Regenesis, September 11th, 1998
The Brook, Southampton, UK
By Ed Sander

When I was in the UK for work I was invited by IQ's Martin Orford to join him for a gig of the Genesis cover band Regenesis. I had heard quite some good things about them, so I decided to take the offer and check them out. I also got a chance to meet DPRP UK-gig maintainer, Sphere keyboard player and former IAPH list owner Neil Durant.

The Brook turned out to be a small venue with a ground floor area as well as a balcony around the stage. The stage itself was rather small, so when the band came on they were a bit cramped. This probably also resulted in less movements on stage by the singer.

The show was really fun to watch and fortunately the band did not take the whole thing to serious and did some silly stuff and joking around between the songs. Some cover/tribute bands tend to take themselves too seriously. Regenesis certainly is not one of them, which by the way does not mean that they're not a quality band.

It was really good to see things like Watcher of the Skies, the complete Supper's Ready, Firth of Fifth and In the Cage live in the flesh for the first time, not having been able to see Genesis in the 70s (couldn't get a day off from kindergarten). I actually got the impression that this band was much better and played much tighter than Gabriel's Genesis ever did. At least there weren't any overdubs on this performance. ;-)

As was to be expected, most of the material was taken from the Gabriel period. Two tracks from Trick of the Tail were also present, but nothing from the albums which came after. In a way that's a bit of a shame because I would have liked to see the band have a go at Home by the Sea or some material from Wind and Wuthering. Still, you won't hear me really complaning about the wonderful setlist. There was someone with a Calling All Stations T-shirt though, who seemed to be slightly annoyed. ;-)

The band used replicas of all of the original masks and stage props. In Watcher the vocalist was wearing the batwing hat and robe, there was the old man's mask as well as a cricket hammer in Musical Box, Rael's leather jacket in the Lamb songs and the legendary flower mask and cubical hat in Supper's Ready.

Although he did not play the flute, the singer in the band did some great additional percussion on a separate small kit during the fantastic drum duet and The Knife. His vocals, by the way, sounded very much like Gabriel's.
The drummer was the absolute star of the band which already became very clear during his amazing drum work at the end of Watcher of the Skies. The guitarist dropped a couple of notes every now and then, but still was a good musician.

The sound was pretty good, although sometimes the keyboards were a bit too prominent and started to drown out the rest of the band. The lighting was very effective and whenever something refering to sunlight, darkness or such popped up in the lyrics the light would be adjusted accordingly.

I'm looking forward to seeing them again whenever they come around to play in Holland. Do check them out when they are playing in your area.

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