I: Introduction/Album Cover

Foxtrot is the fourth album by Genesis, having come out in 1972. It is the second of their albums with drummer/singer Phil Collins and lead guitarist Steve Hackett; it’s also their last album to have the cover artwork of Paul Whitehead (who also did the cover for Van der Graaf Generator‘s album, Pawn Hearts), as the band didn’t like the cover.

The most striking image we see on the surreal cover is that of a woman in a red dress with a fox’s head, or a “foxy lady,” hence the title of the album–also Whitehead’s idea. Singer Peter Gabriel, being the oh, so theatrical frontman that he was for Genesis as a progressive rock band at the time, dressed up in a red dress and fox’s head for the album’s tour. The rest of the band at first were uncomfortable with Gabriel’s ‘crossdressing,’ but when his showmanship gave the band lots of press attention, they were more accepting of it.

The ‘foxy lady’ is standing on a piece of ice floating on the water near a shore. If we look at the back cover, we’ll see four fox hunters on horses looking at her. Whitehead meant them to represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, since the end of the world is a major theme of the album–not just the “Apocalypse in 9/8” at the climax of the side-long epic “Supper’s Ready,” but also the aftermath of that as the subject of “Watcher of the Skies” opening Side One. One of the riders has an alien’s head, suggesting the alien watcher of the skies looking down on our world’s demise.

Fox hunters eyeing the foxy lady suggests male lechery. Note again her floating on that plate of ice on the water. She could be seen as personifying our Mother Earth. Let’s juxtapose this interpretation with the four fox hunters of the Apocalypse. The “foxtrot” of these four lustful men, going after the Earth, is destroying her. Global warming, along with rising sea levels, caused by such things as ocean heating and Antarctic ice loss, was a growing concern in the scientific community already by the beginning of the 1970s, around when Foxtrot was conceived.

An allusion to the cover design of the band’s previous album, Nursery Cryme, can be seen in a detail on the back cover of Foxtrot. The macabre croquet game (with decapitated heads instead of balls) depicted on the front cover of Nursery Cryme, reflecting the British upper class and implying their oppression of the working class, is thus linked with how the ruling class today is harming the environment for the sake of profit, which in turn is bringing about the end of the world for all of us. The profit motive, of course, is a major theme of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.”

One of the horsemen, as I mentioned above, is an alien, implying his disconnect from humanity, symbolic of the social estrangement caused by capitalism. Another horseman has a monkey’s head, implying the foolishness of recklessly exploiting and raping the Earth out of a desire to maximize profit. Another horseman has a handkerchief to his face: he’s weeping, implying remorse over the wrongs done to the Earth. The last horseman has an unusually long nose, implying that he’s a lying Pinocchio, disingenuously claiming he’s doing no harm to the Earth, like the climate change deniers. His mendacity can be linked to that of the “Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” (GESM).

Here‘s a link to the album’s lyrics, here‘s a link to a large image of the whole cover, and here‘s a link to all the music on the album.

II:Watcher of the Skies

“Watcher of the Skies” opens with a dark passage that keyboardist Tony Banks plays on a Mellotron he’d just bought from King Crimson, whose leader, Robert Fripp, would have wanted to get rid of on account of its tuning problems. The two opening major chords we hear in the song, a B-major seventh/F-sharp and a C-sharp/F-sharp, sounded especially good to Banks on this Mellotron, though, in spite of its faults; in fact, those chords sounded better on this instrument than on later Mellotrons Banks used. These two chords will be heard during the bridges between verses in the song, too.

Soon after these two opening chords, we hear Banks play cadences including Neapolitan chords: a first-inversion C-sharp major chord going into a cadence with G major and C major, this latter chord being the Neapolitan chord leading to an F-sharp major and a B minor added sixth. Soon after that, he does an ascension of minor chords in G-sharp, A-sharp, and C, then to G-sharp minor again, going down to chords in F-sharp major, E major, up to A major, and back down to G-sharp minor, then down to an F-diminished chord. This more-or-less descending progression will be heard again towards the end of the song.

The opening two chords return, and the rest of the band comes in, with Collins doing a kind of “Morse code” rhythm on the drums, a rhythm also played in a one-note staccato motif in F-sharp by Hackett and bassist Mike Rutherford. This main riff is said to be played in 6/4 time, though I’d notate it as an alternating 4/4 and 2/4, since 6/4 is a compound duple subdivided three plus three.

