“The greatest drummer of all time,” according to Phil Collins
The bread and butter of every good Phil Collins song revolves around the drums.
Even though Collins has made his living outside of Genesis as one of the more saccharine songwriters of the 1980s, the amount of detail that he puts into every percussion is unmatched by anyone else in his field, including God’s gift to air drummers everywhere, ‘In the Air Tonight’. Although Collins had worked hard to garner respect amongst his drumming peers, there is only one artist he considers better than anyone else.
Coming from the world of progressive rock, Collins had a far more eclectic taste in music than most of his contemporaries. Considering his knack for incorporating complex polyrhythms into the equation, the Genesis man’s impact on music tended to come from genres as far-reaching as classical and jazz.
Before Collins had even tried to master a basic paradiddle, Buddy Rich was already making waves as the most powerful drummer to ever live. Although he wanted nothing to do with rock and roll, the signature swing Rich brought to his jazz bands was one of the turning points in drumming history, having an animalistic sense of power while keeping everything in the pocket throughout every song.
When Collins first heard of Rich’s style, he was blown away, recalling, “I think he is the greatest drummer of all time. I met him once, and first of all, alongside The Beatles and The Who, and all the pop stars, I was also listening to big-band jazz, so Count Basie was someone on his band and Buddy Rich, and I came across this West Side Story medley of Buddy Rich in 1965 and still is an incredible piece of work. If you never heard, you should. He is on top form throughout the whole thing”.
Although there are more than a few licks that Collins had picked up from artists like John Bonham and Ginger Baker behind the kit, Buddy Rich may be one of the most evident influences on his style. Whereas both Baker and Bonham were going for a sound that fell somewhere between a drummer and a feral animal, Collins’s approach was almost clinically precise, making songs that had power without sacrificing brute force for the sake of the composition.
Even when moving in front of the microphone in Genesis, the drums still held a prominent place in the mix. When looking at Collins’s first record as the singer, A Trick of the Tail, that Rich sense of flair is still intact on the first track ‘Dance on a Volcano’, playing around the different time signature changes from Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, climaxing in a massive drum roll that wouldn’t feel out of place as the crescendo at the end of a big band number.
Then again, Rich was never one to play for the sake of being flashy, and his most enduring classics involve him laying down a subtle pulse for the rest of the song to breathe behind. That sense of precision with performing a simple drum groove is also prevalent every time Collins is working on percussion, making the basic drum fill on ‘In the Air Tonight’ sound like the most jaw-dropping feat in drumming history based on how much power went into it.
The commonalities between progressive rock and the swing era might seem like night and day, but there’s a good chance that Rich could have taught Collins a thing or two about how to play drums properly.
He’s not the only drummer Phil Collins has shown love to
Collins’ favourite drummers are the crème de la crème of the instrument and feature names that make it on every list of this kind that’s worth its salt. Throughout everything that Collins has done throughout his career, the most comfortable place for him is still behind the drumkit, and it’s intriguing to discover the five drummers that occupy the most special place in his heart, which he discussed with BBC 6 Music in 2016.
Those names include Steve Gadd, Chester Thompson, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr and John Bonham, whom Collins called “The best bass drum of anybody I’ve ever seen, and I became a convert there, and then, you know. So I started to follow him wherever he was doing rude to be playing in a band. Next time I saw him was with Led Zeppelin when they were still called The New Yardbirds. The early Led Zeppelin was something to behold because nobody was doing that.”
