The “formless” Genesis album Phil Collins never liked
Every band member doesn’t necessarily have to be thrilled with the music they’re making all the time. The business is full of people who are used to making the best they can, but oftentimes, earning the biggest paychecks playing songs that aren’t that inspiring. And while Phil Collins was free to do whatever he wanted when working with Genesis, that didn’t mean he had to be in love with every song that came out of their repertoire.
But if you’re a purely progressive Genesis fan, there’s a good chance that Phil Collins is the bane of your existence. He was far from the worst musician in the world or anything, but it seemed like everyone and their mother had it out for the guy when he started shifting towards pop music. This was everything prog rock shouldn’t have been, but was it really all that bad looking back on it?
Some of his songs were a little bit saccharine, but Genesis’s greatest records in the 1980s had some fairly decent pop smashes on there as well. ‘Abacab’ is still an adventurous pop song for its time, ‘That’s All’ has that commanding vocal strut throughout, and how the hell is anyone supposed to hate on those horn parts that come in during the breaks in ‘No Reply at All’?
It was a far cry from what Peter Gabriel had in mind with the band, but it’s not like he knocked it out of the park every time, either. It was a long time before he settled on the strange costumes that he would wear onstage, but when From Genesis to Revelation came out, you would have sworn that these kids had no future ahead of them, complete with the strange, whimsical tunes that felt like the tasteless side of ‘flower power’.
While Collins was intrigued when he first got the call to perform with them, it’s not like he was in love with what he heard on their first official album, Trespass, saying, “It was sort of formless. At my audition, we’d listened to some of Trespass, and it wasn’t one thing or the other. There were harmonies that reminded me of Crosby, Stills & Nash, but when it was meant to be hard, like on ‘The Knife’, it didn’t sound like they really meant it.”
Whereas most people would have seen a mess, Collins, at the very least, saw some potential. There was a general size and scope to the way that Gabriel wrote that no one else was doing at the time, and when the band locked in on the right groove, it could go from sounding like a fanciful journey to some of the most intense musical passages anyone had ever come up with.
It only takes one listen to Genesis Live to see the world of difference that Collins made when he joined the group. It was more engaging seeing Gabriel’s lavish threads when playing songs like ‘Supper’s Ready’ live, but when looking at the live version of the song ‘The Knife’, no one else could have pulled off that drum performance better than Collins in his prime.
So, despite being one of the most bitter pills for some Genesis fans to swallow, Collins always helped push some of the progressive angles on the band. He may have switched his approach after a while, but there’s no reason to think he was trying to deliberately dumb down their sound by any stretch.
