In 1999, a single-disc album ‘Turn It On Again: The Hits’ was released as a concise collection of Genesis’ chart hits. But it lacked the materials from Gabriel years, since almost all the hits were made in Phil Collins years. And with only one CD, there wasn’t enough space for album cuts.
In 2007, they tried to fix those flaws by the release of the improved edition, marked as ‘The Tour Edition’. By upgrading to double-CD album, they create additional space for tracks from Gabriel years, album cuts, and some rarities. This album contains most of their UK singles, adding more Gabriel’s works such as “The Knife, Pt.1”, “Counting Out Time”, “A Trick of the Tail”, and “Your Own Special Way”. They also manage to fill in some fan favorites missed in the previous edition such as “No Reply At All”, “Man On the Corner”, “Paperlate”, and “Illegal Alien”. They also include 2 rarities, “Pigeons” and “Inside and Out”, previously only appeared on the box set. This album has 2 obvious flaws (if you would call them ‘flaws’); first is that the producers chose to sequence the tracks in reverse-chronicle order. Second is that singles could not tell the whole story of the band, since they released few singles during Gabriel’s era.
However, it manages to give a nice overview of the band’s long career through the band’s singles – although not the complete story. It is a perfect album for listeners who want to start their Genesis collection but don’t know which way they should go. |