“A standing ovation”: the 1971 song Phil Collins thinks Led Zeppelin never topped
Phil Collins knows more than a thing or two about Led Zeppelin. Regrettably so.
After all, he was an honorary member of the band for a brief Live Aid reunion that he won’t have forgotten. The world certainly hasn’t, ascribing the charitable as perhaps the most disastrous comeback in rock ‘n’ roll history.
Collins had big shoes to fill, and Jimmy Page thought he took up the late John Bonham’s mantle about as well as David Moyes stepping in for Sir Alex Fergusson. “Robert told me Phil Collins wanted to play with us. I told him that was all right if he knows the numbers,” Page said.
That trust was perhaps a little casual for the most hotly anticipated comeback show in history on the world’s biggest stage. Page would soon live to regret it. “But at the end of the day, he didn’t know anything. We played ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ and he was just there bashing away cluelessly and grinning. I thought that was really a joke,” he said.
Collins felt this joke unfurling in real time, but he insists he wasn’t the punchline. “If I could have walked off, I would have done,” the drummer explained. “It was a disaster, really. Robert wasn’t match-fit with his voice and Jimmy was out of it, dribbling. It wasn’t my fault it was crap,” the prog drummer insisted.
All in all, the whole thing was a horrible ordeal, so it says a lot that Collins still loves the band’s music and isn’t too scarred by the incident to hail the group’s most sensational moments.
In fact, he was inspired to become a drummer in the first place thanks to John Bonham. “Now, when I was growing up – obviously, growing up as a drummer – there were quite a few drummers that caught my fancy over the years,” he recalled..
But one was clearly ahead of the pack. “Ringo to Charlie Watts to Ginger Baker to Keith Moon. But one of the finest, I think, drummers I’ve ever heard, and the first drummer I ever gave a standing ovation to was John Bonham,” he said when selecting his favourite tracks for iTunes.
For the former Genesis man, the stand-out moment where Bonham perfectly came together with his bandmates was the stirring blues epic, ‘When The Levee Breaks’. He went even further on another occasion and claimed, “It’s probably one of the best drum recordings ever made in pop music.”
The power of the beat might catch the ear, but Collins says it has got it all: ”It’s just groove, sound, attitude.” Arriving in 1971, it perfectly captured the sound that the band would call their own.
That sound in question is borne from Bonham placing his drums in the stairway of the grand old building where they were recording. This gave his beat a cavernous wallop that cuts right through the mix. But perhaps more importantly than that, it also mystically honours the history of the song. ‘When The Levee Breaks’ is an old blues anthem, and the echoey nature of the recording sounds like the track’s past howling from within the new interpretation.
It defines his majesty and exemplifies the control he was capable of. As Jason Bonham proudly told Q, “It’s the drum intro of the Gods. You could play it anywhere and people would know it’s John Bonham. I never had the chance to tell dad how amazing he was – he was just dad.” That original is the product of caring for every aspect of the drumming without overriding what the rest of the group were doing.
As the engineer Andy Johns said of Bonham’s innovation, “I had never heard anything like it, and the drum sound was quite spectacular.” Somehow, the performance is laden with a degree of mystery beyond the prowess that Genesis would later look to bring into their own shrouded sound.
It makes for a profound recording that still softens the blow of a disastrous moment in Collins’ lauded career. In his view, he wouldn’t have been on the stage to flop in 1985 without it, and there are two ways to look at that. Thankfully, the cheery drummer chooses to see the bright side of it.
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