Phil Collins: “I almost joined Yes”
Throughout rock and roll history, it’s strange to see the narrative around Phil Collins changing so much over the years.
He may have been one of the key members of Genesis throughout their progressive heights, but there’s a good chance that more people remember him as the pop starlet of the band that ended up “ruining” the band when he took over vocal duties. Sure, he may have been overexposed to a certain degree, but had he said ‘yes’ to the right people, his entire career would have turned out very differently.
But you have to remember that becoming one of the biggest pop stars in the world wasn’t really Collins’s plan when he first went solo. A lot of Face Value was going to be way too personal for him to release, but after the runaway success of tunes like ‘In the Air Tonight’, it’s like anyone else wouldn’t have leaned into being a pop star if they wanted to. And to be perfectly honest, it doesn’t seem like Collins ever made that turn towards pop solely to make money or anything.
If you look at what he did with everyone from Phillip Bailey to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony or even his covers of classic Motown songs, you could tell that he did love that style of music just as much as the complicated stuff. People may have wanted something that sounded like Brand X all the time, but it was possible for him to make the complicated stuff while also being the same guy who made soundtracks for Disney movies.
On the other hand, part of Collins’s heart was always going to be in making the most complicated tunes that he could. His first band, Flaming Youth, already had a progressive bent to them, and even when Collins realised that he needed to become a frontman, getting Chester Thompson to play with Genesis showed that he still cared about the finesse that the band had whenever they played live.
Then again, Collins’s greatest strength for the longest time was how he played the drums. His performance on records like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was enough to impress even the biggest names in drumming like Neil Peart, but midway through his glory years with Genesis, he was very nearly persuaded to join Yes once Bill Bruford decided to leave to work with King Crimson.
It’s not like Collins didn’t have the chops for it, and even he admitted that the project would have been interesting before he decided to stick it out with his main gig, saying, “I almost joined Yes, actually. I went to see them loads of times at the Marquee. [Yes singer] Jon Anderson gave me his number and said, ‘Sure man, call me,’ in his squeaky voice. And I never did! And I often wonder, what would have happened if I had… I probably wouldn’t be here doing this.”
That’s probably correct, but it’s not like playing with Yes wouldn’t have been a ton of fun also. Collins was always a fan of what Bruford was doing, and while a lot of the longest Genesis songs could get more than a little bit complicated like on ‘The Knife’ or ‘Supper’s Ready’, it would have been interesting seeing what Collins could have done when playing a song like ‘Close to the Edge’ or working with what would eventually become tunes like ‘The Gates of Delirium’.
While it did come full circle when Bruford ended up joining Genesis for a little bit, Collins did manage to end up right where he was supposed to be throughout his career. We might have been spared having to go through the more embarrassing moments of his solo career, but there’s no way that anyone would trade the greatest prog rock epic over a song like ‘Against All Odds’.
