The artist Phil Collins said “sounded like no other rock drummer”
For all of the hits that Phil Collins has had, it’s easy to take his drumming for granted a lot of the time.
Despite being one of the biggest hitmakers of his generation, the fact that he could hold his own next to any prog drummer tends to get lost along the way, the more times people end up going back to ‘Sussudio’ instead of anything from the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis. But even by the traditional progressive standards, Collins made sure to always keep his eye out for drummers who kept him on his toes.
Then again, Collins was never one to show off for the hell of it. Sure, there were more than a few times where he would fly off the handle and make the kind of drum fills that would impress Neil Peart, but he also had the kind of discipline that Ringo Starr had in The Beatles as well. As long as it served the song, it was usually worth doing, but the prog-rock scene wasn’t always about trying to make the most complicated three-minute tune.
This was the genre meant to challenge every single person in the group, and it’s not hard to see why people were thrown for a loop the first time they heard bands like King Crimson. There was no clear reference point for episodic eight-minute pieces in rock and roll at the time, but after Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull started taking audiences for a different kind of ride, it wasn’t out of the question for Genesis to make tunes like ‘The Music Box’ or ‘Supper’s Ready’ once they broke out.
But while Nick Mason and Peart were classic examples of what prog rock drummers should be capable of, there was no real accurate way of describing what Bill Bruford brought to the table. He had already been a veteran of the scene by the time he started working with Yes, but when listening to him play on albums like Close to The Edge, Collins knew he was looking at someone that could put their musical fingerprint on nearly everything they touched.
Compared to the other drummers that serve the song, Collins felt that Bruford was on a completely different level than his peers, saying, “We were totally aware of what Yes were doing, and even though we were very different, they were still an influence. Especially Bill Bruford, who sounded like no other rock drummer at the time. But there wasn’t any rivalry with them. There was plenty of room back then for everybody.”
While they might not have been looking at their music like a sense of competition at the time, Bruford could have easily wiped the floor with nearly everyone in his path as well. Not everything he did needed to have the same punch as John Bonham or anything, but everything that he played was very calculated to the point where everything sounded effortless, which is insanely hard to do when looking at the countless time signature changes that would happen in Yes songs and later on when he worked with King Crimson on albums like Red.
It’s not always easy to see that influence in Collins’s powerhouse performances, but it definitely comes out when he decides to depart from rock and roll. Both he and Bruford each had a healthy respect for genres like jazz, and when listening to the way that he works in Brand X, you can hear a little bit of Bruford’s influence shining through, even if Collins himself said it was a nightmare trying to play and sing some of those songs at the same time.
It had to have been a challenge trying to get the same kind of chops that Bruford did, but it was never at the expense of Collins outshining anyone else in the band. He knew what he was capable of whenever he was presented with a song, and while he could certainly fly off the handle when needed, Bruford was about bringing passion to every performance rather than trying to showboat at every opportunity.
