“It’s a pretty heavy lyric. I said, ‘Are we sure we can write a song about death?’”: How Mike + The Mechanics channelled grief to create a classic ’80s No.1

Mike Rutherford was midway through the US leg of Genesis’s mammoth Invisible Touch world tour when he received a phone call at 3am one morning to tell him that his father had died.

It was late 1986 and the guitarist and founding member of Genesis flew home on Concorde for the funeral.

One year after his father’s death, Rutherford started to reassess his relationship with his father, a Royal Naval captain who had served in the Second World War and had been awarded the DSO and the CBE.

Rutherford had recently formed a songwriting partnership with Scottish singer, songwriter and composer B.A. Robertson, whose own father had also died around the same time.

They decided to write a song about their losses and their shared regret over being unable to communicate as they would have liked with their fathers.

The result was The Living Years, a heartfelt and poignant ballad.

The song’s universal themes of loss and regret following the death of a parent would go on to resonate with record buyers around the globe.

The emotional distance that existed between Rutherford and his father was not uncommon between generations back in the 1960s. But his father’s military background arguably made the chasm between them more acute.

“As a teenager in the late 1960s, the last thing I wanted was to be like my father,” Rutherford wrote in The Guardian in 2014.

“He was a retired naval captain who'd fought in the Second World War. I'd just recorded my first album with Genesis, had hair down to my elbows and lived in jeans and a military jacket from Kensington market that smelled like an entire battalion had worn it at some stage or another.

“It never occurred to me that he might see this as disrespectful.”

Despite their differences, Rutherford’s father ultimately decided to help his son with his musical ambitions.

“I still don't understand why he decided to support me after all he'd spent on my education,” Rutherford said. “But he did. He even put up some more money so we could buy equipment. And when Phil Collins joined the band as our drummer in 1970, my parents let us stay at their house in Farnham while we rehearsed.”

By the mid-’80s, Genesis were stratospherically successful, with four US Top 5 singles and their first No.1 with Invisible Touch.

Rutherford had already recorded two solo albums, Smallcreep’s Day (1980) and Acting Very Strange (1982), but he was dissatisfied with his solo work and vowed never to record a solo album again.

He realised that collaboration was the key.

“I had a revelation, too, in this time period ... that I'm not complete on my own,” he told interviewer Dan Neer in 1985. “I'm much more creative and inspired when there are other people around me and I'm bouncing ideas off."

B.A. Robertson would prove a perfect co-writer for Rutherford.

That year, Rutherford formed a band called the band Mike + The Mechanics as a vehicle for his songs and recruited vocalists Paul Carrack and Paul Young, along with keyboardist Adrian Lee and drummer Peter Van Hooke.

In 1985 came a self-titled debut album, which yielded two Top 10 singles in the US: Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground) and All I Need Is A Miracle.

Buoyed by the success, Rutherford decided to continue with what he had intended to be a one-off side project.

After Genesis’s Invisible Touch tour wound up with four dates at Wembley Stadium in July 1987, Rutherford turned his attention to a second Mike + The Mechanics album.

In January, 1988, he began a prolific period of writing and this was when the song The Living Years began to take shape.

Many believe that the song’s lyrics were solely about Rutherford’s relationship with his father and this notion is reinforced by the official video, in which Rutherford and his then eight-year-old son Tom are filmed in various locations around Porlock Weir in West Somerset.

But the lyrics were actually written by B.A. Robertson while Rutherford wrote the music.

That said, the song is inspired by both men’s experiences.

“Being of similar age, we both came from an era where our parents had lived through two world wars, when young men wanted to be like their fathers – wear the same clothes, do the same things,” Rutherford told Songwriter magazine in December 2019.

“But then there was a huge change and our generation wanted to be anything but their fathers. It wasn't our parents' fault. There was just a big social change.

“Pop music had come along, The Beatles, denim trousers... for the first time, teens had their own culture. That's how our generation couldn't really talk to our parents in the same way.

“So we had the idea of writing a song about how you never really talk to your father, and you miss out on these things.”

As they started work on the song, Rutherford was concerned that it may come across as too heavy and mawkish.

