [pauses] didn’t write anything about Genesis in the 80s. I wrote an article about them when they came back without Phil Collins with Ray, I went to Malta to do an interview and shoot the video of Congo and I wrote a story about that for the top weekly magazine in Italy. You have to understand that I work in Los Angeles very very heavily in movies. I cover every movie that comes out of Hollywood. This week’s article was Doctor House, last weeks was Leonardo di Caprio, next week’s is Brad Pitt. It’s a different area from music.
question: A question I’ve been wanting to ask for twenty-five years. Why does the first book have a picture of a man’s feet on the front?
Armando: [crosses himself] That’s the beginning of a very long story… When I went to California in ’75 – if I thought Genesis were a legend in Italy, in California they were a myth. We are on the other side of the world and there are people there who really love this very British band and they’d meet somebody who knows the band and they kept pumping me: “Why don’t you write a book?” At the same time Peter Gabriel comes to Los Angeles looking for a publishing deal. He tells me nobody gives him any credibility because the band went on to do Trick Of The Tail, they sold a lot. Maybe the publishers thought that maybe Peter Gabriel wasn’t that important in Genesis. Right there and then I thought, I must write this book to give justice to what happened. So until Christmas 1976 I spent eighteen months in California. I wanted to spend as much time as I could to come back to Europe and get a culture shock. I wanted to be not just the Italian, but the American wondering about Genesis and writing about them. So I went to the band and asked if they wanted to sit down with me and do a bunch of interviews for a book. I started straightaway with Tony Banks, three hours on tape. Then it was Christmas and New Year’s Eve, they played the Rainbow and they were going on tour in England. When a band goes on tour they can never sleep at night, so that’s a good moment to do interviews.
Plus we were doing interviews with a book in mind, so they were telling me more things. A couple of months later a publisher in England approached Genesis about writing a book. They said “Hey, there’s this journalist already writing a book.” So I got a deal with this English publisher. The book was delivered – and I find these two feet on the cover. I went berserk, you know? It was the only picture that wasn’t mine. But at the same time I thought: How many bands have I interviewed where I loved the album and they said “well, we didn’t have anything to do with the cover, we couldn’t do anything about the mixing, it was our first album”. So everybody loved the book, but I wanted to do the book in a different way for America so I went on later to do I Know What I Like which was like I pictured the book in the first place. With the band in all its glory live on the stage on the cover and not those effing feet.
question: Did they explain to you why the feet were there?
Armando: Reportedly it was a photograph of the friend of the publisher, and they thought it was kind of biblical. These feet are chasing me! They’re over there, too [points at the poster for the fanclub meeting]! The first time you do a book or an album you don’t know … so if you want to keep it under control, keep it small, do it yourself.
question: When you showed us your photos you said that the band seemed a bit tired during the 1992 tour and less enthusiastic than on previous tours.
Armando: I thought that there was a lot of power, you know, talking about lights, scaffolding, limos, but the actual feeling on stage … they were very professional, but there wasn’t the feeling you have when you are young and you’re trying to prove yourself and you know that you’re not yet a great musician but you’re learning. I felt that difference. They probably called me up to shoot the concert because they played the same places like Newcastle Free Trade Hall and the Edinburgh Apollo (is there an Edinburgh Apollo?). They played 1,000-seaters that they played in 1972 and 1973. Probably they wanted to recapture even in photographs that they went full circle. But the feeling Genesis had on stage in those magical five years – it was incredible, these were kids between 20 and 25 putting their heart on stage. In 1992 they were very professional. Same as with soccer players.
question: What do you expect from the tour the band are going to announce for next year?
Armando: A couple of free tickets… I’d better watch out. These are cheeks questions, man [laughs].
question: Do you expect them to have a different feel than 1992?
Armando: I don’t know. Would be nice to see them back on stage again… I would like to see Peter Gabriel playing Rael. But I expect nothing so I’ll enjoy whatever happens.
question: What do you think about the reunion with Peter Gabriel that was Steve Hackett’s idea? You know their characters better than any of us.
