The sleeve bears a real knife cut across its painted surface. Paul Whitehead, the artist, had been asked to rework his painting after the band added one more song to the record, and the members themselves suggested he take a blade to it. That cover belonged to Trespass, the second studio album by Genesis, released on 23 October 1970 on Charisma Records.
A lineup already falling apart
Trespass was the last Genesis record with original guitarist Anthony Phillips and the only one with drummer John Mayhew. It was also a band in limbo. Phillips told Rutherford he was leaving after the Kingston Polytechnic concert on 9 July 1970, and his departure nearly broke Genesis up. The group talked it over and chose to carry on, but the album they had just made arrived as a document of a lineup that no longer existed.
The music itself had moved far from the pop-leaning sound of the debut, From Genesis to Revelation. Recorded at Trident Studios in London on 16-track tape, Trespass leaned into folk-prog, with gentle acoustic pieces built from layers of twelve-string guitars. Phillips remembered the sessions as far more sophisticated than the first album, thanks to that multitrack setup, and bassist Mike Rutherford said it was the only Genesis album where every track came from equal contributions by all the players. The album also carried traces of earlier work. "Visions of Angels" had been recorded for the previous album but was left off, and "Stagnation" drew on fragments of an unrecorded epic suite called "The Movement". In the final mix of "Stagnation", around ten acoustic guitars partly cancelled each other out, while Gabriel sang into a narrow tube to create an underwater vocal effect.
From Looking for Someone to The Knife
The record opens with 'Looking for Someone', which starts with Peter Gabriel's voice over organ. Elsewhere the tone shifts hard: 'The Knife' began life as 'The Nice', a nod to Keith Emerson's band, and its organ part aped Emerson's style. In concert the song stretched to nineteen minutes, but on the album it was cut to nine. Gabriel wrote the lyric as a parody of a protest song, and the spoken interlude drew on the shootings at Kent State University.
At release, Trespass did almost nothing in Britain and America. It missed the charts in both countries, and the initial pressing was just 6000 copies. Critics were split, and few outside a small circle seemed to notice. Yet in Belgium it topped the chart, and that success led to Genesis's first shows abroad in January 1971. The knife on the sleeve had cut two ways: near-collapse at home, a lifeline across the Channel. The album also earned a warmer notice from Melody Maker, which made it Album of the Month even against Led Zeppelin III and Atom Heart Mother. Later reappraisals were harsher: Rolling Stone dismissed the 1974 reissue as spotty and innately dull, while an AllMusic reviewer felt the guitars were nearly lost in the mix and Banks's keyboards dominated.
The band that made Trespass was already being replaced before the record reached shops. Mayhew, older than the rest and never part of the songwriting, was out, and Phil Collins joined on drums in August. With no replacement found for Phillips, Genesis toured as a four-piece. The album they were promoting was a farewell to one era and a shaky first step into another. The album's later life was quieter but not empty. A 1984 reissue briefly reached number 98 in the UK and stayed in the chart for one week. In the United States, Trespass first appeared on the jazz label Impulse!, part of ABC.
Fifty-six years on, Trespass remains the hinge: an album that nearly closed the book on Genesis, then quietly kept it open. The Belgian number one did not make them stars, but it bought time for the next lineup to form. The cover's real cut, made at the band's own suggestion, still marks the moment when Genesis chose to keep going with a blade at their throat.
The Belgian number one did not make them stars, but it bought time for the next lineup to form.