The one genre Phil Collins called the soundtrack of his life: “The music I lived my life to”
The journey that Phil Collins has taken from a humble drummer to one of the biggest solo stars in the world was never exactly his plan.
He always wanted the chance to make the music that he loved, but when looking through every one of his records, it’s hard to think that the same man who eventually made tunes like ‘Another Day in Paradise’ was also behind all of those insane drum fills in Genesis. By all accounts, it just doesn’t make sense, but when you look at his track record, Collins wasn’t willing to sample just one kind of genre of music every time he made a new record.
He liked the idea of having some variety in everything he made, so while he could make some of the most complicated prog rock epics that he could, what was the point when he could make a great pop song? ‘In the Air Tonight’ had already carved out a much different place for him on the album charts, and when you look at the kinds of ballads that he was writing, the thought of him becoming one of the leading voices for Disney movies didn’t seem that far off the mark for him later down the line.
But the one thing that’s missing from a lot of this conversation is straight rock and roll. Prog might have been an extension of the genre when Genesis first put their minds together, but apart from what he heard from the heavy hitters like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Collins didn’t naturally gravitate towards rock and roll in the same way a lot of his contemporaries had done before.
It was a much different world for him to comprehend when he was shown Elvis Presley for the first time, and while he didn’t take to that music that naturally, he could easily see himself fitting into the world of soul music. Motown was what made him fall in love with music from the moment that he heard bands like The Action playing it, and for someone who looked like the last person someone would hire at Hitsville, he did pull off a respectable version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ by the Supremes.
Then again, that only came from Collins internalising all of those songs when he was first learning about rock and roll. He loved the idea of making tunes that people could dance to in a more natural way, and since those tunes always came back to the rhythmic aspect of things, it was only natural for him to start making music that felt more in that vein than anything that Chuck Berry was doing.
And until the day he dies, Collins will always claim that Motown was the one flavour of music that he loved over everything else, saying, “Well, when I was twelve or thirteen The Beatles’ first album was coming out, and there was a cross section on the first two albums they did. They had some Motown and early soul record covers. So, I was getting third hand versions of quite a lot of these songs from other bands. This is the music that I kind of lived my life to. I know it sounds weird now because forty years or so later, I’ve been known, really, for playing with Genesis, which is kind of a million miles, it seems, away from this stuff.”
But it’s not like the rest of the world could recognise what Collins was doing, either. He could pull off the genre incredibly well, and even if it was weird seeing him next to someone like Philip Bailey when singing tunes like ‘Easy Lover’, it did make a lot more sense when you think of the kinds of tunes that he had been used to writing when he was making albums like No Jacket Required.
That sense of groove was in his veins before he had even started thinking about progressive music, and even if the rest of the world couldn’t see it, he was going to wear those influences on his sleeve. Those songs were practically a part of his DNA, so when making Going Back, it wasn’t like some radical departure. All roads pointed to him making something new, and the thought of joining forces with The Funk Brothers was the perfect place to wrap up his career.
