The Cinema Show

The knock on progressive rock — deserved in many cases — is that technical virtuosity displaced emotional communication, that bands spent so much energy demonstrating what they could do that they forgot to make listeners feel anything. “The Cinema Show” is the refutation of that critique. It is technically extraordinary, rhythmically complex, instrumentally virtuosic, and genuinely moving — not despite its complexity but through it.

The song opens with Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins trading verses over twelve-string acoustic guitars, the pastoral beauty of the arrangement establishing a narrative about two young people on a date at the cinema. The vocal section is lovely, unhurried, the kind of melodic writing that Genesis did in the early 1970s before the commercial pressures of the late decade simplified their approach. Then, around the five-minute mark, the vocals end and something else begins.

Tony Banks’s synthesizer solo over Phil Collins’s 7/8 drum groove is one of progressive rock’s most celebrated instrumental passages — deservedly so. The time signature creates a gentle but persistent sense of forward motion that is slightly off-kilter, never fully settling, generating tension that the melodic content of the solo continually promises to resolve. Collins navigates the 7/8 with the ease of someone for whom unusual time signatures were simply the natural medium of expression.

“See with myriad eyes / A cinema girl / With a cinema smile.”

What makes this more than a showcase is the connection between the vocal section and the instrumental. The young couple at the cinema, the specific vulnerability of early romantic feeling — the instrumental section that follows is not separate from this theme but its extension. The complexity of the music becomes the complexity of the feeling.

Peter Gabriel would leave Genesis two years later. Collins would take over and steer the band toward stadiums and radio. “The Cinema Show” exists in the brief period when they were both present and the balance between ambition and feeling was perfect.