Take a little trip back to the 1960s, the decade when British pop and rock music took over the world, when The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, The Kinks et al. established the template for how a rock band should perform, how it should behave, what it should look like. The rules tended to revolve around playing up a band’s working class roots, adopting an aggressive pose, wearing a perpetual sneer on your upper lip, acting like a harbinger of the revolution.
Nowhere in those templates was there much about forming at public school where you had been sent to be trained to become leaders of the Establishment, captains of industry, upholders of the ruling class. But Charterhouse public school, the alma mater of politicians, diplomats, bishops, judges and winners of the Victoria Cross, was the primordial swamp from which two groups evolved, The Garden Wall, featuring singer and flautist Peter Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) and pianist Tony Banks (born 27 March 1950), and Anon which included budding guitarists Anthony Phillips (born 23 December 1951) and Michael Rutherford (born 2 October 1950), Phillips also popping up in The Garden Wall.
Those two pairs eventually joined forces when Phillips and Rutherford spent a school holiday trying to record some of the songs they’d written and, needing a pianist and organist to augment their sound, invited Banks along. He persuaded them to bring Gabriel along because they, too, had been writing songs and wanted to try out one of theirs.
In the Easter holidays of 1967, they decamped to a small home studio set up operated by school friend Brian Roberts to record some demos. Gabriel was late arriving, so they began by recording the songs Phillips and Rutherford had in hand, with Phillips singing before Banks chimed in with, ‘We should really wait for Peter because he’s got an awful lot better voice.’ To his credit, Phillips agreed, Rutherford saying later in the video that accompanied the 1970-75 box set, ‘If Ant hadn’t realised that [Peter was a better singer] we might have missed the moment.’
It was a decision that brought almost immediate dividends. As well as filling the ranks of the civil service, Charterhouse had produced itself a pop sensation earlier in the 1960s; Jonathan King reached number four in the UK charts with his single, ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’, in 1965 and was quickly an established figure in the music scene. When word circulated that he was returning to Charterhouse for an ‘old boys’ day, they hatched a plot to get a tape of their songs into his hands, though their collective nerve failed them and schoolfriend John Alexander had to do the deed, leaving the tape in his Austin Healey Sprite.
King was sufficiently taken by the tape to get in touch, arrange a meeting and put them into a real studio to record four songs. Happy with the results of that, he then signed them to a ten-year publishing deal – later reduced to a year thanks to the intervention of the band’s parents – for this fledgling four saw themselves as songwriters for other people in best Brill Building tradition. For all his contacts, not even King could find any takers for the songs, particularly for the second batch of material that they provided him with, songs that veered away from the more obvious pop of the initial tape. To recapture King’s waning attention, Banks and Gabriel famously crafted ‘The Silent Sun’ in the style of
