Genesis — Turn It On Again

JUL 01 1980 · 12:00

Genesis — Turn It On Again (1980) Director: Stuart Orme Era: Post-Progressive Pop Crossover (1980) - Genesis's transitional moment from art-rock complexity toward mainstream accessibility, coinciding with the Duke album and Phil Collins's emergence as lead vocalist and pop-facing frontman. High-priority archive acquisition. This is the confirmed official promotional film for one of Genesis's most enduring and commercially significant singles — a track that lent its name to the band's 1999 greatest hits compilation and their 2007 reunion world tour. As a pre-MTV artifact directed by Stuart Orme (who maintained a working relationship with the band through Three Sides Live), the video offers a rare, unmediated window into early 1980s British promo film craft and the visual identity of Genesis's most commercially successful lineup configuration. Context: Released in March 1980 as the lead single from Duke, 'Turn It On Again' marks a decisive turning point in Genesis's commercial trajectory — the first album written entirely as a three-piece (Banks, Collins, Rutherford) following Steve Hackett's 1977 departure. The song reached #8 on the UK Singles Chart, the band's second top-10 hit, consolidating the shift toward accessible, radio-friendly songwriting without fully abandoning the group's progressive DNA. The lyric, written by Mike Rutherford, depicts a man whose sole social world is television — a prescient critique of media dependency that resonates across subsequent decades of screen culture. The video's understated performance aesthetic deliberately distances Genesis from both the theatrical excess of their Gabriel-era past and the artifice of emerging new wave image-consciousness, positioning the band as musicianly craftsmen rather than pop spectacle. Director notes: Orme directed the official 1980 promo clip for 'Turn It On Again,' released to support Genesis's Duke album and its UK single (Charisma Records, CB 356). The video is a performance-based promo consistent with the era's BBC and ITV promotional clip conventions, likely shot on film in a controlled stage environment. Orme also directed Genesis: Three Sides Live, demonstrating an ongoing working relationship with the band into the early 1980s. The clip predates MTV's August 1981 launch and was produced for UK broadcast promotion, making it one of the earliest official Genesis promotional films for the Banks-Collins-Rutherford trio lineup.