“I barely made it”: The last song Phil Collins ever played drums on
For someone that has been playing drums as long as Phil Collins has, no one wants to have that one moment where they realise they have to hang things up.
The whole point is to try and keep a solid track record and learn more things along the way whenever you start jamming with other people, but it’s a bit trickier when your body starts to tell you over time that it needs to take a break and come off the drum stool for the final time. It’s not an easy decision for anyone to make, but Collins couldn’t have picked a better time for him to hang things up and leave his legacy where it was.
For one thing, he was already becoming one of the biggest stars in the world by the time he had released Testify. He was the darling of pop radio for decades at that point, and even his soundtrack songs for Tarzan were among the finest that Disney had heard in quite some time, but after one too many times doing countless reunion tours, Collins started to think that maybe it was time to slow things down.
He had already been inescapable at one point on the charts, but even for a workaholic, things could get more than a little bit hectic juggling a massive solo career and the occasional get-togethers with his old friends in Genesis. So in between the various tours and playing ‘In the Air Tonight’ God knows how many times, there came a point where Collins knew that he wasn’t going to be able to perform to the best of his ability anymore.
Seeing him in a chair on the final Genesis tour was already a little heartbreaking, but it was all about being practical. After guesting with Eric Clapton later in his career, Collins started thinking that he might have to step back from the kit for his own health. He was a lot more frail than usual, and he wanted to make sure that he prioritised his health before anything else whenever he got back on the road.
Going Back already had some of the best soul players performing the songs with him, but when Genesis went back out, hearing his son Nic fill in for him was one of the more wholesome ways of getting around his health issues. His son would have been happy to try his hand at a few of his old man’s records, but his son Simon also let him go out with some class by stepping up to the drum throne one more time.
And in 2008, Collins remembered getting his final chance to show himself off on the song ‘The Big Bang’ from Simon’s album, U Catastrophe, saying, “It’s an incredibly fast piece, slightly modeled on the Genesis drum duets, and he really put me through my paces. I barely made it. It’s a thrilling track, and I think that collaboration with my oldest son may have been, without my knowing it, my last hurrah as a drummer. Which seems kinda fitting.”
Aside from the wholesome backstory, the song is a good way of getting Collins back to the kind of drummer that he had always been. He wasn’t going to throw in any of the strange polymetres that turned up on an album like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but it was a nice way of telling those people that only knew him from his pop hits that he was a lot more than the guy who wrote one of the greatest drum fills of all time.
He was an absolute phenomenon behind the kit, and if this ends up being the final thing that he ever plays, it’s hardly a bad note to go out on. Collins had been in more than a few spotlights throughout his career, but the fact that he got one last one to own is one of those rare feats that only a few musicians actually get to do throughout their career.