Armando: I don’t think it will ever happen. If it was going to happen it was going to happen now. I said as a joke I would like to see Peter Gabriel playing Rael, but can he play it? It happened. It happened thirty years ago. Can Pete Townsend still sing “I want to die before I get old”?
question: When did you interview Genesis for the book?
Armando: The interviews for the book took place from December 1976 to July 1977.
question: How did the band describe their early days from From Genesis To Revelation and Trespass? Was it something they were embarrassed about or didn’t want to talk about…?
Armando: Oh, they were really willing to talk. They were very open. They were so open that I really wanted to find out why they through out this guy [laughs, points at John Mayhew]. It would have been really nice to get John Mayhew at the time but we couldn’t find him.
question: Well, here he is.
Armando: I know. I met him today, can you believe that? They were very open. In a way they were challenging me. Tony Banks in particular was challenging me to write a book. He’d introduce me: “This is Armando. He thinks he’s writing a book about us.” But then he was very good in the interviews. He was the one who went into the details of the early days more than anybody else, Tony Banks.
question: Did you ever consider writing an update for your book, like “this is Genesis until now”?
Armando: Not really. My interest went to other bands. I did a lot of work in the 80s with U2 and INXS. They were the bands I really liked at the time. I didn’t really follow U2 too much. I saw them at Dodgers’ Stadium, probably 1989/90. I went to see Genesis in 1984. But I didn’t like the live album with the white cover [Three Sides Live]. When you’re busy with other things you can’t cover everything. There’s only 24 hours in a day, and I was doing so many other things. – I was busy touring with Peter Gabriel, that’s my answer. I was probably more interested in what Peter was doing as he was trying again to be successful. I am interested in bands before they make it big. That’s the best time when the band or the artist is trying to prove himself. When you are amongst friends and you meet a new band it’s like the biggest-kept secret. When everybody else likes it I’m not interested anymore because everybody else likes it. I find it interesting as a writer, as a journalist and as a photographer, to discover new bands. After ZooTV I wasn’t interested in the band anymore, but they were fantastic in the 80s in the Joshua Tree period. I get bored if everybody else loves someone.
question: Might there be an update for the Peter Gabriel book? And also, you wrote a book about Genesis and about Peter Gabriel. What about the other members of the band?
Armando: I would like to write a book about myself. The Peter Gabriel book I’d like to update. I did a book with him. It’s not a biography, that’s what I write in the first page: “This is not a biography”. It was like an intimate meeting with Peter. In fact, over a span of three years we met in various situations where we could sit down and do interviews only for that book because it was mainly to express what Peter Gabriel felt as an artist during the period. In the 90s I was hired to shoot the US tour, and I proposed to update that book to RealWorld. I’m still waiting for it to be decided. It would be nice to add another hundred pages or so. But to do a book you always need the collaboration of the artist. If that does not happen, it’s impossible to do, a waste of time.
[during the translation Christian jokes about RealWorld’s slowness in making decisions. Armando sighs:] “The turtle movement”. That was Peter Gabriel’s definition.
question: Were you involved with Peter’s UP project artistically or as a photographer… ?
Armando: Oops. When I mentioned the US tour before I meant UP. The tour with the big ball, right?
question: Yes. Were you involved in the whole project or just the tour?
Armando: No. How can I be involved in the project? I was talking to Tony Levin on the basis that four years ago he was still waiting for the album to come out. I was excited when he finally went on tour. He was going on tour in November but I was excited when I found out he was playing some gigs before in Mexico City. I flew to Mexico City to surprise him: “Hey, I’m here.” I really wanted to see what he was doing. I was looking forward to seeing an artist like that. So I saw the show in a theatre without a camera, and I was kicking myself for that. The following day I shot the show and I sent the pictures to RealWorld. They asked me to shoot Madison Square Garden. I thought these live shows were amazing. They were one the best live shows I’ve seen. I couldn’t walk. I don’t know how Peter did it, I was only taking pictures. The guy’s amazing. Probably he would get more energy when he hangs himself upside down. I was totally knocked out by the tour. The choice of songs on the album was very difficult. It’s a very sad album in a way, very difficult to digest. You need to be in a good frame of mind to put on that album to really enjoy it. But there’s a lot of stuff in the Growing Up tour. Growing Up is probably the same thing I have previously said about The Musical Box: There’s so much in one song that many other artists would divide Growing Up into three or four different songs. But that’s what happens when you stay with a song for such a long time. I wish he could lay down the songs, do an album and get it out. But … turtle movement.
question: [conjectured – not on tape] What are you doing these days and are you still in contact with Genesis?
