“I said, ‘Are we sure we can write a song about death?’”: The story of Mike + The Mechanics' classic No.1 The Living Years

Mike Rutherford in 1986.

Mike Rutherford was midway through the US leg of Genesis’s mammoth Invisible Touch world tour when he received a phone call at 3am one morning to tell him that his father had died.

It was late 1986 and the guitarist and founding member of Genesis flew home on Concorde for the funeral.