“It’s frustrating”: The legendary band Phil Collins never bothered to hear
Not every artist can keep up with what’s new on the charts all the time. As much as they might like to keep their ear close to the ground, no one can be expected to listen to music after going through a massive tour and make sure that they have their finger on the pulse of every new artist that comes around when they are in the studio. Then again, when looking through the 1980s, it was hard to really escape anything related to Phil Collins given how many places he could be at any one time.
Sure, he was one of the greatest artists of his generation and has written some of the greatest anthems of the 1980s, but he also earned the distinction of being overexposed a little too much. The idea of him juggling his solo career and Genesis was hard enough for people to keep up with, but by the time he was working with Bone Thugz-n-Harmony in the 1990s and started making music for films like Tarzan, it’s understandable why people had their fill of him after a while.
Then again, Collins already had his fair share of hangups before he even hit the big time. During the Peter Gabriel run, Genesis were still considered an underground band that were slowly bringing progressive rock to the mainstream, but looking through every other prog band they were lumped in with, Collins was never exactly comfortable with being lumped in with people like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. He always knew the power of a great pop song, and he wanted to make something in that vein rather than long exercises.
The only problem was that Genesis were often incredible at getting the prog epic down to a science. People may have been used to singing along to tracks like ‘Invisible Touch’ once the 1980s began, but every second of ‘Supper’s Ready’ is a technical masterpiece, to the point where they made one of the sections work while the band and Tony Banks play in two completely different time signatures.
But Genesis was far from the first band to think of more ambitious pieces for a rock and roll band. King Crimson had been toying with the idea of episodic songs, and The Beatles had pioneered the concept of tunes with multiple sections like ‘A Day in the Life’ and the medley on Abbey Road, but in terms of stretching out songs, noone did it better than The Grateful Dead, and Collins couldn’t be asked to care.
Despite their reputation for jamming for minutes on end, Collins said that he never willingly went out of his way to listen to a Grateful Dead album, saying, “I’ve never even heard a Grateful Dead album, but they’re there in that corner, the same as we are to people who have never heard us! Maybe if I listened, I might like them. But it’s frustrating.”
But it’s easy to see the difference between what Genesis does and how Jerry Garcia led the Dead. The whole point behind Jerry Garcia’s music was to turn a song into a living, breathing entity whenever they played, but Collins was always interested in making structured sections of a tune rather than having 20 free minutes of music onstage and hoping for the best whenever a solo came up.
What Collins had to do had to do with parts other than jams, and no matter how much the Grateful Dead played their asses off, he wanted to reach a bit further. So whenever he sat down to write a pop song, a prog epic, or anything else in between, Collins made sure that he had a nice roadmap for where any of the songs were going to go before he was through.