The progression resolves to F-sharp major, and Gabriel begins singing, with Banks accompanying him on organ, and that staccato motif is heard not as one note, but as C-sharp, F-sharp (9x), then octaves of F-sharp. The line “watcher of the skies” comes from John Keats‘s 1817 poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Now, the new world that Keats, as a watcher of the skies, has seen upon reading George Chapman‘s brilliant translation of Homer‘s poetry (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Batrachomyomachia) is an exciting discovery, a happy one. In contrast, the alien watcher of the skies that Gabriel sings of sees the remains of a most unfortunate world, a world we have destroyed. We have brought about our own apocalypse, a theme to be explored later.

“Now [our] reign has come to end/Has life again destroyed life?” Our foolishness in doing so is described as if it’s a form of childishness, for perhaps we “play elsewhere” now. Could we be capable of more than our mere “childhood games?” In the lizard’s shedding of its tail, the end of this civilization could bring the birth of a new one.

After this bridge, we have a verse in F-sharp major again, but with Gabriel stomping on the pedal of a bass drum to double that of Collins’s drum kit. Gabriel is also shaking a tambourine as he sings of how one shouldn’t judge a humanity already dead. After all, they’re unable to defend themselves against the reproaches they’re sure to get.

After this verse, we hear Rutherford play a bass riff, to the tight accompaniment of Collins’s drums, in one bar of 4/4 time, then Hackett does a lead in a bar of 7/16, then one in 4/4 with triplets; then we’re back to the alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Banks playing those two opening chords again on the organ.

With this next bridge, Gabriel seems to be singing his “parting counsel” to us at the present moment, warning us that our journey isn’t done. Our ship may be sturdy, that is, the Western empire and the liberal order of the 1970s may feel as though it’s safe and secure, but the sea has “no mercy” (at the time, there were fears of nuclear war and the USSR), and would we “survive on the ocean of being”?

As of now, that old Cold War is no longer a problem, but that doesn’t matter, since there’s a new Cold War happening right now, giving this old song new relevance fifty years later. Our “thoughts turn to the stars,” sadly: “this is [our] fate alone.” Towards the end of the song, that “Morse Code” rhythm in alternating 4/4 and 2/4 gets expanded to two bars of 4/4; then the song ends with that descending keyboard progression I discussed that occurred during the Mellotron opening.

III: Time Table

“Time Table” is solely Banks’s song, musically and lyrically, and it’s centred around piano progressions. It opens with him playing two melodic lines in largely parallel motion on the piano.

Gabriel sings of the medieval world in a manner similar to how that world is portrayed in Rush‘s song, “A Farewell to Kings.” It’s depicted as a noble era from which we in the modern world have sadly declined. As with the Rush album, whose themes also include an idealizing of the past, though, we have to wonder if Banks is in earnest, or if he’s being ironic.

I’m betting on the latter. His references to “legends born” strongly implies that he’s perfectly aware that the ‘nobility’ of medieval times was a fiction. The key to seeing the irony is in these lines: “It seems because through time and space/Though names may change each face retains the mask it wore,” followed by a cloyingly mawkish melody in E major on what sounds like one of those old 18th century fortepianos. We hear a train of tinklingly high Bs before going down a fifth to E, then F-sharp, G-sharp, and a B an octave lower. The melody then modulates to F-sharp major before going to the next verse. The mawkishness of this tune, sounding as it does, as if it’s being played on such an old piano, reinforces the theme of a foolishly idealized past.

The point of the song is that, though this “carved oak table” from the past–where kings and queens once sat–is now dusty and of “musty smells” where “only the rats hold sway,” those times of the past had their faults, too. Times may change, but the masks people wear remain the same.

So many idealize the past as some ‘Golden Age’ from which we today have fallen. Surely the feudal era, with its impoverished vast majority, its religious superstition, and royal authoritarianism, is no improvement on our capitalist modern world, as bad as it admittedly is.

IV: Get ‘Em Out by Friday

…and speaking of capitalism, we now come to the next song, “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” In the first song, we encountered the end of the world from an alien’s perspective. Each of the following songs in its own way seems to explain one of many factors leading to humanity’s demise.

