When Shall We Three Meet Again?

It was a basketball game that gave it away in the end. On January 22, Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford were spotted sitting together in the crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden, watching the New York Knicks vs Los Angeles Lakers.

It seemed an unlikely place for three Englishmen of a certain age to be hanging out, and the rumour mill instantly sparked to life: the trio were in New York to discuss playing together as Genesis for the first time in 13 years.

“A guy said to me, ‘Why are you over here?’” Tony Banks tells Prog. “I just said, ‘Oh, for a wedding.’ Obviously, he knew we weren’t there for a wedding. I think people who cared about Genesis knew what was really happening.”

“People go, ‘It would be a lovely idea for Peter to rejoin’, but he left 45 years ago. And Steve left 43 years ago. People don’t think about how it works–who sings what? No, it was always going to be the three of us.”
Mike Rutherford

What was really happening was that, yes, a Genesis reunion was in the air. Except it was way further down the line than anyone could have guessed.

Banks, Rutherford and Collins weren’t just in New York to watch some basketball and discuss getting back together for a belated, and unexpected, follow-up to 2007’s Turn It On Again tour. They were actually holed up in a rehearsal studio in the Big Apple, testing the waters on a musical–and in Collins’ case, physical–level.

“It wasn’t a foregone conclusion, because we had to see how things would work out,” says Rutherford. “You can’t just go and book some