The one genre Phil Collins wanted to see die: “A lot of that crap”
There’s still a good contingency of people out there who would be very happy if they never heard another Phil Collins song again.
Even though he has written some of the greatest hits of the 1980s and turned Genesis into global superstars, there comes a point where anyone would have grown sick of the guy after seeing his face plastered over every single television screen and radio station at every single turn. That’s a lot of Collins all at once, but even when the ground was shifting beneath the drummer’s feet, he was happy to see rock and roll move in a bunch of different directions.
Because, really, Collins didn’t want to be known as a rock and roll artist for the rest of his days or anything. He liked the idea of making the best music that he could, and since he wasn’t in love with the idea of the early rock and rollers like Elvis Presley, it was much easier for him to grapes onto what the biggest names in R&B had been doing around the time that he started to fall in love with music.
That kind of approach made more sense to him, and while that worked in the context of his solo career, it was going to be a hard sell for him to turn in a Genesis song that was all about soul music. His bandmates had been used to playing the most oddball songs that had ever been created with strange time signatures around every corner, but Collins didn’t want to be a part of the prog sphere for the rest of his life.
In fact, half of the bands that Genesis were being lumped in with didn’t even make that much sense to Collins. Emerson, Lake and Palmer never did that much for him, and he was only mildly interested in what bands like Yes had been doing, so when a band like Sex Pistols came around to tear everything down, Collins only saw that as a breath of fresh air from the past few years of instrumental wank.
Let’s face it: the prog rock world did have some fantastic musicians, but there are more than a few times where a few of them crawled up their own ass. Rush even had a song subtitled ‘An Exercise in Self-Indulgence’, so it wasn’t like they were trying to hide the fact that they were a little full of themselves, but when the punk regime came along, everything was stripped back down to the importance of the songs rather than how well you could play.
And when prog rock began to fall by the wayside, Collins couldn’t help but smile a little bit, knowing that he didn’t need to play that genre forever, saying, “I always felt that, hey, this big shake up ain’t going to affect us, because there’s substance to what we’re doing. I never really felt threatened by it. But what I did feel was that it was going to get rid of a lot of that crap that was around.”
But old habits die hard, even with the greatest musicians in the world, and it’s not like Collins couldn’t get caught up in a few self-indulgent moments in his solo career. There are more than a few songs throughout his solo career that feel like exercises in making the song as long as possible, and even when Genesis had more poppy material on Invisible Touch, it’s not like they had forgotten about their prog fans on some of their more ambitious songs like ‘Domino’.
He could still feel free to do whatever the hell he wanted with his material, because at the end of the day, he knew that Genesis was more than just flash. A lot of the biggest prog bands in the world were more interested in blowing everyone away with their talent, and Collins felt that if there wasn’t a song at the heart of what they were doing, he was more than happy to see them fall by the wayside.
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