A traditionalist, ultraconservative demonizing of progress through praising an idealized past (“Time Table”) at the expense of the present, instead of looking ahead to the future in an attempt to improve the quality of our lives, is one of those destructive factors. Capitalism was an improvement on feudalism; it was even revolutionary several centuries ago. It isn’t revolutionary now, though, and that’s where the problems dealt with in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” come in…as a matter of landlords.

The song begins with a spirited passage in 6/8 and in the key of A major. Banks does a quick, ascending organ run of sixteenth notes from G-sharp to C-sharp. Then the progression goes down to E major, then up to the relative minor in F-sharp, and we hear that ascending organ run of sixteenth notes again.

Then it goes to the mediant in C-sharp minor, then to the subdominant in D major, with Hackett playing an ascension, in thirds, of alternating quarter and eighth notes starting on F-sharp and A, and ending with tied and dotted half notes in E and G-natural, then a parallel ascension from B and D to whole notes in A and C-sharp, with a change to 4/4 time. Variations of these two ascensions will be heard later in the song, one example being in a theme in Mrs. Barrow‘s verse with these lines: “I don’t know why, it seemed so funny/Seeing as how they’d take more money.”

Now the key is A-natural minor, and we hear Banks playing eighth-note triads on the organ; first, a bar in 7/4, then back to 4/4. The rhythm is in triplets.

Gabriel begins singing in the harsh voice of ruthless businessman John Pebble, of Styx Enterprises. He orders Mark Hall, “The Winkler,” to evict all the tenants in properties in Harlow that Styx has recently bought. In the Cockney accent of The Winkler, Gabriel sings to Mrs. Barrow, a tenant, that she must move out.

In The Winkler, we see an example of a crucial element not only in capitalism, but in all systems of power: the servile obedience of underlings to their masters’ laws and edicts. The systems of oppression that we all suffer under wouldn’t exist if the common people, like The Winkler, would simply refuse to do their bosses’ bidding. We’ll come back to this servility in my discussion of the next song, “Can-Utility and the Coastliners.”

Gabriel sings in Mrs. Barrow’s voice of her shock and dismay at the greed of her evictors, while plaintive music is played on 12-string guitar and Mellotron (flute tape). She’s willing to “pay double the rent,” but this isn’t enough for the new owners of the property, who know it’s “good money gone if [they] let them stay.” Under capitalism, it isn’t enough to make money–profits have to be maximized.

To her even greater shock, Mrs. Barrow learns, upon moving to “Harlow New Town,” the new area where Pebble et al want her and the other evictees to live, that they want to raise the rent. This, surely, will allow Styx to get back the four hundred pounds they gave the evictees to goad them into moving, plus get a lot more money, over time.

After a brief solo by Hackett of sobbing guitar leads over Banks’s organ triads, we come to an instrumental interlude meant to represent the passage of time over about forty years. The main motif of this passage is five notes played on the bass and organ: E D E D F-sharp. Soon after, we hear E D E D F-natural. This motive is harmonized on the Mellotron (flute tape again) and Gabriel’s flute.

When Gabriel’s singing returns, we’ve gone from 1972 to 2012, which I find most interesting from our point of view living now. The social commentary and prophetic nature of Gabriel’s lyric (inspired by his own landlord troubles of the time) are even more prescient, in a metaphorical sense as I’ll explain below, than he must have imagined.

One should bear in mind just how much the world has actually changed since the writing of this lyric, just before the 1973-1975 recession marking the end of Keynesian state intervention in failing economies and of the beginning of the end of welfare capitalism, and the dawn of neoliberalism and the “free market,” which in turn has metastasized into the horror it became by the 2010s.

Note how “Genetic Control” announces that there will be a restriction on tenants’ height to four feet. The directors of Genetic Control have been buying up all the properties recently sold, and with shorter tenants, “they can fit twice as many in the same building site,” thus doubling the money made in Pebble’s company, no longer Styx Enterprises, but now “United Blacksprings International” (sounds like BlackRock to me). Under capitalism, successful businesses grow into giant, multinational corporations.

We’ve all been made “shorter in height,” thanks to the depredations of contemporary neoliberalism. Capitalism makes the 99% small so the 1% can tower over us all. The cramming in of “twice as many in the same building site” reminds me of the terrible living conditions of the working class in 19th century England and elsewhere. See also Marx, pages 816-818.

