The 1976 Genesis song Phil Collins compared to Led Zeppelin: “A musical standout”
There were never any parameters around a genre like progressive rock. Since the title of the genre implies pushing music forward into different areas, it wasn’t out of the question for any group to take cues from everything from jazz to classical music to even traces of avant-garde to get their point across.
While Phil Collins was comfortable playing whatever style would suit him in Genesis, he felt that one major standout of his career came when they got heavier on the track ‘Squonk’.
Because, for all of the great music that they created together, ‘heavy metal gods’ was never something that was going to be part of Genesis’s job description. That was reserved for the Black Sabbaths of the world, and looking at their material with Peter Gabriel, there were far too many 12-string guitar and keyboard-dominated sections to be anywhere close to the true kings of heaviness.
But something started to change once Gabriel left the fold. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway had already begun exploring different textures, and even on their more episodic songs like ‘Supper’s Ready’, each section was part of an elongated journey to soundtrack either an epic battle or some cosmic ride through sound.
With Peter Gabriel’s departure, Genesis faced a defining crossroads. Rather than retreat, they leaned into a more muscular sound, allowing their arrangements to carry greater weight without losing their progressive identity. Phil Collins stepping forward as frontman marked not just a shift in voice, but a recalibration of the band’s overall dynamic.
That evolution came into sharp focus on A Trick of the Tail, where the group proved they could still innovate while tightening their approach. Tracks like ‘Dance on a Volcano’ hinted at this renewed energy, but it was ‘Squonk’ that fully embodied their heavier ambitions, blending narrative depth with a newfound intensity that pushed their sound into more forceful territory.
So when someone loses that kind of frontman, what exactly do you do? While Collins did step up to the microphone to sing, A Trick of the Tail was the best direction they could have gone in. They weren’t the band that many had grown up with, but it hardly mattered when the tracks still sounded great, like on ‘Dance on a Volcano’.
Then again, ‘Squonk’ was a lot more fierce than most people thought they were willing to go. Perhaps they were channelling some of that aggression from Gabriel’s departure, but hearing the journey of a kid who never found his place in the world never sounded more epic than it did with Collins singing.
Although it’s not the first song that should be played to newcomers, Collins considered ‘Squonk’ to be a major standout of his career, saying, “’Squonk’ was a musical standout. That was always our Zeppelin kind of song, kind of a bit of ‘Kashmir,’ a bit of ‘When The Levee Breaks.’ When you listen to it, it doesn’t sound like that, but that’s what it was meant to be, with the heavy guitar chords and my John Bonham hat on.”
It’s no small feat to be competing with the likes of Zeppelin on any epic track, but Collins does come fairly close here. There are a lot more changes than what Jimmy Page was known for using in his band’s early cuts, but even with the group changing time signatures now and again, everything still sounds completely natural coming out of them.
And that hard-edged side would stay with them for years as well, with Collins eventually bringing back that metallic edge for tunes like ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’ off of Invisible Touch. So, for anyone arguing that Collins watered down what Genesis stood for, have a listen to this and see what the prog-tinged version of the group was really capable of.
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