“Abacab” by Genesis

"Abacab" gave Genesis the title track of their 1981 album, and it went out as a single on 14 August 1981. The name isn't code for anything mystical: the band built the song from three chunks of music, tagged A, B and C, and at one point they happened to fall in the order A-B-A-C-A-B. By the final version the pieces had been reshuffled into something else entirely, but the label stuck.

Mike Rutherford did most of the writing, with Tony Banks and Phil Collins, and supplied the words; Genesis produced it themselves, with Hugh Padgham engineering. This is a leaner, meaner Genesis, trading the old prog sprawl for a hard, clanking groove, Collins' drums punching holes in the mix and Banks' keyboards stabbing rather than soaring. It reached number nine in Britain and, as the album's second US single, got to 26 on the Hot 100 early in 1982.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.