Incidentally, Pebble has been knighted. When a rich, exploitative capitalist becomes Sir John De Pebble, we can see how foolish it is to idealize the era of kings, queens, and knights (à la “Time Table”).

“Satin Peter of Rock Development Ltd.”, an obvious pun on the saint, announces the coming of a capitalist heaven on Earth “with land in your hand.” Remember this religious imagery when we come to “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” in “Supper’s Ready.”

V: Can-Utility and the Coastliners

“Can-Utility and the Coastliners” opens with 12-string acoustic guitars–as integral a part of the early Genesis sound as the Mellotron was of the early King Crimson sound–and Collins hitting a triangle. “Can-Utility” is a pun on Canute, an old king of England, Denmark, and Norway back in the 11th century. Surrounded by flatterers, the king showed them he had no extraordinary powers by sitting on his throne at the shore and commanding the tide to stop coming in, which of course it didn’t.

The song is mostly Hackett’s, with some musical contributions from Banks and Rutherford. Hackett’s lyric demonstrates how foolish blind deference and obsequiousness to authority is. As I said of The Winkler, this thoughtless obeying of orders is what gives evil leaders their power. Luckily for Canute’s flatterers, he was not that kind of king; he just wanted his flatterers to realize how foolish their ass-kissing was.

The song begins, as I said above, with 12-string acoustic guitars, playing arpeggios of B major, C-sharp minor seventh, and F-sharp seventh added flat ninth chords, and a strummed B major chord. Then the song goes to D major, and Gabriel begins singing.

He sings of a history book telling Canute’s story. The book is by the sea, just as Canute was, and its pages get “washed by the waves,” just as the king was. We hear a chord progression of D major, A major, G major, and A major as Gabriel sings of the shadow of a cloud looking down on those pages “as eyes of the past.” Just as a king should not be deified, or made into a cult of personality, neither should history or tradition be so revered uncritically.

We hear those major chords in D, A, G, A again when the king commands the waves to “halt at [his] feet.” With the same music, the king makes the same judgement about the foolishness of obsequiousness as those “eyes of the past” that looked down on the pages that praised a king’s modesty…or was it a false modesty? After all, some have claimed that the king vainly commanded those waves to stop because he really did think he could stop them. Either way, the point is made clear about excessive praise of power and authority.

Rutherford hits a low D on his bass pedal synthesizer and Collins comes in on the drums as Gabriel begins to sing of a coming storm near the king’s throne on the shoreline. We hear those D, A, G, A major chords again with words of flattery to the king. Hackett plays a lead of nine notes through a volume pedal as a segue to 12-string acoustic guitar playing in D minor.

Collins bangs in with the drums again during this instrumental passage, with vigorous 12-string acoustic guitar strumming, Rutherford pounding his foot on that D on the bass pedals, and Banks playing a dark theme on the Mellotron. The music seems to be depicting the waves splashing against Canute’s feet and his throne, humbling him and his flatterers.

One senses that maybe the king, deep down, was hoping the waves would obey him when Gabriel sings “he forced a smile even though his hopes lay dashed where offerings fell.” This leads to another instrumental passage, beginning with a chord progression of D minor, G major, C major, and A major. Gabriel plays an oboe melody over this progression.

While we hear the oboe, Rutherford puts his 12-string acoustic guitar aside, and no longer needing the bass pedals, picks up his bass guitar. The key changes to F-sharp major, and he’s playing fast notes in E and going from there to hammer-ons in F-sharp. Banks is playing arpeggios on the organ, first in one bar of 5/4, then back to 4/4, where the time stays largely the same, except for the occasional time change to a bar in 5/4 again, then to a bar of 3/4. During this time, Hackett does a solo, the first few notes using the volume pedal again.

The key switches to C major, and Gabriel resumes singing over alternating C and F major chords. The king’s modesty sure seems to be false (as far as Hackett’s lyric is concerned, at least), for he hopes that–as the tide soaks him–at least his former flatterers won’t laugh at him.

Well, they do eventually laugh, his face turns red with humiliation, and he dies. Sic semper tyrannus?

