The one drummer Phil Collins could watch all day: “It will blow me away”
Phil Collins was never looking to waste people’s time every single time he got onstage.
It was a lot for anyone to try and sit through some of the major epics that Genesis came up with, but some of the biggest pieces of their catalogue tend to fly by because of how much musical chaos is going on every single time they perform. And while Collins was the one that everyone points to when talking about the band going pop, he was just as nimble as the rest of them when he got behind the drum kit.
He may be known more for the few seconds in the middle of ‘In the Air Tonight’, but the entire point of the band working together lived and died on how Collins played. A lot of the best tunes that he ever made were always about testing the limits of what he could, and even outside of his main band, his work in Brand X gave him a much better outlet for what he wanted to hear out of his own playing.
But the idea of pure showmanship never really appealed to Collins that much. He lived to serve the song, and while there are more than a few heroes of his that ended up making more ambitious drumming vehicles like Buddy Rich, it all had to make sense in the context of whatever they were working on. And that meant that Collins shied away from any kind of drum solo throughout his career.
Because when you think about it, drum solos were the epitome of what excessive drumming was supposed to be. Some of them looked and sounded fantastic, like when John Bonham would throw down without his drumsticks at Led Zeppelin’s live shows, but a lot of what Collins was doing needed to be rooted in something with a bit more structure to it. Then again, he could easily see why Tony Williams was one of the best in his field when he first heard him.
Williams had already been a contemporary in the jazz world, and the thought of anyone slowing him down would have been a tragedy had he been forced to work outside of his usual wheelhouse. And while Williams did take the occasional drum solo, Collins said that he had more than enough time to listen to him every single time he got behind the kit to demolish every other drummer in the room.
He kept things entertaining, and that was all Collins could have asked for, saying, “It’s so bloody boring to see someone just doing rolls with the bass drum, or throwing a stick up and catching it, or things like that. It’s so predictable. No matter how good the solo, it’s predictable that you start there and it’s going to get there. It’s pandering to the masses, really. Kids like to see it, but they’re not going to want anything better unless you give them something better. I can watch Tony Williams do a drum solo because it will blow me away.”
Collins was the last person to say that he could do the kinds of things that Williams did, but there was a lot more to him than simply playing drum rolls. He wanted to tell a story with the drums that couldn’t be told on other instruments, and a lot of that came down to him trying to paint a straight line through every single complex part, just like Williams did and making everything work in that way.
It wasn’t going to be easy keeping a tuneless instrument all that engaging, but Collins knew that it was about far more than hitting things for a living. It was about how you used the sticks and the swing in your playing, and Williams knew that kind of feeling like the back of his hand every time he performed.
