“My strength was arranging”: The members Phil Collins called the heart of Genesis
It’s about time that someone has come to rescue Phil Collins from all of his naysayers. As much as he has been ridiculed for creating some of the most insipid music of the 1980s and beyond, it’s important to remember how much he’s done for the progressive rock scene before when he was in Genesis. Even though he was known as the face of the group once he started notching up singles like ‘Invisible Touch’, the drummer always considered someone else as the true heart and soul of the band.
It’s important to know that Collins was far from the first person to join the group, even when the band consisted of a bunch of charter school students, Collins was still a hapless kid doing different acting roles before coming to audition with the progressive giants at Mike Rutherford’s house.
And listening to some of his drumming, it’s not like he wasn’t working with any pop schlock initially. Selling England by the Pound and Foxtrot took everything about acts like Yes and King Crimson and tried taking things to a different level, which was bound to get a lot weirder when Gabriel decided to don lavish costumes every time he stepped onstage, from a flower to a fox’s head.
Although the group could assemble the most complex arrangements that anyone had ever thought of, Gabriel knew the time was up when he finished working on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Everything was still working fine, but it was clear that he needed to move to preserve his own sanity and look after his newborn daughter.
Despite Collins being a bit leery of standing behind the microphone, the first records he sang on were still far from the poppiest offerings. Even when they started to go towards the mainstream, ‘Turn It On Again’ doesn’t follow the same structure of a pop tune, especially with the different unusual chords in the mix and the time signature throwing everything a bit off balance.
Regardless of how many hits Collins wrote for the band during their time, he still felt that the real heart and soul of the group had nothing to do with him, telling Louder, “The spirit of Genesis was Tony, Mike and Peter. I didn’t regard myself as a songwriter then. But there were things in Genesis I was highly influential in. My strength was arranging.”
At the same time, Collins might be selling himself a bit short. He could certainly turn in great arrangements when he wanted to, but his prowess as a songwriter is what made ‘Misunderstanding’ so catchy while also making a song like ‘Sussudio’ one of the more insufferable earworms to come out of the decade.
Still, it’s hard to deny Rutherford and Banks’ power over the group up until their final days. Even though many people think that both eras of Genesis ended when Gabriel and Collins left, respectively, both Rutherford and Banks were the only two people who could have feasibly hung everything up.
