The one drummer Phil Collins never enjoyed: “Does nothing for me at all”
When it comes to drummers like Phil Collins, the beauty behind their craft comes down to feel over anything else.
Collins had to be comfortable with the kind of tunes he was playing, and by the time that he started working with Genesis, the arrangements that they made on their first few albums would have been any other drummer’s paradise when Collins stepped behind the kit. He was the one helping turn their songs into powerhouses a lot of the time, but he did have a keen ear for when he heard something that sounded a bit bizarre in between the classics he was making.
Then again, the idea of giving Collins the blame for turning Genesis into a pop band just doesn’t feel right in a lot of sense. Yes, the band did have a lot more commercial appeal once they entered the 1980s, but it’s hard to look at the band as pure hitmakers with Collins behind the microphone when their first albums without Peter Gabriel had tunes like ‘Dance on a Volcano’ on them.
They were as prog as they ever were, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t room for them to explore other genres as well. I mean, what is progressive if not sampling every style that you can? It’s not like there wasn’t any room for them to spice things up, and by the time MTV started kicking, even the biggest prog bands of the time like Rush and Yes were already starting to get in on the action when they started making more accessible tunes like ‘Limelight’ and ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.
As we can see now, Collins was much better at being a hitmaker, but there was still that attention to detail in his drumming. You have to remember that this was the same guy who was known for making tunes with Brand X, and while he did have a lot of chops during the prog days, he wasn’t about to throw them away once he started making tunes like ‘Sussudio’ or ‘Invisible Touch’.
At the same time, there is a way for some people to go too far in the other direction, and Collins could feel Carl Palmer crossing that line more than a few times. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were already the poster children for prog when John Lydon started talking about how much he hated the genre, and when looking at his sense of technique, even Collins had to admit that there were many better drummers out there for people to be emulating than what Palmer did.
Compared to every one of his contemporaries like Bill Bruford and Neil Peart, Collins didn’t feel that same kind of soul in Palmer’s drumming when he was comparing him to Yes’s Alan White, saying, “In Alan White’s defense, I think he’s not at all like Carl Palmer, whose playing I don’t particularly enjoy. He might be a nice man, but his playing does nothing for me at all.” But it also comes from a different language that both of them are working with.
Sure they both could play as fast as any other drummer, but when you listen to what Palmer was doing behind the kit, there was a lot more athletic ability that seemed to go into making a record like Tarkus. That’s not how Collins thought about drumming, and a lot of what he did seemed to be indebted to what he heard out of the biggest Motown musicians that he had grown up listening to.
So while there are more than a few times where Collins could make a grand progressive statement on par with his colleagues, Palmer wasn’t the first person on his list of imitators. He needed to have a bit more passion in what he was doing, and while Palmer could deliver a show whenever the time called for it, Collins wanted something a little less cold whenever he picked up a new record.
