The 1950s rock stars that meant nothing to Phil Collins: “I never really liked those records”
Phil Collins didn’t necessarily take the typical route to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world.
Even though he was already a part of one of the biggest progressive rock bands in England, the thought of a band known for long-winded exercises across their records birthing one of the biggest pop icons in the world isn’t normally what everyone thinks of first. But even when Collins ascended to the greatest heights in rock and roll, he could be a lot more candid about the stars that he didn’t care for along the line as well.
Then again, a lot of that might have been personal when you look at the kind of company that ridiculed him. There’s no doubt that he didn’t have warm feelings towards Jimmy Page when he started lambasting him for ruining Led Zeppelin during Live Aid, but hating someone at least has its own merits. Hate requires someone taking up space in your mind, and the worst kind of music is the kind that ended up rolling right off of Collins from the moment that he heard it.
He could still keep his ears open for massive talents like Adele every now and again, but there were more than a few times when he didn’t understand the typical rock and roll contemporaries that he worked with. The other prog-adjacent bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer never did that much for him, and even when he broke free from Genesis, he was more likely to take cues from what the biggest names in R&B were doing.
That’s the kind of music that he grew up with, after all, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t find time for rock and roll. Keith Moon was virtually untouchable when he first heard him play for The Who, and while The Beatles set him on the right path when he was a kid, he felt that anything that came before them was nothing but a passing fad in his mind when he first laid his ears on people like Elvis Presley.
The Fab Four were his introduction to what rock and roll could sound like, so when it all came back to the same bluesy structure, Collins wasn’t exactly knocked out by what he heard, saying, “It wasn’t until The Beatles came along in 1963 that I really became serious about being a musician. I was thirteen and began to look at myself as a musician. It was Ringo who gave me a clear course and a direction to move towards. Prior to The Beatles, early rock-and-roll meant nothing to me. My brother used to listen to artists like Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and Eddie Cochran, but I never really liked those records.”
And for someone who first got introduced to rock and roll through tunes like ‘All My Loving’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, it definitely feels a bit strange going back to the stone age of the genre. Bill Haley was doing his best to make rock and roll sound cool for the kids, but when you look at bands that were actually pushing the genre forward and having fun in every song, making tunes that were all about partying felt all the more hollow.
That’s not where Collins’s head was at the time, and even when he was working on some of his own tunes, he needed to have more of a connection with what he was playing. That did involve him getting a bit too serious on some of his tunes, but that also opened his mind to see what he could do when he pulled from bands that most rockers wouldn’t have thought of, like Earth, Wind and Fire.
People like Presley should never be discredited for bringing rock and roll to every household in the world, but if it weren’t for those who came after them, there’s a good chance that the genre might have died out a lot quicker. Collins was willing to expand the palette of his genre, but he wasn’t going to be caught dead playing the same kind of bluesy vamps that the legends were playing.
