“I actually asked”: The band that turned down Phil Collins as a drummer
By the time Phil Collins reached his solo years, he really didn’t need another band to play with. He was already close to getting overexposed once Genesis started seeing hits, and when he began making music for Disney films in the 1990s, it was becoming clear that there was some fatigue setting in when it came to everyone hearing his voice everywhere they went. Although Collins always held onto that workaholic demeanour throughout his time in the spotlight, he felt that there was one band that he would have gladly taken on.
Then again, Collins’s taste in music was never limited to strictly prog rock. Even when the genre started finding its sea legs around the time he was making records like Foxtrot and Selling England By the Pound, he never considered himself to be in the same genre as people like Yes and King Crimson, usually focusing on making something far more inventive than traditional scale exercises.
That’s because Collins was born and bred, favouring genres like jazz right alongside traditional rock. You have to remember that he was in a band called Brand X when first working with Genesis, which may as well have been the UK version of the jazz fusion group Weather Report during their tenure.
While the Genesis drummer thrived on making something a bit more complicated than usual, he never sacrificed his sense of power either. Even when the band arguably “sold out” when he started to take on lead vocals, albums like A Trick of the Tail contain some of the most complicated feats that he ever pulled off, playing with the same energy as John Bonham with and the precision of Neil Peart.
But in the world of rock and roll drumming, the art of being a powerful drummer is still the house that Keith Moon built. Although most of The Who’s music could seem a bit complicated looking at their massive rock operas, Moony never played anything that sounded too busy, even managing to make those strange drum fills in the middle of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ work before Pete Townshend’s guitar comes screaming back in.
Although Collins was ready to leave Genesis behind once Moon passed away, he remembered getting a polite rejection from Townshend when he offered his services, saying, “I actually asked Townshend if I could join the Who at one point. When Moony died, I was doing some sessions with Townshend, and I said, ‘If you need a drummer, I’ll make myself available,’ and we got on very well, but he’d already asked Kenny Jones.”
If he wasn’t going to be able to play with his heroes, he would spend the rest of the 1980s doing everything else he could. Outside of taking breaks on and off with Genesis, his solo career saw him making even greater strides with his technique, either going full-on pop on No Jacket Required or managing to make something a bit more progressive in the 1990s with the album Both Sides.
While Collins may have been at the top of the food chain a bit too long for some people, having him in The Who for a few years would have been a fine way for them to close the book on their legacy. ‘Eminence Front’ may have been a send-off to the group’s classic era, but imagine the type of performance Collins would have given had he been working on that instead of embarrassing himself on ‘Illegal Alien’.
