Songoftheday 11/18/14 - She has a built in ability to take everything she sees and now it seems I'm falling for her...

Genesis - "Invisible Touch"
from the album Invisible Touch (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12

Today's Song of the Day comes from the British progressive rock band Genesis, who had a sizable fanbase throughout the world, but their mainstream pop success was more modest. Since Phil Collins had ascended to the lead singer role after the departure of Peter Gabriel, their music had become more mainstream pop inflected, though even their 1984 self-titled album only sent one single, "That's All", into the American top-40.

But a lot had changed between then and the time their next album would be released in 1986. Phil Collins' solo career had gotten a huge boost on his No Jacket Required album, scoring a pair of #1 hits and another duo of top-ten songs, as well as another chart-topper with "Separate Lives" from the White Nights movie. Also, guitarist Mike Rutherford's side-project Mike & The Mechanics had released a successful debut album that placed two singles into the American pop top-ten as well. So when it came time to reassemble Genesis, their profile couldn't have been higher. Instead of cashing in on that clout and evolving their music to bring up the "thinking man's rock" quotient on top-40 radio, the trio dumbed down for the incredibly basic "Invisible Touch". With a chorus that sounds like it was composed by a sixth-grader, the repetitive fluff grew out of jamming on another cut on the album, "Domino". But the mid-80s Reaganite kiddies just ate it up....

"Invisible Touch" became the band biggest American hit of their career, going to #1 on the pop chart in July of 1986. The record also topped the Mainstream Rock radio chart and climbed to #3 on the Adult Contemporary radio list in Billboard magazine. Internationally, while the single went top-ten in Australia and Canada, their fellow countrymen in Britain weren't as swayed (initially), stopping the song at #15.

And why do I have such a hatred towards "Invisible Touch"? Surely there's more painful records out there by lesser talent, but like "We Built This City", there is nothing that makes me hurl more than a band with a proven track record of goodness lower themselves to this type of sing-song drivel. But hey, it bought them plenty of houses, I'm sure...

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Here's the band touring behind the album in 1986...

While "Invisible Touch" didn't make the British top-ten on the first go, the live version of the song released as a single in 1992 did the trick, peaking at #7....

Up tomorrow: Australian new wavers succeed by being forgotten.