The song ends with some tricky riffs, perhaps musically suggestive of the awkwardness of the king’s situation. The 4/4 switches to a bar of 6/4 with an ascension of C-D-E-G-C-D-E, then down an octave to an eighth note in E before going back to a bar of 4/4, and a G in a tied whole note. Then a bar of 5/4 with the G from the previous bar as the first of six eighth notes, the others being a G an octave higher, then E, F, E, and C, and ending with a C an octave lower after a quarter and an eighth rest. Then alternating 6/4 and 4/4, and Gabriel singing about the king’s red face and his death. That’s the end of Side One.

VI: Horizons and Supper’s Ready

Side Two begins with another Hackett composition, a short solo for six-stringed acoustic guitar called “Horizons.” It’s a beautiful piece in G major, featuring a clever use of bell-like harmonics.

After that, we come to the great Genesis epic, “Supper’s Ready.” It’s 23 minutes long, and divided into seven parts, the first of which is called “Lover’s Leap,” based on an experience late at night that Gabriel had with his wife, Jill, in their London flat. Hackett claimed that there was some drug use, and that Jill began speaking in a completely different voice at one point, something reflected in Gabriel’s lyric, “I swear I saw your face change; it didn’t seem quite right.” He made a makeshift cross from household items, and she reacted violently. Obviously, it was a bad trip.

A later incident that inspired some of this part’s lyric was when Gabriel looked out the window and saw seven shrouded men walking across the lawn to his parents’ house. These disturbing experiences would evolve into an epic story about good vs evil, including a journey through various scenes from the Book of Revelation, whose apocalypse ties in thematically with the end-of-the-world scenario of “Watcher of the Skies.” We’ve already dealt with such forms of evil as greed in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

The song begins on an A minor chord with an added 6th, with Gabriel and Collins coming in immediately, singing an octave apart from each other, while Hackett, Rutherford, and Banks are all playing arpeggiated chords on 12-string acoustic guitars. As I said above, this dulcet, harpsichord-like sound of three acoustic guitars together was a staple of the early Genesis sound, something they’d already established on such songs as “Stagnation” from Trespass and “The Musical Box” on Nursery Cryme.

As the band was developing the first part of “Supper’s Ready,” though, they didn’t want to repeat themselves too much, so they made sure to have their epic go in different musical directions, as we’ll hear later in a piano arrangement by Gabriel that would become “Willow Farm,” as well as an instrumental passage by Banks, Rutherford, and Collins that would become “Apocalypse in 9/8.”

Behind the vocals and acoustic guitars, we hear Collins strike a triangle again, and–on the studio version–Rutherford playing a cello. The importance of “Lover’s Leap,” from a lyrical and thematic standpoint, is how the love of the husband and wife at the beginning of the epic establishes the good against which the evil will be later contrasted.

Now, I understand–from the programme notes Gabriel wrote for concertgoers to give further explanation of what’s going on in the story–that the two lovers are supposed to be experiencing all the events of the plot together. Still, I feel that there’s a huge contradiction between the notes and when Gabriel sings, twice, “I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm [loving] arms. It’s good to feel you again”/[alternatively] “Now I’m back again.” These lines are heard toward the end of “Lover’s Leap,” and again at the beginning of “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with the variations as given above.

Why would the husband sing this if he’s been with his “babe” the whole time? I tend to think of Gabriel’s lyrics as more canonical and authoritative than his programme notes, which he could have written while stoned, for all we know. Note also the line “A distance falls around our bodies.” He summed up the story as “a personal journey,” suggesting that we’re meant to think of him “walking through scenes from Revelation in the Bible” alone, not with Jill.

Then again, maybe Jill is with him throughout the song, but only in a metaphorical sense. That is, he misses her, and she misses him, so they imagine themselves together as a kind of dream-like wish-fulfillment. Perhaps this is what’s being implied in the programme notes when they say that in the “Lover’s Leap” section, that they are “transformed in the bodies of another male and female.” Perhaps this, indeed, is what is meant by lover’s leap: it’s a leap of faith that, one day after the apocalypse, they’ll be together again. So they dream, perhaps in a drug-induced stupor, that they’ve been together the whole time, but seeing each other in the bodies of a different man and woman.

