Abacab

Sealed brand new repressing of this classic album with a smart repro. cover. Made in the EU.

Abacab is the eleventh studio album from the English rock band Genesis, released in September 1981 on Charisma Records in the United Kingdom and Atlantic Records in the United States. The album's sound is more synth-oriented but sparingly arranged, with less of a dense texture than previous albums.

Abacab became the band's second consecutive UK No. 1 album. It reached No. 7 in the U.S. where it was certified double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for over 2 million copies sold.

Genesis initially wrote an album's worth of material which they subsequently discarded because they saw themselves as becoming, in Mike Rutherford's words, "a caricature of ourselves". In what he saw as a major turning point for the group, they made a decision to throw out any songs which sounded like anything they had done before.^[1]

Genesis recorded the album at their newly created new studio, The Farm. The band also produced Abacab themselves. Engineer Hugh Padgham, who had assisted Collins on Face Value, continued to work on Genesis and Collins recordings through the end of the 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

The album takes its name from an early arrangement of the title track. Rutherford said on the U.S. radio show In the Studio with Redbeard (which spotlighted Duke and Abacab in one episode): "There were three bits of music in 'Abacab', and we referred to them as 'section a', 'section b', and 'section c'... and at different times, they were in different order. We'd start with 'section a' and then have 'section c' ... and at one point in time, it spelled Abacab. On the final version, it's not that at all, it's like 'Accaabbaac'."^[2]

Three songs from the Abacab sessions — "Paperlate", "You Might Recall", and "Me & Virgil" — were issued on the 3×3 EP. They were also issued on the non-UK releases of 1982's Three Sides Live. Two other songs from the sessions, "Naminanu" and "Submarine", appeared as B-sides on the "Abacab" singles, but were originally intended to be part of "Dodo/Lurker", where the order would have been either "Naminanu/Dodo/Lurker/Submarine" or "Dodo/Lurker/Submarine/Naminanu".^{[citation needed]}

The keyboard sound on "Who Dunnit?" is the result of Banks changing the presets on his Prophet synthesizer as he plays. Live performances of this song featured the novelty of Rutherford playing drums alongside Chester Thompson (although Collins played drums on the studio version).