The one supergroup Phil Collins was asked to leave: “Bad news”
Anyone working in the music industry would have given anything to have a drummer like Phil Collins among their ranks.
Despite him becoming the darling of adult contemporary and making some of the most commercial rock and roll people had seen in the 1980s, he will forever be etched in history for that drum fill in ‘In the Air Tonight’ alone. But even if Collins was a massive star and could practically turn anything into gold, there were always going to be people who weren’t as enamoured with what he was doing.
For instance, it’s not exactly a mistake that Collins became the whipping boy when the 1990s kicked in. He had become almost omnipresent on the charts after one too many hits, and given the crazy amount of backlash that came his way in the next decade, you would have sworn that he hurt every single one of them personally by the time songs like ‘Sussudio’ started crawling up the charts.
But the fact is that Collins simply knew what made songs work. He was a child of everyone from The Beatles to Motown, and nothing was going to get in the way of him singing what was in his heart. If there’s one thing that eclipsed his songwriting, though, it was being one of the most exciting drummers anyone had ever heard. Say what you like about his hits, but he’s an absolute monster behind the kit on those early Genesis records, and even if someone was a bit holier-than-thou, they certainly wouldn’t shake a stick at the idea of Collins playing with them.
And by the time that the drummer started branching out into production work, he seemed to have a magic touch when he found the right person. The idea of him working for the members of ABBA was certainly strange for the time, but when listening to his work with Philip Bailey, it’s shocking how well he was able to make the transition into everything from pop to soul music at the time.
So when he got the call to work with Eric Clapton, it felt like a no-brainer. If he already had his heart broken when working with Led Zeppelin at Live Aid, maybe this could turn things around, but even with him adding his production touches onto records like Behind the Sun, Collins remembered getting the cold shoulder a lot quicker than he expected when it came time to hit the road.
He was ready to put his solo career and Genesis on the shelf for a little bit, but Collins knew that the phone call he got from Clapton’s manager wasn’t going to be good news, saying, “I realised that was a rare thing when I worked with Eric. I thought his previous albums had been a bit lazy and I wanted him to find his voice again. [Then his manager] said, ‘Bad news – we’re going to LA to record a few more songs, and you ain’t coming.’”
Then again, if there’s one thing that Collins knew how to do better than most at this point, it was move on. He had gone through several collaborations within the past five years alone, and even if things didn’t work out for the best with ‘Slowhand’, it did at least give him a new energy when it came time to reboot Genesis in the late 1980s.
Although 1980s Clapton isn’t everyone’s favourite flavour of Clapton most of the time, the fact that Collins found a way to make his signature sound work for a little bit is somewhat commendable. For many, it looked more like a reign of terror half the time he walked into the studio, but if anyone else were in his position, chances are they would be working with as many people as they could as well.
