“The best I’ve ever been in”: the band Phil Collins put above all the rest
Phil Collins didn’t really need to keep working after the 1990s if he didn’t want to.
As much as he was omnipresent in people’s lives during the 1980s and became one of the greatest songwriters in Disney history thanks to Tarzan, he could have spent the rest of his life counting his millions and resting on his throne as one of the finest songwriters of his generation. But even when he became a solo superstar, he felt that there was a lot more ground for him to cover than just being a singing drummer.
Collins wanted the chance to work with everyone that he could, and since he got to the top of the rock and roll world, he wasn’t about to stop moving. No Jacket Required was dominating the conversation everywhere, and even if some songs like ‘Sussudio’ became more than a little bit insufferable, it’s not like Collins was going to apologise. He was happy to keep his momentum going, but not everything necessarily worked out perfectly.
His performance with Led Zeppelin left a lot to be desired, but even if he was no John Bonham behind the drum kit, getting the chance to work with any of his heroes was another check off the bucket list. Philip Bailey working with Collins would have been unthinkable at the time, but when you listen to them going back and forth when performing ‘Easy Lover’, you can tell that they are speaking the same musical language whenever they are singing together.
But since Collins’s first love came from the best rock bands he heard in the 1960s, it wasn’t a shock that he ended up rubbing elbows with some of the biggest names in the genre. He didn’t always have the most stable relationship with people like Paul McCartney all the time, but being able to help David Crosby out of his drug-induced hell was a plus when working on ‘Another Day in Paradise’. Then again, anyone needed to be prepared if they were going to step behind the kit with Eric Clapton.
First of all, ‘Slowhand’ was already one of the best musicians in his field, and anyone that he worked with needed to be at the top of their game. And second of all, this is the same person who played with Cream, and even though Collins was no slouch whenever he got behind the kit, the idea of him filling the shoes of Ginger Baker whenever he played some of those old tunes was definitely going to be a challenge.
But when the drummer finally got behind the kit to play, he couldn’t have been happier playing alongside people like Nathan East, saying, “I love to play, and also these were great gigs. I produced two albums for Eric, and then we took it out on the road, and it was the best band I’ve ever been in, Eric, [bassist] Nathan East and [keyboardist] Greg Phillinganes. We used to call it ‘The Heaven Band.’ Man, it was wonderful. I had so much fun.”
At the same time, Collins did get a bit of a wake up call when he was working with Clapton after the fact. His final performances with Clapton was a sure sign that he could be playing as hard as he did for the rest of his life, and even if he can’t play the same way that he could back in the day, that doesn’t discount the kind of playing that he did when he was jamming with Clapton for the first time.
The songs that Collins worked on with the guitar genius may have been a bit slower than what everyone was used to, but the tempo of everything didn’t really matter for Clapton at this stage. It was all about whether it made people’s hearts sing, and even if Collins’s fingerprints were all across Behind the Sun, that didn’t discount the fact that a musical god was still at work behind the fretboard.
