The band Phil Collins saw as a threat to his career: “The enemy”
Poor old Phil Collins was never unaware that his career hadn’t been granted an easy ride.
He once bemoaned in an interview with David Sheff, “I was called the ugliest man since George Orwell. What’s that got to do with the music? And, by the way, how ugly was George Orwell?” And beyond the unnecessary critique of his perfectly normal looks, he often found himself wishing that he could swap places with a critical darling like “Dvid Byrne, with this small, tight group of fans.”
However, it wasn’t just the critics and public who took fault with the little singing drummer. As the 1970s wore on, the prominence of Genesis came under fierce threat from afar, and for once, Collins was rattled in a far more substantial way.
Progressive rock and punk are not the most natural bedfellows. Punk traded on musical simplicity, with its biting lyrics often doing the heavy lifting. Prog-rock, as spearheaded by the likes of Genesis, preferred a longer, more complex output. Phil Collins witnessed the brilliance of both movements throughout the 1970s, often remarking on the landmark arrival of punk by way of Johnny Rotten’s scathing lyrics.
Having released a slew of studio albums, namely: Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, A Trick of the Tail, and Wind & Wuthering, before the 1977 release of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, it was obvious Genesis were the more well-established band as change came around the corner.
In 2014, Collins reminisced on their explosive rise to fame, noting that he and the rest of the band hadn’t been too threatened by punk’s newfound popularity. Famed for their extensive worldwide tours, they didn’t realise the revolutionary scale of the reception punk was getting in England either. But as Pete Townshend would quip, it was rivalling Beatlemania.
The first time Collins really took notice of the Sex Pistols was when watching So It Goes, a British music TV show presented by Tony Wilson, and thought they had a “fantastic” sound. “When you hear the Sex Pistols record,” he said.
Adding, “It was very well produced – it just sounded so legitimate. So I kind of liked it, and then I realised that we were the enemy. We were the people they were trying to get rid of in a way.”
Although punk seemed to mark the end of a general interest in longer, more psychedelic songs, Collins did have to chance to meet John Lydon later down the line. “I kind of didn’t like the way you people sang deliberately out of tune,” he told the vocalist. “[You] deliberately detuned instruments or untuned them. I kind of felt there was a bit of cheating going on.”
While Collins initially treated punk as a noise-filled fashion fad, he grew to appreciate their ethos. “I think the Pistols are a great band,” he once admitted. “I actually did meet Lydon at a Mojo awards show.”
Continuing, “I went up to him and said, ‘I just got to say hello to you, because I think you’re great’. He said, ‘Phil! What a pleasure!’ I don’t think he was taking the piss. I got a picture that is my studio at home of me and him together.”
Punk had a lasting impact on music in general, even providing the crucial inspiration for one of Genesis’ own tracks on ‘Abacab’. Although in a 1990 NME interview, Collins refused to reveal which one, he did say the Sex Pistols were “great” and had a lot of “energy” to their music that was clearly inspiring on the mystery track.
