Let’s talk about this romantic song, shall we? It’s a lovely little opening here with the tinkling 12-string sound. It gives similar vibes to “The Musical Box” a couple albums earlier, though the notes and structures are very different. But it almost wasn’t to be.
Steve: When it was originally put together it was linked to “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight”. We had a very sort of contentious meeting about this at the time. I remember Phil saying, “Well, if there’s a 12-string passage in something, does it mean that every long song has to have a 12-string passage in it?” There were some crestfallen faces. So we started to do some long songs that didn’t have 12-string passages in them.
You can almost see Mike’s face getting even longer than usual at an exasperated Phil saying “Enough with the 12-strings already!” And indeed, while the 12-string wouldn’t exactly go away until the three-piece era, after this album it did become slightly less ubiquitous. But by golly, “The Cinema Show” is a romantic song, and romance means 12-string guitar!
Mike: Another good example of when I tuned my 12-strings. Normally you’ve got twelve strings and they’re paired up, and you tune each pair to the same note. I started tuning each pair to harmony notes. Which is how the song starts with that little rundown. Now what the hell that tuning is, I haven’t got a clue. Because the other day in New York they were saying, “Let’s do the first half of ‘Cinema Show’ maybe.” And I said, “Well, I have no idea how I played it. We’d have to work a compromised version out.”
Spoiler alert: they never did work a compromised tuning out, so if you’re disappointed that you never got to hear “The Cinema Show” in its entirety in the 21st century, it’s all Mike’s fault. Anyway, there are a lot of guitar strings tinkling around in this one.
Steve: I was influenced by the flute work of Ian McDonald working with King Crimson, so I tried to play very pastoral phrases. I developed it a bit more when we did it live, doing percussion noises and whathaveyou. But in some ways it typifies the Genesis sound because you’ve got almost a plethora of 12-strings going: sometimes two 12-strings, sometimes three. And an electric 6-string as well. And this jangly sound where you can’t tell: it sounds almost...is that a keyboard? Is that a guitar? What is that sound?
And then we get the story, or really more like a snapshot, of this busy young woman trying to tidy up her place and herself before going to catch a movie with her date. I confess when I first heard the lyric that she “clears her morning meal” I thought it meant she was having some gastrointestinal difficulties, if you catch my drift. Decidedly unromantic, that. But I wouldn’t have put something like that past Peter. Was it Peter? Who did the lyrics to this one, anyway?
In any case, from Juliet we go straight to Romeo, who is basically just looking to get laid. It’s a classic story. Boy meets girl, boy lusts after girl, girl agrees to a pleasant night at the cinema, boy gives girl chocolates, girl thinks boy is nice, boy propositions girl, both go home a little more tired. Tale as old as time, that one. And it’s from there that Tiresias makes his appearance, where his actual background is relayed. There are variations on the classical myth, but Genesis lands on one of them in particular.
Tiresias, as the story goes, was hiking up a mountain and saw a pair of snakes “getting nasty,” as I think they called it back then. He used his walking stick to “break that shit up,” I think was the parlance, which incurred the wrath of the goddess queen Hera, who was aspected to things like fertility. Hera was a capricious and impulsive goddess, and so she immediately decided that interrupting a pair of fornicating snakes was punishable by forced sex change. Thus, she transformed Tiresias into a woman and made Tiresias one of her priestesses so (s)he could atone. Tiresias was surprisingly not much put out by this turn of events, and found a nice man to settle down and have kids with. After some years, Mother Tiresias found some more snakes doin’ the deed, and left them alone. Hera then turned Tiresias back into a man since he’d seemed to learn his lesson, which meant that in a very strange twist of fate, his kids now had two biological dads; I imagine the family dynamics probably got a little awkward after that.
Later, Hera and her husband Zeus found themselves in an argument over who derived more pleasure from sex - men or women. Being exceedingly petty gods with victim complexes, each one wanted the other sex to be the “winner.” That is, Hera argued that men enjoyed sex more, and Zeus the opposite. At an impasse, Hera summoned Tiresias on the basis that he was the only person - mortal or god - who had experienced sex from both sides of the equation. They posed the question to him, and though he was a priest(ess?) of Hera, he felt compelled to answer truthfully: women get way more out of it than men do. Genesis translate this reply thusly: “Once a man, like the sea I raged. Once a woman, like the earth I gave. But there is, in fact, more earth than sea.” A furious Hera struck him blind on the spot for embarrassing her, but a very pleased Zeus tried to make up for it by giving him foresight instead. Thus, Tiresias became known as a blind seer, a title as fittingly oxymoronic as his status as the first man-woman-man.
So, in summary, “The Cinema Show” isn’t an adolescent fixation on sex. No, it’s an adolescent fixation on sex combined with classical Greek mythology. See? All grown up now! In fairness though, musically that maturation is very clear. After our first dalliance with Tiresias, we go into a veritable forest of guitar strings once again, featuring oboe and flute solos. It’s such a unique atmosphere. As much as I love the live versions of this song, listening to this section on Seconds Out you can’t help but feel like an entire audio channel is missing. Those jazzy, improv style woodwind lines have an impact that to me can’t be overstated.
From: https://www.reddit.com/r/Genesis/comments/ixm1qe/hindsight_is_2020_9_the_cinema_show/
