The drummer Phil Collins said had too big of an ego: “The size of a hotel”
No artist can be at the top of the mountain for their entire career and be level-headed. As much as he might come off like a performer simply doing his job half the time, it’s easy to look at someone like Mick Jagger and know for a fact that he doesn’t breathe the same air as what the rest of us put up with every time he gets onstage with The Rolling Stones. But even for someone who had as many hits as Phil Collins, he knew when to keep things in check when off the stage.
Then again, if there was one person who could have afforded to be a bit more egotistical than most, it was probably Collins. Not only did he manage to bring Genesis to the top of the pop world in the 1980s, but he also juggled his solo career in between that, performed with Led Zeppelin, and even shifted the concept of how drums were recorded on ‘In the Air Tonight’. It’s not stretching to say that his music changed pop, but his presence was also a bit of a curse.
Because no matter how much people claim to love Phil Collins, it’s a lot to get people to listen to that much of him all at once. And by the time that bands like Oasis came along, it was clear that the pop sheen of the 1980s was a thing of the past, and people like Collins needed to move on to other things. But this was far from the first time that Collins dealt with a band full of egos.
After all, he was from the world of prog rock, and there were always going to be people who were willing to have a big head about their music strictly because they could play far better than most. Weather Report could have easily made different genres of music from the ground up half the time, but even when the punk movement started taking over the world, The Police were the only band that could get away with playing CBGBs and still have some prog tendencies.
Sting had already been a professor before putting the power trio together, so it wasn’t like he was afraid of sounding like he knew what he was doing. But despite the frontman’s immaculate pop ear, Stewart Copeland was always the one keeping it rooted to the ground every time he played. Every single one of his parts makes the track feel interesting, but Collins felt that he was a bit too high on his own ego.
There may have been a reason for him to be larger-than-life, but Collins felt that Copeland didn’t need to be holier-than-thou about his drumming, saying, “The Police and probably a few others I’m not aware of, that Punk thing started to become more sophisticated. The Police are one of my favourite bands. I mean, Stewart Copeland’s got an ego the size of this hotel, but he can play.”
Granted, there was never any love lost between the two drummers when working on their friends’ projects. Most people would turn their nose up at working with anyone remotely associated with Collins, but since Copeland eventually worked with Peter Gabriel on the album So and followed in Collins’s footsteps by working on soundtracks, they always seemed to be on slightly parallel tracks.
Even if Copeland did have the kind of ego that Collins implies, this is one of those few instances where the playing matches the player’s attitude. Because if you’ve laid down the groove on ‘Message in a Bottle’ and can have people recognise ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ from one second of your drumming, you’re on another level compared to every percussionist around you.