Armando: … I am a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press, the association that votes for the Golden Globe. So when Phil Collins did the music for Tarzan and Brother Bear he met us. He did a press conference with us. He got a Golden Globe, in fact. And Peter met us during the UP tour because he had a soundtrack for Rabbit-Proof Fence.
question: Do you find it easier to shoot shows with little visual effects – perhaps like the Foxtrot shows which had a very simple live setup – or something that is rich in visuals or the total visual overkill like The Lamb tour?
Armando: The answer is very simple: When there is very little light nobody can shoot. Or you shoot with flashlight which kills the atmosphere. I probably was the only one shooting, because the only pictures were mine! So I would shoot with my elbows against my body so I could rest the camera. You shoot with an eighth of a second or a fifteenth of a second. I used to shoot film with 160 tungsten and push it two stops in the developing so it gets kind of bleached out. The photos you know of the Old Man and the batwings … the Lamia was shot with a fifteenth of a second. You have to stand very still. But I used to love that challenge – I was the only one to come up with pictures. I love the atmosphere, I love just a little light. When there is too much light – as I said in the We Can’t Dance tour there was so much light you just shoot, it’s no fun. Probably that’s why I didn’t like it so much; I preferred the early days.
question: You have seen so many shows over the years. Is there a favourite Genesis show or tour?
Armando: Uhmm…. I like the Selling England By The Pound album and live show, really. It was an improvement but it wasn’t overkill. It was very poetic, I thought. The white clothes, the little projection… and the album was probably the very first album that, production-wise, was really clean. So that was probably my favourite period.
question: Were you involved with the slides that were used for the Lamb tour?
Armando: No, I had nothing to do with that.
question: Is it true that you sold all your pictures to Hit’n’Run? What is the legal status of the images?
Armando: I sold them mostly because there was a plan to do a DVD with the boxset.. can’t remember when it came out, but it was a box set with three CDs [Archive 1976-1992]. So I sent the pictures to them to use them on the DVD. I sent a bunch of duplicates so that they could tell me which ones they wanted. These are the pictures I showed you today. Hit‘n’Run digitized the dupes. – But this general idea that I have thousands of pictures of Genesis: I don’t. These were all. I have more pictures of U2, Zucchero, Vasco Rossi, even INXS. With Genesis, I used to shoot pictures to go with my articles. As I said before, the best ones went with my articles, the rest was left over with me. I never did huge photo sessions. They never posed for me in a studio or anything like that. So probably I was in the right place in the right time with the right people. When that happened, I was lucky.
question: So what we have seen is a selection of what is left over?
Armando: That would be another book, wouldn’t it? What’s the point of keeping them in my archives? From One Fan To Another was a great idea by this English publisher. He saw the pictures on the lightbox. Those were the pictures that were left out from the book, and he said: “You must have some other pictures.” There were maybe 300 or 400 pictures left and those pictures went into the making of From One Fan To Another. So there will be no volume 2.
question: Did you see the Ovo show at the Millennium Dome?
Armando: No, sorry. I didn’t. I was in Naples on that New Year’s Eve.
question: Well, the show ran for a full year…
Armando: I didn’t know it did. Badly publicized, that, especially for people in America.
question: . and it was never filmed professionally.
Armando: Well, look at The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. They did it a hundred times, and the management never filmed it! They knew! They knew that Peter was leaving the band, they might as well film it.
question: There was a Canadian boxset with The Lamb, I think, and your book included in that boxset. How did that happen?
