The one musician Phil Collins never wanted to talk to: “A miserable bastard”
Phil Collins learned a long time ago that he didn’t need to take himself all that seriously.
Some of the best songs that he ever made were all about the simple pleasures in life, and while it was hard to even understand what he was saying on some of his solo tunes, you could tell that he was putting in as much effort into making ‘Sussudio’ into one of the greatest records that he had ever made. But making music just to have a laugh isn’t something that everyone resonated with when they first heard him singing.
Then again, isn’t that how rock and roll started out? Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were making songs for people to look at the dark undercurrents of what they were singing about, and Collins never claimed to be a dour songwriter. He had gone through his fair share of turmoil in his life, but he was more than happy to focus on the lighter side, whether it was getting a bit goofy or writing tunes for Disney movies.
That kind of optimism is often half the reason why people hate the second half of Genesis, but it wasn’t like Collins was abandoning prog rock when he started making more pop-flavoured tunes. Their sound was already naturally going in that direction, and if their contemporaries like Yes could have a hit tune and their ex-bandmate Peter Gabriel could become the darling of MTV, Invisible Touch wasn’t exactly all that out of place next to them.
But right around the early 1990s, it seemed like everyone had collective burnout for Collins. He didn’t need to be one of the biggest names in the world across every single radio station, and it didn’t help that the music suddenly stopped having as much resonance. That’s not to say that We Can’t Dance was a terrible record by any means, but when you listen to where they had been, it wasn’t going to get the same kind of major credibility that they had during the days of Foxtrot.
In fact, half of the record was an opportunity for the band to leave all that kind of structure behind. They liked the idea of spontaneity on a lot of their songs, and half of the record featured songs that were recorded totally off the floor compared to what they had been doing earlier. That did leave room for a few goofy lyrics, and for someone who was as adamant about lyrics as Roger Waters was, Collins remembered getting a verbal lashing from him when he heard about what he said in the press.
After hearing him tear apart the song ‘I Can’t Dance’, Collins said that Waters was nothing but a cynical musician at the end of the day, saying, “He said, ‘That’s Genesis doing a stupid walk with that awful song.’ Now I’ve met Waters, and I love his music, but he’s a miserable bastard. He’s got a very dark, cynical sense of humour, but he didn’t see the fun in it at all. He thought this was our big statement. I wrote to him, and he said that [comment] was supposed to be off the record, which didn’t make it better.”
Then again, it’s always been difficult to try to gauge what Waters thought was a bit tongue-in-cheek every time performed. There are more than a few shows that seemed dark and dour from the minute that they started, and aside from working with Pink Floyd at Live 8, there hasn’t been a single show that he’s played where he is all smiles from the minute that he hits the stage.
So even if Waters could tear apart people like Collins, the drummer was always going to let it roll off his back every single time he heard it. There were always going to be people out there who didn’t like his music, and the least he could do was make a few songs that he felt could make people happy at the end of the day.
