In 1986, Genesis earned their first No. 1 hit song on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Invisible Touch.” The track appeared on the album of the same name and became the band’s only No. 1 hit. Along with a top spot on the Hot 100, it stayed at No. 1 on the Airplay chart for three weeks.
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However, in mid-1986, “Invisible Touch” was knocked off the top spot by someone very familiar with Genesis. At the time, the band didn’t know it, but former vocalist Peter Gabriel took the No. 1 spot with his song “Sledgehammer.”
Speaking to The Guardian in 2014, Phil Collins joked about the occurrence, stating that Genesis wasn’t aware that Gabriel had ousted them.
“I read recently that Peter Gabriel knocked us off the No. 1 spot with ‘Sledgehammer’,” he said. “We weren’t aware of that at the time. If we had been, we’d probably have sent him a telegram saying: ‘Congratulations, bastard.’”
“Invisible Touch” Was Phil Collins’ “Favorite Genesis Song” but Once Admitted That It Came Out of “Nowhere”
In the same Guardian interview, Phil Collins and bassist Mike Rutherford spoke about the making of “Invisible Touch.” According to the two, the song came virtually “out of nowhere” during a jam session.
“We would arrive in the studio every day and just start playing,” said Collins, speaking of the making of Invisible Touch. “One day Mike Rutherford played a riff on the guitar, with an echo, and I suddenly sang: ‘She seems to have an invisible touch – yeah!’ It came in to my head fully formed.”
He continued, “I’m sure people have all kinds of ideas about how we wrote these songs they love or loathe, but really our writing process was close to jazz. We improvised, we weren’t afraid to make lousy noises. We knew each other well: if I started singing crap, no one would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Still, there was a good percentage of crap.”
Rutherford then explained a bit of their process for writing music during the album’s inception. “On day one, we had no songs, no ideas, and a blank bit of paper,” he said. “Phil was always keen to fill that bit of paper – he was very organized – and we let him. It’s a wonderful song: upbeat, fun to play, always a strong moment in any gig.”
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