ReGenesis
August 7th & September 18th
Whitchurch Prog festival, UK
De Pul, Uden, The Netherlands
By Mark Nickol and Ed Sander

Editorial note

The photos on this page are taken at the Robin 2 in Bilston on December 12th 1998. This was former singer Glyn Protheroe's farewell gig. The pictures I took during that gig were too good never to publish, so therefore I have pasted them into these reviews. The show's still the same, it's just a different guy.
Enjoy, Bart.

Whitchurch Prog Festival
By Mark Nickol

The Whitchurch festival is a 3-days event in the small town of Whitchurch in the south of England. The Friday and Saturday gigs normally involve prog bands, while the Sunday is filled with blues music. This year's Friday headliners were 'Regenesis'.

This was my first chance to hear the new lead singer, who sounds, probably even more like Peter Gabriel than Glynn Protheroe (their last lead singer), although he is not as smiley as Glynn. A very impressive performance, though, and he coped with the theatrics well as well. On the Sunday, I was discussing with a friend, however, that maybe they should be varying their set a bit more. I have seen them probably more than 10 times now, and every time they have started with Watcher.. and finished with The Knife. Can we have a bit more variety, please ? Having said that, it was great to hear The Battle of Epping Forest.

ReGenesis at "De Pul"
By Ed Sander

It was only one and a half month after seeing the band perform in Whitchurch when I saw them again in my hometown (Uden). The setlist was almost the same as in Whitchurch, although In The Cage had been replaced by The Lamia and seemingly Return of the Giant Hogweed had been swapped with Firth of Fifth at the last moment (it was still present in that day's written setlist).

After a rather long intro tape, Watchers ... opened the show, with bat-wings and all. Immediately it became clear that this was one of those deafening Pul nights. That venue's sound engineer must have a real problem with his ears, or wanted to give the rest of the audience one. Although not as painfully loud as some other recent gigs, the volume was once again above comfortable level.

As mentioned, Hogweed was deleted from the set, something which made me quite happy because personally I think the track is a load of bullocks (heresy #1 !). The replacement, Firth of Fifth was not played without the occassional bum note from the keyboard player (wearing an Eric 'I'm not fat, I'm bog boned' Cartman South Park shirt) but was nevertheless a lot more enjoyable than the botanical tune.

When the new vocalist, who indeed sounds more like Gabriel than Gabriel himself, introduced the next song with a story about old Henry, he mentioned that Henry must have been at least as old as the 147-years-old guitarist had his birthday that day. As you can imagine, The Musical Box followed. A fine version with perfect theatrics and old man's mask in the closing section.

As in Whitchurch, the band proceeded with the full version of The Battle of Epping Forest. A nice tune but in my opinion it drags a bit too long and should have been half its length (heresy #2 !). Nice to see once, but there's better Genesis tunes to choose from.
I was slightly disappointed by the fact that The Lamia (not one of my favourite Lamb songs) had replaced In the Cage, although it was indeed fascinating to see this song live on stage.

Supper's Ready will always be the highlight of the set for me. It must be one of my favourite songs ever and the performance was brilliant again ! Any ReGenesis gig is well worth the money if they play this, if only for the Flower costume. I had just spend 5 days in Norway and singing 'Now I'm back again, and babe it's going to work out fine', to my wife gave me chills all over my back.

Set closer was Cinema Show followed by the drum solo and Los Endos which included an interesting inclusion of some lyrics from Supper's Ready.

The band returned for Fountain .., a track which has never been able to get me extremely excited (heresy #3 !) and The Knife. I've now seen ReGenesis three times, including last years performance in Southampton and like Mark I would have preferred a more surprising encore for a change.

Anyway, another splendid night with a great band. The only thing which I would like to see ReGenesis do for a change is improvise a bit with some of the songs instead of playing all the songs note-for-note as the originals. On the other hand, most people would probably prefer to see them play the originals as they are .....

(All photos © Bart Jan van der Vorst)

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