If my interpretation–that the lovers are apart from the end of “Lover’s Leap” to “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs”–is true, then I can see “Supper’s Ready” as allusive not only to the Bible, but also, in a subtle sense, to scenes from Odysseus‘ leaving of Ithaca to fight the Trojan War, to his odyssey to get back home–he and his wife, Penelope, missing each other’s touch for twenty years. I’m thinking in particular of the way the story is related in the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante (Odysseus) and Greta Scacchi (Penelope). In this sense, Gabriel’s watcher of the skies really is reading Chapman’s Homer.

The lovers’ bodies transformed into those of a different male and female, and yet together as such throughout the middle of “Supper’s Ready,” can thus be paralleled in The Odyssey to how, on the one hand, Odysseus sleeps with Circe and Calypso, and Penelope is troubled by a horde of obnoxious suitors on the other.

The seven shrouded men moving across the lawn could be paralleled with Menelaus, Agamemnon et al calling Odysseus to join them in retrieving Helen of Troy. It’s interesting how the seventh shrouded man in the front has “a cross held high in hand,” which seems like a projection of the makeshift cross Gabriel had, the one that upset Jill so much. I’m sure Penelope was deeply upset about her husband being taken from her by the suitors of Helen to go to war for so many years.

After all the verses of “Lover’s Leap” have been sung, we hear Banks play a solo on the Hohner Pianet while the 12-string acoustic guitars are playing in D minor. A harmonized tune is played by Hackett on his electric guitar using the volume pedal and Rutherford on the cello. After that, Gabriel comes in with a brief flute melody.

The song soon segues into “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” and we’re back in A minor, which in turn will soon become A major. A humble farmer simply looking after his farm is contrasted with a religious fraud, “who looks after the fire.” The farmer reminds me of Candide, who must cultivate his garden and not be distracted with philosophical and theological nonsense, while the “fireman” reminds me not only of how Pangloss has the opposite philosophical and theological attitude, but also of what a religious hypocrite Tartuffe is.

Religious frauds like the GESM are, of course, part of the evil of the world, promising heaven with their cure-all opium of the people, yet pulling us all into holy (and far-from-holy) wars, just as the GESM will do with his followers, who will do battle against “all those without an up-to-date ‘Eternal Life Licence‘,” as the programme notes tell us. This war, of course, is the subject of the next part, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men.” This war also parallels the Trojan War, as I would have it.

“Ikhnaton” is Akhenaten, a pharaoh from 14th century BCE Egypt, not far in time or space from the Trojan War. We all know what the promise of heaven from the GESM is: it’s a con. The “band of merry men” sound like those of Robin Hood; yet the name must be ironic, for while those of Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, those of the GESM steal to enrich himself.

This section is in D major, with Banks playing arpeggios on the organ, Rutherford quickly strumming a 12-string acoustic guitar, and Hackett tapping arpeggios in harmony with some more played by Banks on the organ. Just as Odysseus and the Greeks win the Trojan War, so does the GESM’s and the husband’s side win in our story. Thus ends this section, and we come to part IV, “How Dare I Be So Beautiful?”

It’s a soft passage in which Gabriel sings about the aftermath of the war and climbing up a pile of corpses. At the top, though, they (the survivors of the battle, or him and his wife, however you wish to interpret “we”) find “a plateau of green grass and green trees full of life.” It’s so surreal that they would find life up at the top of a mountain of death. Is this the GESM’s definition of heaven, after what he’d imagine to be a ‘life and death’ struggle with evil?

The husband’s journey through good vs evil and the apocalypse was also influenced by The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is also about a man, Christian, traveling from his hometown, the “City of Destruction,” or this world, to the “Celestial City,” or heaven, atop Mount Zion.

The husband sees “a young figure…by a pool.” Having “been stamped ‘Human Bacon’ by some butchery tool” sounds like his war injuries, or some other kind of wound. Narcissism’s origins are in some injury, or abuse, and we can see he has this kind of problem.

“He is you”…who? The husband’s wife? I suspect it’s the GESM, for he comes off as having narcissistic traits, given how he’s made for himself a cult of personality. “Babe” seems too sweet to have such vices as these.

The narcissism of powerful leaders is an evil that causes wars like the one just ended. The egotism of “this lad” causes him to turn into a flower, while his servile followers “watch in reverence.” And speaking of flowers, we then come to “Willow Farm.”

