The one singer Phil Collins called his musical soulmate: “I was very close to him”
Phil Collins was usually the last likely candidate to be considered a rock star.
He was usually happy to hang at the back of the stage playing the drums in Genesis, and even when he did end up getting behind the microphone, he didn’t really have the same stage presence that you would see in someone like Mick Jagger or James Brown whenever he performed. He was ready to knock everyone out with pure music, and not everything that he did really needed to be purely rock and roll, either.
Because if you look at those original Genesis recordings, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were from a totally different genre from the Chuck Berrys of the world. Their brand of prog rock had a lot more going for it than being strictly based on blues textures, and when Collins did eventually get control of the band once Peter Gabriel left, he was far more focused on trying to sound more sophisticated.
He wasn’t afraid of sounding a bit more nuanced than the average prog rock band, but there was a lot more that he had to work through during his solo career. There were plenty of genres that he tried out that simply wouldn’t have fit Genesis, and while Tony Banks was more than a little bit pissed that he was never shown ‘In the Air Tonight’, they probably weren’t going to pull off sounding like Prince on ‘Sussudio’.
But the sounds of funk and soul were never bad words for Collins. He liked the idea of making music that had a bit more of a groove to it, and some of his favourite bands from back in the day were all trying to make their own brand of what Motown was creating years before. That didn’t exactly suit what Genesis was doing, but he did at least take comfort in knowing that Gabriel was one of his biggest confidantes when it came to soul.
You have to remember that one of Gabriel’s greatest heroes at the time was Otis Redding, and listening to records by the likes of Nina Simone was what first got him going. There was no universe where he was ever going to sound anywhere close to them by any stretch, but Collins knew that there was a way out of the typical prog sphere if he kept on working with what Gabriel wanted to.
Even though Collins was determined to stay in the band once Gabriel left, he never forgot about the good times that he had listening to soul music with the frontman, saying, “I was very close to him. Tony and Pete were schoolmates, but I came in the band and he was a drummer, I was a drummer, we related really well. We were soul mates, if you like. We liked soul music, I was his stooge on stage, I was always there singing, we were peas in a pod.”
And when looking at Gabriel’s solo career, Collins was never afraid to throw his hat into the ring every so often. Both of them are the reason why the classic 1980s drum sound sounded the way it did, and even when looking at the year 1986 alone, all of the band members made out like bandits on the charts when Invisible Touch was then preceded by So and a slew of Collins’s own chart hits.
There was no reason for any of them to complain once they broke things off, but Gabriel and Collins kept things more than a little bit cordial. The idea of doing a joint tour of both of them singing for Genesis wasn’t in the cards, but they could at least take solace in knowing that they had the best taste in R&B music that anyone else in the band had.
