In the autumn of 1977, Genesis were a band in danger of becoming a trivia question. They had spent a decade as progressive rock’s most theatrical cult act — the group of Supper’s Ready, of Peter Gabriel in a fox’s head and a red dress — and now the second of their founding voices had walked out. Guitarist Steve Hackett, frustrated that his ideas kept being passed over, quit during the mixing of the live album Seconds Out, and his departure was made public on 8 October 1977. Gabriel had already been gone for two years. What remained was a trio: keyboard player Tony Banks, bassist and guitarist Mike Rutherford, and drummer-turned-frontman Phil Collins. The rock press wondered, politely, whether there was anything left. The trio’s answer was not a twenty-minute epic designed to prove the doubters wrong. It was a three-minute love song — Follow You Follow Me — written around a single guitar riff, with lyrics its author dashed off in about ten minutes. It became the first Genesis record that ordinary radio listeners, people who had never owned a Mellotron album in their lives, actually bought.
A Trio With Something to Prove
The decision not to replace Hackett was deliberate. Banks, Rutherford and Collins pointed out, with some justice, that the three of them had always formed the band’s engine room: they had built the “Apocalypse in 9/8” section of Supper’s Ready between them, and the bones of A Trick of the Tail had been written while Hackett was off making a solo record. So they rehearsed for around six weeks at Shepperton Studios and then, in September 1977, returned to Relight Studios in Hilvarenbeek in the Netherlands — the same studio they had used for Wind & Wuthering — to write and record as a three-piece. Recording abroad was, as Rutherford drily noted, their one tax concession.
Working as a trio changed the music in ways nobody had fully planned. Rutherford took on all the guitar duties himself, lead parts included, and refused to imitate Hackett’s distinctive tone. The basic tracks came out sparser, the arrangements simpler, and the band made a conscious decision to write shorter, tighter songs — partly to fit more ideas onto one album, partly in response to the punk and new wave bands then making progressive rock look bloated. Banks later recalled that recording as three was simply easier: everyone had a defined role, and there were fewer collisions. Producer David Hentschel, who had engineered the band’s previous two albums, shared production duties with the group, and by Rutherford’s account the material was recorded in about two weeks before being mixed at Trident Studios in London.
The Only Truly Group-Written Number
Most of …And Then There Were Three… arrived as finished songs brought in by individual writers — Banks contributed four, Rutherford three. Follow You Follow Me was the exception, and the only track on the album written during the rehearsal stage itself. It began with a gentle, circling guitar riff from Rutherford. Banks picked it up and built a chord sequence and melody line over it, and Collins, as Banks put it, “centralised” what the other two had started. Banks later called it “our only truly group-written number,” adding that it worked precisely because it was so simple: “It was enough as it stood.”
The lyric was the fastest part of all. Rutherford wrote the words — a plain, unadorned pledge of lifelong devotion, inspired by his wife Angie — in about ten minutes, and later described them as the easiest lyrics he ever wrote. There was a strategy underneath the simplicity, too. The band were aware that their audience skewed heavily male, all those young men analysing time signatures in the dark, and the song was written partly to redress the imbalance: a love song, sung straight, with no mythology and no costume changes. Even so, nobody in the band expected it to carry their commercial hopes. Collins, who sang it and drummed on it, remembered it as “a great rhythm track” that “was not intended to be a hit single.”
The Song the Producer Underestimated
The band liked the track enough to close the album with it, deliberately placing it last as a lighter counterweight to heavier material like Burning Rope and Down and Out. But co-producer Hentschel was dismissive of the song, and it might have stayed an album closer had he not prepared an initial mix and played it to the staff at Atlantic Records. The label’s people heard what the band had not quite heard in themselves: this was a single. The track was remixed for release, and on 24 February 1978 Follow You Follow Me came out as the first single from the album — backed in Britain by Ballad of Big and in America by Inside and Out.
Radio agreed with Atlantic. In Britain the single climbed to No. 7, spending four weeks in the Top 10 — the band’s first Top 10 hit at home after a decade of trying. In the United States it reached No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 21 on the Adult Contemporary chart, their first American Top 40 single, and it went Top 20 as far away as Australia and New Zealand. It later earned a Silver disc in Britain. The trade press heard the change of direction immediately: Record World praised the single as an “engaging song” with a “light, flowing sound,” language nobody had ever used about the band of Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme. Atlantic even trimmed the track for American release — the US single edit runs 3:19 against the album version’s 3:59 — sharpening a record that was already the most concise thing Genesis had ever put their name to. What surprised the band most was not the chart position itself but who was buying the record: the love song had done exactly the job it was designed for, and the audience filing into their concerts was no longer an almost entirely male crowd of prog devotees. The parent album, released on 31 March 1978 with a title borrowed from the old counting rhyme — five members, then four, and then there were three — reached No. 3 in the UK and No. 14 in America, at that point the highest-charting Genesis album in the US, on its way to platinum. The mimed performance video, filmed at Shepperton Studios with Collins singing while shaking a percussion instrument, put three unassuming Englishmen in front of an audience that had never seen them leap about in flower masks.
The Door It Opened
The real significance of Follow You Follow Me is what it made possible. Genesis toured the album in 1978 with two hired hands — guitarist Daryl Stuermer and drummer Chester Thompson, both of whom would remain fixtures for decades — and returned as a bigger live draw than they had ever been as a five-piece. More importantly, the single proved that the trio’s instinct for melody, stripped of the epics, could stand on its own. Everything that followed — Turn It On Again, the Duke and Abacab albums, the stadium years of Invisible Touch — flows in a direct line from the discovery, made in a Dutch studio in a fortnight, that three minutes and a love song could do what twenty minutes of mythology could not.
The song itself never left the stage. It was played on tour after tour for more than forty years, and on the band’s final The Last Domino? tour in 2021–22 it closed their acoustic set, following That’s All and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway — the little love song literally bookending a career that began in the most ambitious progressive rock ever made. Collins sang it on his solo tours too, and Rutherford still performs it with Mike + The Mechanics. There is something fitting in that endurance. Genesis survived the loss of Gabriel and Hackett not by defending the old fortress but by walking out of it, and the first step through the gate was a riff, a chord sequence, and ten minutes of words written for a wife at home. The progressive rock band that wrote Follow You Follow Me “almost too banal,” as Banks confessed, had accidentally written their most human song — and the hit that saved them.
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