Armando: Lovely question! That was an idea I proposed to Charisma. Charisma celebrated ten years or ten albums of Genesis. As you noticed the book has the same height of a CD, so I proposed: Why don’t you do a boxset with all the CDs of Genesis, my book on top and two cassettes or singles … The answer was: You want to use Genesis to sell your book! I told the same story to Greg Nolte who was working for +Records On Wheels+. He was selling records and he recognized the place to sell the book would be in a record store where Genesis fans were going. So we did the box set that Charisma didn’t do. This Canadian distributed the box set and it sold 3,000 copies – that’s 3,000 times ten Genesis albums, too. Strange things happen in life – the record company didn’t do it, but the distributor did it. – Greg Nolte is now president or vice president of marketing at EMI. Charisma doesn’t exist anymore.
question: Charisma was bought by Virgin, Virgin was bought by EMI.
Armando: Exactly!
question: Do you have a favourite picture of Genesis?
Armando: Probably the Seconds Out pictures. I got a call to come from Tony Smith. He said: “We’re playing Paris, five nights. We’re going to do a live album. Why don’t you come over? We need pictures for the live album.” That week I saw one of the very first screenings of Star Wars. I was totally knocked out when I was part of that secret: this great movie nobody had seen. I went around and would tell people: “Hey, may the force be with you!” [laughs] Peter Gabriel asked: Is it a new band? And when I saw the show with the landing lights – to me it was a spacecraft. I was so stunned by the visuals of Star Wars, it looked like a spacecraft from the side. I shot it in Paris, and it was a very difficult show. There were all these strong lights and the smoke. Sometimes the smoke works, sometimes it didn’t. I shot it with tungsten film. I shot the same moment in Holland with daylight Kodak 400 daylight which made the cover of I Know What I Like. Much warmer colours. I loved it. When the band saw that they went straight for the cover. And it became Best Album Cover from Melody Maker. I never got the award; Genesis got it.
[At this point Armando gives away a copy of his book to the person who comes the farthest away]
Armando: Tell you what, I’ll be kinder when I do interviews. It’s tough sitting here answering questions!
question: Why did you move to England and later to the U.S.?
Armando: The Beatles. I finished my national service and went to London with a one-way ticket. London was just an amazing place in those years… the miniskirts &c. … I worked as an architectural designer and I was into music and wrote about that. The editors of Drop magazine in the U.S. saw it and asked for my collaboration. I wrote an article about an Italian pop singer who was in the charts in England. She was at #19 so she was going to do Top Of The Pops. I contacted the publisher, we did an interview and it was published as a two-page piece, and I got a letter saying “where shall we send the money? To your address in Rome or London?” It was fantastic, really great feeling. With that article I went straightaway to Manchester Square to EMI to Roger Watson who invited me to every concert of the EMI magazine. Apparently I was the only Italian journalist they knew. It was ’67 and The Beatles were coming out with a new album, which was Sgt. Pepper. One of the people called me and said “can you cover that?” I said yes and they took me to the listening party of Sgt Pepper. That was my third article. The rest is history.
question: How did you get to the United States, then?
Armando: I got to the United States …. For the first time I went there for Alice Cooper and Genesis in April ’73 in New York and Detroit. I wasn’t really impressed that much. Then there was an Italian band called PFM, they were extremely good. They were doing very well in America and I was doing their PR in London. Manticore asked me to go on tour with them as a press officer. It was the time before MTV got started so the promotion was done through concerts and through radio stations, so everywhere we went there were radio stations to do and press to do. We were there for November and December 1974. We left Chicago in the middle of December in the snow storm and arrived in Los Angeles in wonderful weather with a beautiful sky. Just landing in Los Angeles was a great feeling. I decided there and then to try and find a nice place. I started doing some articles on movie stars. I went to the set of James Bond when Roger Moore became James Bond and got it published with a top Italian magazine. They didn’t have anybody in Los Angeles. By April 1975 I had packed the bags, actually the tea chests, and moved to Los Angeles in April 1975. It was great – Pink Floyd were playing there!
question: Armando, thanks for taking the time and coming here. Thank you!
moderator of Question Time and on-stage translator: Christian Gerhardts
transcription: Martin Klinkhardt
photos by Sabine Zindler
Steve Hacketts Studio-Album from 2006 as a Special Edition.
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