The 1970s band Phil Collins always knew were special: “The music still sounds strong”
For someone who could play a million notes at a time, Phil Collins never seemed to be too snobby about his music.
Some of the best tunes of his solo career always tried to keep things simple, and even when he stretched his tunes out whenever he got into his album cuts, it was always about picking the melody that served the song instead of showing everyone what he could do on every instrument. He was much more interested in giving the audience a great tune, but if things had been a little different, Collins would have taken a much stranger path in his solo years.
Because if you look at how everything unfolded, Collins’s solo career was never supposed to exist as long as his marriage stayed together. Face Value was made out of romantic desperation after he wasn’t able to articulate his feelings all that much, and since the rest of the world fell in love with everything that he was playing on tunes like ‘In the Air Tonight’, it wasn’t hard for him to realise what his audience wanted out of him.
And when you have that many people looking to hear pop hits, Collins finally felt like he could express himself in a different way. No one in Genesis would have given the thumbs-up to him doing his own version of The Supremes’ ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, but you can tell that he had a real knack for making his own version of soul music whenever he wanted to. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still respect the technical side of everything.
In fact, more bands could have taken notice of the kind of dynamic Genesis had throughout Collins’s solo years. He may have been a little bit overexposed at the time, but he was more than happy to play with his bandmates and find time to throw himself into his own work whenever he needed to. But if he was trying to get technical, it was always about listening for those who played their music in a different way.
He had already had his side project Brand X to let out his fusion chops every now and again, but Weather Report was far superior to anything they were doing. There were certainly some complicated parts to every one of Brand X’s songs, but when you put them alongside an album like Heavy Weather, there’s no sense in trying to compare both of them when one band has someone like Jaco Pastorius in it.
These were true professionals, and Collins felt that almost everything they did never needed any sort of tweaking, saying, “I’m a big fan of Weather Report; that’s no secret. When I find a sound that fits the song’s mood, I tend to play less. And when I play less, the sound says more. That’s why in bands like Weather Report, even when very little is actually going on, the music still sounds strong and compelling.” And that’s really a lost art when it comes to many progressive bands.
The likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer were making some fantastic tunes, but what makes a band really stick out in people’s minds is about wowing everyone with their superior playing. It was about making tunes that people could feel, and even when Pastorius was playing some of the most impressive bass runs, you could still feel the pulse and the sense of groove in every single note he played.
People like Wayne Shorter were just as important for bringing that sound together, but even if they were playing the most simple line ever, you’d better believe Collins was taking notes. This was the kind of band that truly understood the importance of harmony, and he was going to do everything he could to come anywhere close to that.
