The 1985 Genesis album Phil Collins called their peak: “It opened up a whole new world”
The story of Genesis has always been a touchy subject for certain stripes of prog fans. On the one hand, they have gifted the world some of the most complicated music ever made for the rock genre, and on the other hand, they have recorded some of the poppiest material that ever fell under the prog banner.
While Phil Collins is one of the only people who went through almost every iteration of the group’s success, he still felt that their peak as a group came with the album Invisible Touch.
If you were to have told a progressive rock fan that the same band that made albums like Trespass would go on to make songs like ‘Invisible Touch’, their brains might have dripped out of their ears. Collins may not have been in the band in their early days, though, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t able to make progressive music.
Although Collins would later become synonymous with chart success, his roots were firmly planted in technical musicianship. His early contributions helped shape some of the most ambitious material Genesis ever recorded.
Once he arrived in the band on Nursery Cryme, Peter Gabriel still ruled the band’s sense of direction, wearing lavish costumes every time he took to the stage. Despite not being able to take your eyes off Gabriel, Collins was still a technician behind the drumkit, playing the kind of massive drum rolls that felt more indebted to jazz fusion at times rather than typical rock and roll.
“We were just writing how we felt at the time. We weren’t trying to be commercial. That’s just the way it turned out on that record…”
Phil Collins
Even when Gabriel left the fold, it wasn’t like they turned into pop hitmakers overnight. Since one of their first massive hits, ‘Follow You Follow Me’, was just based around a half-baked riff Mike Rutherford had, it almost feels like a mistake that they became pop songwriters, almost as if they were screwing around and made a classic song.
For the next few years, things would get more mainstream on every album, to the point where half of Invisible Touch landed on the radio. Fans were probably right to be pissed that the now-trio had succumbed to making power-pop over time, but Collins couldn’t see that much of a difference between that album and the more intricate records they made.
When talking about the songs later, Collins thought that the mainstream success was just the result of them becoming more accomplished, saying, “We were just writing how we felt at the time. We weren’t trying to be commercial. That’s just the way it turned out on that record… Each one of those songs, ‘Invisible Touch’, ‘Land of Confusion’, ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’, they were all top five singles in the States. I think that the 1985-86 tour, that was our first stadium tour. It opened up a whole new [world]. That was probably our peak.”
While everyone likes to complain about the record’s cheesiness, it’s not like the band forgot how to make complex songs. As mainstream as ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’, you can’t say that these guys made a song that is almost nine minutes in length and honestly expected it to be on the hit parade.
Songs like ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’ demonstrated that Genesis hadn’t entirely abandoned their progressive instincts. Beneath the polished production remained a willingness to experiment with structure, atmosphere and scale.
At the same time, that balance of hookiness and progressive rock is probably what got Collins the gig as a soundtrack aficionado, whether that was contributing songs like ‘Against All Odds’ to movies or working on the entirety of the Tarzan soundtrack. Genesis might have wandered far outside their prog roots, but if the worst thing about your “sell-out” album is a handful of farty synthesisers, you’re still doing a damn fine job.
Whether fans prefer the theatrical grandeur of the Peter Gabriel era or the polished confidence of Invisible Touch, Genesis’ legacy rests on their refusal to stand still. For Collins, the band’s greatest achievement wasn’t abandoning progressive rock or embracing pop—it was finding a way to successfully inhabit both worlds at once.
