‘It’s always worth mentioning that most band members start a solo career because they’re not happy in their main band,” Mike Rutherford says when asked why he’d stepped away from Genesis in 1985 to form a second band, Mike + the Mechanics. “In our case, we were having a gas with Genesis. But we’d been together for quite a few years, and it’s a bit like, let’s just try a bit of variety, make the page a little bit bigger. In a funny way, it helped keep Genesis going for a lot longer.”
Rutherford, who’d penned the lyrics for such Genesis hits as “Follow You, Follow Me,” “Land of Confusion,” and “Throwing It All Away,” had already recorded two albums under his own name before founding the Mechanics. Fronted by singers Paul Carrack and Paul Young (who died in 2000), the new group launched its own string of hit singles, including “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground),” “All I Need Is a Miracle,” and — biggest of all — “The Living Years.”
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That last song lent its name to Rutherford’s new memoir, in which he mingles his memories with passages from an unpublished memoir of his father, a career military man. Speaking by telephone from Tarrytown, N.Y., where a new Mechanics lineup would play that evening, Rutherford talked about the band, his memoir, and those pesky Genesis reunion rumors — which only intensified when Rutherford, Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Hackett got together last year for “Genesis — Sum of the Parts,” a Showtime special now available on home video.
Q. Genesis was at a peak of popularity in 1985 when you formed Mike + the Mechanics, and you’d also recorded under your own name. What prompted you to form a second band?
A. Having sung on “Acting Very Strange,” I thought, you know what, I’m not a singer; I’m a songwriter, and I want a good voice to sing it. So I thought, let’s go and do what I like doing best, which is collaboration. I got a list of songwriters, and the first two were Chris Neil and B. A. Robertson — and that’s as far as I got [laughs].
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Q. What prompted you to reunite the Mechanics now, and how did you find singers to fill the roles of Paul Carrack and Paul Young?
A. We kind of stopped for about eight years after Paul Young — it was like the end of an era. Carrack and I thought, “We had a great time, that’s enough.” Then I wrote some songs four or five years ago that sounded a bit like Mechanics songs. And this time I knew what we needed: The Mechanics always had two singers, an R&B voice and a rock voice. I knew Andrew Roachford, who’s got a great R&B voice. Tim Howar has been in rock bands, and in the theater world, as well.
Q. On the recent Genesis anthology “R-Kive,” Mechanics songs are set alongside Genesis tracks and solo cuts by Phil, Peter, Tony, and Steve. Was there a musical point you were all trying to make by gathering the flock under a single roof?
A. The reason for doing it is a lot of people don’t tie it all in. People say to me, “Was Phil the drummer?” Or they say, “Was Gabriel in Genesis?” Or they say, “You’re in Mike + the Mechanics as well?” When we put the whole package together, it has a kind of continuity and shows the whole picture rather well, I think.
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Q. Genesis emerged from a smart, creative, and rebellious generation that came up in the wake of two world wars. When you mixed passages from your father’s unpublished memoir with your own experiences for your book, were you surprised to find connections with a father who’d had a distinguished military career?
A. That’s one of the revelations in the book, really. You always reckoned that you didn’t share very much in terms of how your life went, but then doing the book, you realize that you did share more than you thought. You’re away from home a lot, managing children, managing home affairs, managing work, managing a team you work with.
A book just about Genesis and what I’d done — it’s all out there, it’s all been written about. But I’ve had a huge fascination for a long time about that huge generational shift. The United Kingdom was an older, more established, stiffer country: empire days, commonwealth, two world wars. Until our era, young men at 21 wanted to become their fathers. There wasn’t any youth culture; there were no blue jeans and pop music and guitars. There was a huge change, I think. And in a sense, the story of what happened with the band against that backdrop is interesting.
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Q. Here we are in 2015, awash in renewed rumors about a Genesis reunion with Gabriel and Hackett. Why do you suppose people are so keen to see the five of you back together?
A. I think people like a bit of history. First and foremost, as Peter said, we’re all still above the grass, which is a good starting point. There’s no plans for anything at the moment, that’s really the thing — but you never know what project might come along. The last tour with Phil wasn’t planned at all, really. Things just fall in a certain pattern, and you kind of just go with it.
Interview was condensed and edited. Steve Smith can be reached at steven.smith@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @nightafternight.