The one singer Phil Collins always wanted to join Genesis: “The poor guy”
The journey that Phil Collins took to become one of the biggest singers in the world wasn’t necessarily planned out the whole way through.
The entire concept of him becoming a solo star was already a happy accident when Face Value got released, but when looking at his work with Genesis and his countless solo hits, you’d hardly go more than a few minutes without seeing Collins in some capacity whenever his videos appeared on MTV. Not bad for a guy who didn’t even want to be a singer in the first place.
Despite the litany of people who claim that Genesis was dead the minute that Peter Gabriel after The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Collins wasn’t exactly the person hellbent on destroying every one of the band’s prog songs. If anything, he was the guy who wanted to make their songs a bit more complicated than usual, and yet looking through every one of their albums since Gabriel left, a lot of the biggest hits of their career came about based on a group effort rather than the drummer laying down the law.
In fact, A Trick of the Tail made it sound like absolutely nothing had changed whenever the band performed. They were still used to making some of the most complex rock and roll that anyone had ever heard, and even if Collins wasn’t going to be dressing up like a flower, that wasn’t so much of a problem when they still had those insane sections in tunes like ‘Dance on a Volcano’ and ‘Squonk.’
The band didn’t even see any of their real major hits until ‘Follow You Follow Me’, but when Collins was first holding lead singer auditions, he didn’t think for a second that he was going to be the frontman. He was the one who did all the background vocals, and since he was part of a team with Gabriel, he figured that he should be the one showing everybody their parts rather than being at the front.
Collins even thought long and hard about bringing in vocalist Mick Strickland for the job before his audition ended up falling through, saying, “We gave Mick Strickland ‘Squonk’ to sing, but the first line – ‘Like father, like son’ – is a bitch, and the poor guy wasn’t in key. My thinking, though, was that we would still find someone who could sing lead vocals on tour.” Even though Strickland went back to his own band, Witch’s Brew, getting Collins out front became one of the greatest strengths of the band as well.
He wasn’t going to be able to play everything and sing from behind the drum kit, but getting Chester Thompson in the group became a real shot in the arm to their sound. He was joined at the hip with Collins rhythmically, and Collins was more than happy to get out front and deliver it to the audience once he had a bit more stage experience under his belt. But that was also the biggest problem.
The more that Collins focused on his solo career, the more he started to feel a bit jaded coming back to Genesis. He didn’t want to be the person to split up the band, but after We Can’t Dance, the fact that he focused on making his own projects made him realise that there was so much more out there than trying to make the most complicated rock and roll that anyone had ever heard.
So while many people can get up in arms about how Collins abandoned Genesis or killed their prog sound, that’s not necessarily the case. The band were always moving in different directions, and even if Collins managed to find his way out of the band eventually, there was no chance that Strickland would have had the same kind of songwriting power that the rest of the band did at their peak.
