“I’ve never felt completely on top”: the Genesis era Phil Collins found difficult to play
No matter how easy professional musicians make their jobs seem at times, it’s certainly far from the case that they’re able to approach everything with a relative sense of simplicity. For every artist who seems fully within their comfort zone with everything they attempt, there’s always something that they find challenging, and even the most consummate professionals such as Phil Collins have struggles that they have to overcome.
Having joined the progressive rock giants Genesis in 1970 as their drummer, he contributed to four albums from Nursery Cryme to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in this position. It seemed that his presence offered stability in this position that they had not had in the past, given that their first two albums as a group were recorded with two different drummers, John Silver and John Mayhew, and their original drummer, Chris Stewart, didn’t even contribute to a single studio release.
However, in 1975, a major departure from the band would rock the group and put their status in jeopardy. With frontman Peter Gabriel announcing that he would no longer be a member of Genesis, the band were left wondering how to replace such a key figure in the band’s sound, and after auditioning a number of potential replacements, they finally settled on allowing Collins to take the reins on a permanent basis.
The band’s early releases with Collins as both drummer and vocalist, such as 1976’s A Trick of the Tail were successful in employing the same progressive sound that they had become known for with Gabriel at the helm, and would regularly see the band flitting between time signatures and tempo shifts throughout songs in order to show off their virtuosity as musicians. As a drummer and vocalist, this isn’t the easiest thing to be able to pull off, but Collins seemingly did this with ease.
Despite this, there came a point where Collins felt the need to change this, and by the time they were working on their self-titled twelfth album in 1983, Collins thought that the necessary change would have been to simplify their sound a little in order to ease the toll on him and allow him greater freedom to express himself as a vocalist without needing to concentrate on all of the finicky mid-song changes.
In a 1986 interview with Hitmen, Collins revealed that he actually used to find it difficult to change between styles and perform these tricky transitions. “We’ve never recorded different sections of a song separately and then later spliced them together, so I do have an idea of what I’m doing and how to make those transitions flow smoothly,” he told the magazine but quickly added that it wasn’t such a straightforward process to do this. “It’s just that I’ve never felt completely on top of them,” he claimed, “whereas for drummers like Simon Phillips or Billy Cobham, I’m sure that’s no problem.”
Speaking further about the decision to change this on Genesis, he stated that “we tried to stick to one tempo for each song. In the past, we used to employ a lot of tempo slow-downs and speed-ups, in which the tempos would vary from verse to chorus, along with signature changes from four to seven to nine, a solo in thirteen, that sort of thing.” Further elaborating on why they chose to do this in the past, his response was simply “to prove that we could.” It’s no wonder he chose to simplify things.