A willow, of course, is a tree or shrub–a plant. When willow leaves and bark are used medicinally, one doesn’t generally think about narcotics; when one considers the surreal lyric of “Willow Farm,” though, one may find it easy to think of willow as a kind of euphemism for drugs. So “Willow Farm” could be seen as a code for, say, cannabis farm.

Gabriel’s lyric playfully maximizes rhyme and wordplay, suggesting the imaginative flights of fancy of the stoned. I bring this up because this section of “Supper’s Ready” parallels that of The Odyssey dealing with the lotus eaters. Odysseus and his crew come to an island whose inhabitants eat lotus fruits and flowers, which have a narcotic quality, causing their eaters to sleep in peaceful apathy. This happens to Odysseus’ men, and he has to get them all back on his ship and sail away, for if he doesn’t, they’ll all stay there and never go home.

This lolling about is one of the evils that the husband must struggle against if he is to get back home and be with “Babe” again. So many of us, rather than band together in solidarity and fight the injustices of the world, prefer to sit around and smoke dope, lying about and doing nothing. In terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, this would be sloth.

In the lotus-land of Willow Farm, “everyone’s happy to be here.” If you go there, “open your eyes, it’s full of surprise [drug trip], everyone lies [tells lies, or lies down? I suspect the latter] like the fox on the rocks [inspiring the foxy lady on the cover, though I still insist she’s standing on a flat block of ice] and the musical box [reminding us of the first track on Nursery Cryme].”

Among the examples of surreal imagery in this lyric are “Winston Churchill dressed in drag [since this is not meant to be a reference to transgenderism, I’m delighted to hear that horrible man mocked], he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.” Many bad things or people used to be good ones, or at least they were once perceived to be good. “The frog was a prince, the price was a brick, the brick was an egg, the egg was a bird.”

Such surreal imagery reinforces the idea that what’s being experienced in Willow Farm is a drug trip, or lotus-eating. Accordingly, the people are “as happy as fish, and gorgeous as geese, and wonderfully clean in the morning.” They’ve “got everything, [they’re] growing everything,” like good dope dealers.

In this stoned state, one never gets anywhere. As in the homunculus argument, one tries to explain a concept in terms of the concept itself, hence “mum to mud to mad to dad,” then “dad to dam to dum to mum.” One comes right back to where one started. Those in Willow Farm are thus like the lotus-eaters, high as kites and going nowhere.

However much the husband may yearn for his wife (“Mama, I want you now!”), just as Odysseus did among the lotus-eaters…or when with Circe or Calypso, for that matter…he’s stuck where he is and can’t get home (“like it or not…you’re under the soil…yes, deep in the soil…”).

Being seeds in the soil means that the husband and his fellow survivors of the war are underground, which can be associated with the Underworld, where Odysseus goes to learn from Tiresias how to sail safely back to Ithaca. “Willow Farm” segues into a soft instrumental passage during which Gabriel plays flute over guitar accompaniment in A minor. At the end of this is a marching snare drum with a trumpet-like restating of the GESM theme (“I know a fireman who looks after the fire.”). The martial nature of this restated theme reinforces the link between religious hypocrisy and war.

And now we come to the climactic “Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-Starring the Delicious Talents of Gabbie Ratchet)”. Gabbie Ratchet refers to the Hounds of Hell; they’re also known as Gabriel’s Hounds. It’s called 9/8 time, but a compound triple should be subdivided three plus three plus three, not four plus five, as it is here.

The repeated riff, over which Banks improvises an organ solo, is eighth notes of E E F-sharp E B E E E F-sharp, heard on the guitar and bass, and briefly at one point on Gabriel’s flute. It was originally conceived as an organ improvisation with no defined time signature.

The lyrics are full of imagery from the Book of Revelation: “Magog” (20: 7-8, when Satan, released from his prison, assembles the nations of the Earth [including Magog] for battle); “Dragons coming out of the sea” (13:1), bringing “down the fire from the skies” (13:13); “666” (13:18), and “and the seven trumpets blowing” (8:2 and 6).

Now, the Revelation in the New Testament was referring, however poetically and cryptically, to events in the Graeco-Roman world in the latter half of the first century (i.e., Nero was the Antichrist); but Gabriel’s lyrics are bringing these ideas into the modern world, to a time when there were great fears of nuclear war between the US and the USSR. Since we’re in a new Cold War now, with the US/NATO empire on one side and Russia and China on the other, all nuclear-armed, the warnings of “Supper’s Ready” are all the more relevant today.

