“Very complicated music”: When Phil Collins fell in love with a drummer who could play anything
Asking a drummer to step up off their stool and fulfil vocal duties on a full-time basis is an inherently frightening thing to do.
All drummers, including the great Phil Collins, take a great deal of safety from their little area behind the drum kit, and so any of the remaining stage real estate feels unprecedented.
But when Peter Gabriel left Genesis, the split duties of drumming and singing became somewhat unmanageable, and one discipline had to be chosen. The drums were always Collins’ first musical love, and so he harboured a fair amount of hesitancy towards stepping forth, relying on the catalogue of willing frontmen who existed in the music industry at the time.
But the band recognised that Collins understood the heart of the band’s sound and would therefore make the perfect replacement for Gabriel. After much deliberation, the allure of the leading spotlight seemed too good to turn down, and so he stepped forth into the full-time role of Genesis’ frontman.
Then came the tricky subject of hiring his replacement – the man responsible for laying down his drum fills with enough skill to keep the band ticking, but not enough so that it raises questions over Collins’ legacy as the one true great. Prog rock icon Bill Bruford, who previously played with Yes and King Crimson, threw his name in the hat first, offering to step in temporarily. But the band knew they needed permanency and so scoured the record racks, searching for contemporary genius.
While listening to Frank Zappa and the Mothers’ live album Roxy & Elsewhere, Collins believed that he found it in drummer Chester Thompson. With less hesitation than he had stepped forward as a vocalist, Collins cold-called the drummer and outright offered him the role without an audition. Even more astonishingly, Collins accepted straight away, turning down offers from Santana and the Pointer Sisters.
Clearly, there was an unspoken connection between the pair, rooted in a sense of mutual appreciation. Thompson relished the opportunity of working in a band led by a drummer, while Collins felt safe in the knowledge that Genesis’ sound could simply go anywhere so long as they had the multi-faceted Thompson at the helm.
“I never thought of him as a jazz drummer,” Collins explained. “His natural habitat would have been that. He was able to play very complicated music. We weren’t going to throw anything at him that he wasn’t going to be able to play.”
Thompson’s decision was vindicated from the moment he sat down with the band. Refusing an audition and accepting the role straight away came with its dangers, but those were soon squashed once he reached the rehearsal room.
“Phil and I, from the very first rehearsal when he sat down, and we started jamming together, we just locked,” he said. “It was just there. And Phil and I had a lot of the same roots. He was into a lot of American jazz drummers.”
Collins and Thompson’s relationship was living proof of how music could connect people from different ends of the social spectrum. Different upbringings, in different cultures, from different countries were all put to rest the minute the pair sat at the kit together, and became musical brothers.
