The song Phil Collins retired from playing live: “I don’t really want to sing this”
It’s really the artist’s decision what songs they want to perform for a paying audience whenever they get onstage. While it’s commonly a good idea to play the hits that people know, there are occasionally going to be those deep cuts that get dusted off and leave hardcore fans speechless when they actually hear them in a live setting. Phil Collins was never afraid to take a few chances whenever he performed live, but when Genesis returned for various reunion tours, he admitted that ‘Abacab’ deserved to be laid to rest after years on the live stage.
Then again, was there ever anything that Genesis wouldn’t do when they first emerged? Even though Collins remained sat at the back behind the drum kit during the Peter Gabriel years of the group, seeing the frontman dress up as everything from a flower to a fox in a dress to the embodiment of a disease was something else to witness during each performance.
Once Gabriel left the fold, though, everyone seemed to get Collins’ musical direction wrong these days. Compared to his reputation as the pop crooner who ruined the band, the message behind A Trick of the Tail seemed fairly straightforward: what if we had a stage show where the music mattered more than the costumes?
It’s a bold goal to reach, I know, but up until ‘Follow You Follow Me,’ the group was actually on steady ground throughout the late 1970s. But once they started going towards pop, Abacab marked a weird point in their discography. There were still great tunes and eventual pop hits like ‘No Reply At All,’ but they hadn’t lost the will to take a chance and write episodic songs like ‘Dodo/Lurker’ or get heavy on ‘Keep It Dark’.
But which Genesis members wrote the song?
Just because they had started to veer towards pop didn’t mean they had to lose their edge. This was the same band that wrote monumental epics like ‘Supper’s Ready’, so they were never afraid to dabble in a few unconventional structures if it meant adding to the track. While most of their epics normally had working titles, Rutherford ended up titling his song after the structure they were working with.
Despite being his song, Collins recalled that the phrase ‘Abacab’ stuck when they were working around different names, saying, “[It] was a way of remembering the sequence of the song. A was the verse, B was the chorus, and C was the bridge. That wasn’t the way that we did it in the end. The way that we did it was unpronounceable.”
Given that they were moving in a slightly different direction, the title seemed to work perfectly. Pairing along with the abstract art from the cover, most of the band figured that having a nonsensical title would be a great way of introducing a different flavour to what they had been doing, just like other various art movements had done in the past such as dadaism.
Even by Genesis’ standards, the title track was a bit of a weird beast to tackle. For everyone trying to figure out what the hell language the title is derived from, the only reason the group called it that was to make sure that they knew how the song was arranged, arranging the sections as A, B, and C, respectively.
It seemed straightforward enough, but Collins remembered having enough of that kind of mental gymnastics when running through the tune during soundchecks, saying, “That happened with ‘Abacab,’ which I’m sure everyone expects us to do. Halfway through the first verse, I said, ‘I don’t really want to sing this. I don’t know what it’s about.’”
And since the song was paired down for radio from its original six-minute runtime, it probably wasn’t the best idea trying to please the fairweather fans with the shorter version. That way, you’d be playing a song named after its structure and then have to work around said structure on the fly, to the point where it’s better to call it ‘Ababcb’ because that’s more pleasing to the fans.
Still, Collins has earned the right to do whatever he wants with the tunes, even if it means dropping a handful of them during the setlist. There are some hearts that might be broken along the way, but if they throw something like ‘That’s All’ on instead, most of the people in those arenas are not going to complain.