Indeed, it really does feel as if we’re coming dangerously close to the end of the world, not only because of this new Cold War, which is being expanded, it seems, to include the Middle East as struggles by Yemen to disrupt the Gaza genocide are being frustrated by the American empire (Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine is a kind of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” in its own right), but also by global warming (recall the foxy lady on the block of ice of Foxtrot‘s cover).

Those of us who want justice feel caught between Scylla and Charybdis: if we intervene in an attempt to bring about revolution, the fascist police can shoot us down; if we sit back and do nothing like the stoned lotus-eaters, letting the imperialists have their way (their all-too-obedient police and military being the Winklers and Canute-flatterers of our day), we’ll all die. Speaking of Scylla and Charybdis, the apocalypse of “Supper’s Ready” could be compared to the unavoidable danger and death faced by Odysseus and his crew, six of whom die.

Towards the end of “Apocalypse in 9/8,” after Banks’s organ solo and Gabriel’s singing of the second verse, Banks comes in with the Mellotron and plays a descending melodic line of high E, E-flat, D, and C. Then the song segues into the seventh and last part, “Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with a reprise of the “and it’s ‘Hey babe, with your guardian eyes so blue'” section of “Lover’s Leap.” Just as Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca and into Penelope’s arms, so does the husband finally return (as I insist, in my interpretation of Gabriel’s lyrics, happens) to his wife.

Note how passionately Gabriel sings of how far away, and for so long, he’s been from her “loving arms.” This doesn’t sound like a man whose woman has been with him the whole time, as the programme notes would have us believe. Collins hits some tubular bells for even greater dramatic effect: first, a first-inversion B major triad, then B, B-flat, A-flat, G-flat, E. One might think of church bells, since a happy ending after the apocalypse can only be the attainment of heaven.

Just as the lovers could be likened to Odysseus and Penelope, in the context of all the Biblical imagery in Gabriel’s lyrics, the couple could also be likened to the Christian bride (the Church) and the groom (Christ), as the lovers of the Song of Songs are often allegorized. Recall also the influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress, as I mentioned above.

And with the “angel standing in the sun…crying with a loud voice, ‘This is the supper of the mighty God'” (Revelation 19:17), we come to the inspiration for the title of this side-long epic. (One might also think of Psalm 23:5.)

But what does all of this Christian symbolism mean? Note how the music of this last section is, ironically, the same as that of “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” but much more passionate, climactic, and sincere. In these two sections of “Supper’s Ready,” we have a contrast between the religious hypocrisy of the GESM and the heartfelt love and genuine spirituality of “As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs.”

There’s a big difference between those capitalists, settler-colonialists, and imperialists who claim to have Christian motives for their evil acts, those who “invest in the church for [their] heaven,” and those whose love is as real as that of the husband and wife of this epic. There’s a big difference between toadying up to authority (people like The Winkler and Canute’s flatterers), and a genuine love of God (“lord of lords, king of kings”).

VII: Conclusion

So, what does the concept of Foxtrot as an album all mean? The destruction of all human life is observed by an alien, and we can see a number of the causes of that destruction. The idealizing of the past, as justifying conservative, reactionary attitudes, which undermine efforts at progressive change; the greedy control of land and wealth, whose ill effects range from landlords evicting tenants to settler-colonialists and imperialists taking land away from the indigenous peoples of the world; servile obsequiousness to authority, to narcissists, and to religious hypocrites, who manipulate us all into supporting wars that ultimately lead to the annihilation of the human race. And instead of doing anything about it, so many of us would rather lie about and smoke dope.

And what would be a cure to these ills? Yet another thing that the lovers of “Supper’s Ready” could represent is our communal relationship with each other. The husband and wife, thus, are the self and other. Their separation, as I interpret it to be during the middle of the story, and expressed as such at both the beginning and the end of the epic story (“I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm/loving arms.”), can represent social alienation in general, another well-known symptom of capitalism, or any form of class conflict.

So the cure of the ills that will destroy our world includes a restoration of that communal love, whose solidarity will end alienation, and with that, end war, greed, servility, slothful intoxication, and the wrong-headed idealization of the past. For it is to the future that we must look to make a better world, “to take [us] to the New Jerusalem.”