The 1981 song Phil Collins thought Genesis fans hated: “We’re going to reinvent ourselves”
The biggest hurdle that any band has to face is changing the frontman of the group. This is the person that everyone identified with whenever you played live, and since that face is now gone, how are they supposed to get acquainted with some random person stepping up to the mic who somehow has the same swagger?
Phil Collins claimed to be up to the challenge, but he knew the group had started getting a little too close to pop territory when working on the track ‘No Reply At All’.
What made this transition particularly fascinating was how gradual it felt from within the band itself. There was no single moment where Genesis abandoned their progressive instincts, rather a slow recalibration of priorities.
Hooks became tighter, arrangements slightly more economical, and the emphasis shifted towards immediacy without fully discarding their taste for complexity. It created a strange middle ground where long-time fans could still recognise the band’s DNA, even as the edges began to soften.
At the same time, Collins was emerging as a more prominent creative force, not just as a drummer or reluctant frontman but as someone with a clear sense of how songs could connect with a wider audience. His instincts leaned towards rhythm and accessibility, qualities that naturally nudged the band in a different direction. That did not mean abandoning ambition, but it did mean framing it in a way that felt more direct, something that would soon define Genesis in the eyes of a much broader listenership.
But let’s get one thing crystal clear: Phil Collins did not ruin Genesis. In fact, the band’s ability to carry on so seamlessly after Peter Gabriel’s departure is largely due to how well Collins meshed with the rest of the group. His contributions helped shape A Trick of the Tail, featuring songs that were arguably even more progressive than those from the Gabriel-led era. Far from being a step back, Collins’ tenure allowed the band to explore new creative directions while maintaining their core identity.
Once they had a major hit with ‘Follow You Follow Me’ taken from And Then There Were Three, something strange started to happen. They still had the massive songs that would go on for ages and have different parts layered on top of each other, but there would always be a pop sheen surrounding all of their tracks.
That shift wasn’t by accident. Prog bands prided themselves on staying at the cutting edge of technology, and when synthesisers began to emerge in the 1980s, acts like Yes and Genesis found themselves becoming the most unlikely pop stars. Their ability to harness these advanced soundscapes allowed them to stay ahead of the curve, transforming their progressive roots into a new era of mainstream success.
But horns weren’t exactly the first thing people thought of with Genesis. From the minute that ‘No Reply At All’ starts, it feels like a tune that never made it into one of Collins’s solo outings, especially with the white-soul slant of the horn breaks that sound like they’re ripped straight out of a forgotten Motown classic.
Since they had already started pushing themselves on the rest of Abacab, Collins thought they should test their audience even more on this tune, saying, “I thought, if we’re going to reinvent ourselves, why not have horns on it? This is a song here that sounds like a funky, R&B thing, so let’s put horns on it. So we did it, and people hated it.”
Granted, it’s not like the song is the worst thing in the world. Collins is more than capable of singing a soulful tune based on his solo career, and the band deserve at least some props for making a tune that has a few time signature changes and yet still sounds like it has a rhythmic pocket.
But if anyone wanted to make a case for the moment that Genesis got truly silly, look no further than this song and the video specifically, complete with the group miming the saxophone parts with “air horns”. Yeah, with one look at this music video and one listen to the tune, we should have all expected that Collins had a ‘Sussudio’ in him waiting to rear its head.
