The drummer Phil Collins claimed to rip off for years: “I was dumbstruck”
Some 40 years ago, during the summer of 1985, Phil Collins was arguably at the zenith of his mainstream popularity. His third solo album, No Jacket Required, had already topped the charts for weeks in both the UK and the US, and when he was invited to perform at Live Aid in July, Collins took the opportunity to pull off a ridiculous stunt, playing a set at the London concert before boarding a Concorde jet to Philadelphia to take the stage there on the same day.
Unfortunately, that Philly leg of Collins’s Live Aid marathon included one of the more disappointing moments of the entire event, as the much-anticipated reunion of Led Zeppelin—with Collins and Tony Thompson manning the drums in place of the late John Bonham—proved to be a misfire.
The lack of proper rehearsal time, combined with Robert Plant’s strained voice and a slightly detuned Jimmy Page guitar, produced a bit of a mess, so much so that Zeppelin’s set was left off the Live Aid DVD box set years later. For his own part in the mishap, Phil Collins simply said that “John’s boots were too big for anyone to fill”.
He knew what he was talking about, too. While the easy-listening pop tunes of mid-1980s Phil Collins wouldn’t remind anyone of peak-period Led Zeppelin, Collins had been a longtime fan, even dating back before the first Zeppelin album. Along with following Page’s work with The Yardbirds, Collins had made a point of seeing folk-rock artist Tim Rose at a London gig in 1968, backed by a certain drummer named John Bonham.
“I went down to the Marquee Club and patiently queued up to get in,” Phil recalled in the 2005 book, John Bonham, the Powerhouse Behind Led Zeppelin. “Within the first few minutes, I was dumbstruck by the drummer.”
Collins was, of course, a drummer himself long before he was a pop singer, so he didn’t just watch Bonham as a fan, but as a student. “He was doing things with his bass drum that I’d never seen or heard before—the last two beats of a triplet, something I’ve stolen and do whenever possible,” he said. “He then played a solo and again I’d never heard or seen a drummer play like that. He played with his hands on the drums. I later found out that as a bricklayer, he had very hard hands, and it was obvious from seeing him solo that night.”
At this time, in 1968, 17-year-old Phil Collins was playing in a band called Hard Meat. Two years later, he’d join an upstart outfit called Genesis. In the meantime, “I vowed to keep an eye on this guy Bonham,” Collins said, “And I followed his progress. He was, even then, a major influence on my playing.”
While Collins only met Bonham face to face once in the ensuing years (as a Melody Maker awards show), Genesis and Zeppelin did cross paths several times as both bands continued their ascents.
“Funnily enough, Genesis was at Headley Grange where Zeppelin had recorded some of Physical Graffiti,” Collins recalled, “and those legendary drums of ‘When The Levee Breaks’ from Zep IV recorded in the stairwell.”