As he said: “It’s all very well to start working on it, but it’s a pretty heavy lyric, so I turned to B.A. and said, ‘Are we sure we can write a song about death?’ If we’d got it wrong, it would’ve been very schmaltzy – that was always my worry.”

For all its poignancy, there is a directness to Robertson’s lyrics. “Every generation/Blames the one before,” it begins.

From that point on, the lyrics recount the difficulty of communicating complex emotions: “Crumpled bits of paper/Filled with imperfect thought/Stilted conversations/I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got.”

“The lyrics were an assembly,” Robertson told American Songwriter magazine in August 2021. “I had the first two verses before I took it to Mike. The third verse I wrote when I pulled over on the A3, the road from Guildford to London.

“I wrote the last verse in Los Angeles at a house I had just bought. I wrote it outside the kitchen window, leaning on the ledge one afternoon.”

The last verse is arguably the most affecting. “I wasn't there that morning/When my father passed away/I didn't get to tell him/All the things I had to say.”

But the song also closes on a life-affirming note as it looks to the next generation. “I think I caught his spirit/Later that same year/I’m sure I heard his echo/In my baby’s new born tears.”

Rutherford recalled that it was sometimes difficult to contain emotions when listening to the lyrics.

“I remember that during the writing of it, B.A. would come down some days towards the end when we’d just do lyrics, and a couple of times I had to leave the room. The eyes started welling up – it touched a nerve with both of us.”

Rutherford and the band recorded the song and the album that bears its name from 8 April to 8 August 1988.

Genesis’s own studio, The Farm, in Chiddingfold, Surrey, was the facility chosen for recording.

Chris Neil was co-producer with Rutherford and Neil also co-wrote five songs on the album.

Had it not been for Neil, The Living Years would have been a significantly longer song than it is.

“I remember now that The Living Years had a sort of four-minute, ‘left-turn’ middle section at one point, which B.A. and I liked,” recalled Rutherford, “It was a rambling instrumental and I can’t remember how it went.

“But Chris Neil said, ‘Guys, are you really sure it needs that?’ We were like, ‘Hang on a minute, maybe you’re right’.

“So we dropped it and he was right – it could’ve been a seven-minute song.”

At its core, The Living Years is a soulful ballad, in which the digital soundscape of synths such as the Yamaha DX7ii and D-50 are offset by Paul Carrack’s warm and emotive vocal delivery.

Carrack’s vocals are superb, effortlessly imbuing the lyrics with real melancholy and yearning while instilling a sense of hope and resolution.

Written in the key of Ab major, The Living Years moves along at a stately 98 bpm. Sweeping synth strings intro the song and 20 seconds in, a rhythmic guitar/synth pattern enters the mix, which forms the central motif and drives the whole track forward.

It takes 1min 48secs for the first chorus to appear, at which point a choir kicks in like a squadron of celestial angels.

There are a few moments when the lyrics feel too oppressive. But overall, the sheer emotional honesty of the song overrides such doubts.

While neither Rutherford or Robertson knew it at the time of recording the song, the lyrics rang particularly true for singer Paul Carrack.

“I didn’t realise at the time that Paul Carrack’s father died when he was young,” Rutherford told Songwriting magazine in December 2019. “So, in a sense, the song had a resonance for him.”

The Living Years was released on 27 December 1988 and topped the charts in the US, Australia, Japan and Ireland, reaching No.2 in the UK.

In 1989, the song won an Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically, and in 1996 Burt Bacharach stated that the song featured one of the finest lyrics of the last ten years.

In an interview with Songwriting magazine in 2019, Rutherford recalled a compliment he received when the sessions were over. “At the end of the album, I remember Chris Neil shaking my hand and saying, ‘I just want to thank you because it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever worked on’. I was like, ‘Oh, okay!’ You know it’s good, but often when you’re so close to a song you can’t see it.”

Only when Mike + The Mechanics went out on tour did Rutherford get to see first-hand the impact that he and B.A. Robertson’s song really had.

“To have a song that is a hit and becomes part of people’s life is wonderful, but to have a song that touches them like this… most nights on the Mechanics tour you’ll see someone in the audience crying.”