Genesis
Trespass

Take it from us, the guys who play every kind of pressing we can get our hands on, the UK pressings are the only way to go on Trespass.

This early British Charisma pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Trespass Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Standard Operating Procedures

What are sonic qualities by which a record -- any record -- should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.

When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.

Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.

Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing -- or your money back.

What We're Listening For On Trespass

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks for the guitars and drums, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
• Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering -- which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, way behind the speakers. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put them.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit worse is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Looking For Someone
• White Mountain
• Visions Of Angels

Side Two

• Stagnation
• Dusk
• The Knife

Background

In the summer of 1970, shortly after the recording Genesis' second album, Trespass, John Mayhew and Anthony Phillips quit the band. Phillips, suffering from intense stage fright exacerbated by health issues, soon announced his departure – a decision that left the band scrambling. We went back on the road and I just couldn’t do it," the guitarist told The Telegraph in 2014. "I had to tell Mike. It was difficult, but I knew I was going to hold them back."

Once again, the band sought to fill their ever-vacant drummer's chair and add a new guitarist. A flurry of auditions uncovered child actor and drummer Phil Collins, who joined the group in August 1970. By the autumn of 1970, the Trespass album was released and, by the year's end, Genesis met their new guitarist, Steve Hackett.

"From the beginning, we'd set out as songwriters," singer Peter Gabriel reflected in the album's reissue interview series. "And we were quite happy to be writing what were effectively pop songs. But I think there was always inside of us a yearning to explore, to push the boundaries and to mix styles. And as we started to get a little more adventurous, it got too out of mainstream, left-field for Jonathan and for the publisher we were working with."

"The folk sound was definitely from Ant and Mike and this 12-string combination," Gabriel noted. "I think that was really quite innovative. And I loved it and tried to encourage it from my point of view."

"If you look at, say, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, 10CC, other bands which are songwriter-based, rather than musician-based, I think you do see long life spans," Gabriel said. "It's a different sensibility. Most bands begin playing together and then find writing, whereas we wanted to write and we found playing."

The songs on the album originated from one or two members bringing along ideas to develop, or the group working out an arrangement as a whole. Banks later said that "we had played live quite a bit and every song on the album had been performed on stage. We had a selection of at least twice as many songs as appeared on the album, and the versions changed rapidly." Rutherford complained that the songs had already been composed and arranged in advance, and there was little opportunity to change their sound, arrangement or direction in the studio. The band drew from Gabriel's soul influences, along with classical, pop and folk music, and made regular use of Phillips and Rutherford's twelve-string guitar playing. Gabriel was particularly fond of the combined twelve-string guitars and thought they gave the group a more unique and innovative sound. The group's songwriting during this period often originated in pairs, with Phillips and Rutherford, and Banks and Gabriel, developing songs separately and presenting them to the group for further development.

The album opens with "Looking For Someone," beginning with Gabriel's vocal accompanied only by an organ, later described as being "idiosyncratic enough to set them apart from the herd within seconds". He came up with the song which was then extended and developed by the group, starting with soul influences which move towards folk as it progresses. The coda at the end of the song was written by the group as a whole. Paul Stump wrote in 1997 that there is "the barefaced presence of a riff" from "I Am the Walrus" by The Beatles in the song.

"White Mountain" and "Dusk" had been worked out by Banks and Rutherford before deciding to record the album. The whole group worked on the music for "Stagnation," originally called "Movement," that Gabriel added lyrics to. "Visions of Angels" was recorded for the previous album From Genesis to Revelation, but not used as the band did not think any takes of it were good enough, so it was re-recorded for Trespass. It originated from 1968 a piano piece by Phillips at a time when his piano technique was limited, but could produce a "plodding" style similar to songs by The Beach Boysand The Beatles. It has a more straightforward verse/chorus structure than some of the other songs. "Stagnation" and "Dusk" showed Phillips and Rutherford's combined twelve-string sound, along with Banks taking a lead on piano, organ and Mellotron. This subsequently became a trademark of early Genesis. Rutherford later recalled there were around ten acoustic guitars on part of "Stagnation," but they cancelled each other out in the final mix. Gabriel described the track as a "journey song" with its lack of a more typical verse/chorus structure and the variety of mood changes it presents. At one point during its development the song was around 13 minutes long before sections were removed or altered, but the introduction remained unchanged.

"The Knife" was written by Gabriel and Banks. It was originally titled "The Nice" as a tribute to The Nice, and the organ on the track was composed to resemble the playing of Nice keyboardist Keith Emerson. As fans of the group Genesis were inspired to put together a heavier rock song which Gabriel said was "something more dangerous" compared to their delicate acoustic numbers. He added: "It was the first peak of a darker energy that we discovered." It lasted up to 19 minutes in concert, but was reduced to 8 for the album.[29] Gabriel wrote the lyrics as a parody of a protest song.

Phillips later recalled that songs "Everywhere is Here," "Grandma," "Little Leaf," "Going out to Get You," "Shepherd," "Moss," "Let Us Now Make Love," and "Pacidy" were ones that were not developed further in the studio. Banks said that "Going out to Get You" was too long to fit on the album as well as "The Knife", and the latter song had to have a portion of it cut out to fit on the LP.

In the liner notes to the Genesis box set Genesis Archive 1967–75, Banks claims "Let Us Now Make Love", one of Phillips's songs, was not recorded for the album because the group thought it had the potential of a single, but following the guitarist's sudden departure following the album's completion, it was never recorded in the studio. A live version was released on the box set, performed in February 1970.

At the same time, the group decided to replace Mayhew with a more suitable drummer. He was older than the rest of the band and considered an outsider, not contributing much to writing and lacking confidence. An urgent replacement was required to fulfill live dates to promote Trespass. Phil Collins auditioned and joined in August, and the album was released in October. The group could not find a suitable replacement for Phillips, so they resumed gigging as a four-piece. In late 1970, they appeared on the television show Disco 2 to promote the album with Phillips' replacement, Mick Barnard. The group mimed with Gabriel singing live, who recalled the performance was "disastrous."

The album cover was painted by Paul Whitehead, who also did the covers for the band's next two albums. The cover showed two people looking out of a window at mountains, which represented the pastoral themes of some of the songs. Whitehead had finished the cover and then the band added "The Knife" to the running order. Feeling that the cover no longer fit the mood of the album, they asked Whitehead to redo it. When Whitehead was reluctant to do so, the band members inspired him to slash the canvas with an actual knife.

Trespass sold 6,000 copies on its original release and helped the band build up a live following. "The Knife" was released as a single in January 1971. The album charted at  No.  1 in Belgium, which led to the band's first overseas concerts there in January 1972.

--Wikipedia