The era that made people hate Phil Collins, according to Phil Collins
Love him or hate him, you can hardly level any criticism towards Phil Collins for not having kept his output varied throughout his lengthy career.
Having started out as the drummer with Genesis, a prog rock band whose complex and convoluted music was the sort you wouldn’t imagine would have had many prospects of being big outside of niche circles, it’s actually rather remarkable that he managed to move on from this and establish himself as a household name. It may not have arrived overnight, but there are some important leaps from earlier in his career that certainly aided him in his ascent.
After Peter Gabriel’s departure from the band, Collins would be the one to assume lead vocal duties despite an initial reticence towards the idea, but this also saw the band gradually change direction to suit the styles that Collins wanted to explore. As a result, the change in style saw him become more confident in being a frontman, and therefore gave him the confidence boost he needed to embark on the next chapter of his career.
This shift in Genesis’ sound towards the end of the 1970s and into the ‘80s brought them their greatest commercial success, but Collins wasn’t happy with simply having this and recognised that he still had plenty in his locker that he wouldn’t be able to do using the band as a vehicle.
Consequently, he ended up pursuing a solo career in tandem with the band, which saw him elevated to even greater heights, beyond anything that the band had achieved as a unit, but on the flipside of his success, his omnipresence began to frustrate many people who had previously been staunch supporters of his work.
His music was becoming increasingly commercial, which some people saw as pandering to the masses, and that he’d lost all artistic integrity, having started out as a prog rock trailblazer who valued making forward-thinking music rather than disposable pop, something that was becoming oversaturated in the charts during this time.
Collins knew that he was being placed under the microscope as a result of his heightened attention, and while he does sort of subscribe to the idea that he was at his most annoying, he also feels he was unfairly placed in a box with the worst of the worst from the decade that saw pop reach its most overpolished form.
“I was ubiquitous throughout the ‘80s,” he later acknowledged in a 2016 interview with Stuff. “I became unfairly tarnished with the brush of that era. Meanwhile, I was just trying to write good songs and play music with people I loved. But yeah, I think looking back on it, I can safely say, I was pretty irritating.”
The ‘80s may have been a frustrating time for pop music, where things were becoming more and more vapid, but at least he’s always maintained an element of self-awareness around the fact that he bought into the idea of making music with a widespread commercial appeal.
