The Big Genesis Poll, part 2: the results

Running a second poll for Genesis covering their more commercially sucessful (and arguably more radio friendly) years was always going to divide opinion. Naturally, as Real Gone’s last poll shows, there are many people very keen on the 70s prog side of the band who just never took to the more commercial Genesis. Likewise, the band picked up fans throughout the 80s who just never quite understood the earlier work.

With this in mind, the second poll was always going to be interesting. However, unlike the second Queen poll, it really isn’t a clean sweep for the well known hits. Far from it, in fact. The majority of our top ten proves that you can take the prog out the band, but you can’t take the prog from the dyed-in the wool fan. Genesis recorded relatively few songs with epic track lengths from the eighties onward, but yet Real Gone’s readers and supporters have placed most of those near the top of our chart! Sure, it represents the views of only a small core of fans, but support for these tracks (and especially those from 1980’s ‘Duke’ is overwhelming – ‘Duke’s Travels’ coming out on top, with the same albums lengthy ‘Duchess’ and pompy ‘Behind The Lines’ scoring high marks. Personally, at Real Gone, we’ve always preferred Phil’s pop-oriented re-recording of the latter, but there you go. You’ll get no argument from us re: ‘Home By The Sea’, though.

You can check out the final tally here. To mark the closure of the Genesis polls, here are a selection of clips taken from the band’s later years. Enjoy!