The one show Phil Collins said Genesis were booed offstage: “Not very pleasant”
Anyone who has been a star like Phil Collins knows the importance of getting criticism.
Any band that doesn’t know how to deal with people grilling them about their own work is never going to last long, and when the drummer stepped out from behind the kit to sing for the first time, there were bound to be a whole lot more people confused when he wasn’t making the same theatrical moves that Peter Gabriel did when he started playing. But Collins was always a different kind of singer, and that was either going to be a breath of fresh air or the kiss of death, depending on who you talked to.
To this day, there are still people who claim that Collins officially ruined all of the goodwill that Genesis had. His pop antics as a solo artist probably didn’t help his case, and seeing songs like ‘Invisible Touch’ and ‘That’s All’ rocket up the charts had to feel strange for someone that picked up Selling England By the Pound back in the day, but it wasn’t like the drummer woke up one day and decided that all semblance of prog be stripped out of the band.
They had a more gradual evolution, and even by the time they became superstars, it’s not like Gabriel was that far behind them, either. So was packed to the brim with hits, and while Collins’s approach may have been more informed by some of his favourite pop acts back in the day, there isn’t a soul on the planet who wouldn’t jump at the chance at being a pop star if they had the right songs behind them.
And if you were to ask Collins, his career would have been very different had he had his way more often. Face Value was never intended to be his debut solo album, and even if Collins did have the idea of making a career out of it, he would have gone for something a bit more technical in the vein of what he did with Brand X. Even records like A Trick of the Tail were indebted to their prog roots, but ‘Follow You Follow Me’ from And Then There Were Three was the first time everyone noticed a change.
This was a catchy tune that was the best of both worlds for the band, so naturally, they wanted to lean into that pop side a little more. After all, Collins had been known for writing a few more hooks once he had ‘In the Air Tonight’ and ‘I Don’t Care Anymore’ under his belt, so when he got the idea of adding horns to songs like ‘No Reply At All’, it felt like the next step for them. Everyone was happy with how Abacab turned out, but they got a firm wake-up call when they performed some of the tunes for the first time.
People still expecting ‘Firth of Fifth’ may have had their hearts broken, but Collins was able to take those initial crowds in stride, saying, “I think the fans were a bit trapped because they knew what they wanted and didn’t like us to deviate too much from that. I remember being in Holland and Leiden, [and when] Genesis played there we got booed. At least it was a positive reaction in a negative way. To get an audience to do something honest was quite interesting but not necessarily very pleasant.”
Which is strange, looking back on the kind of song ‘No Reply At All’ was. Anyone could have been there to hear them tear through some of their old classics, but if we’re judging it on the basis of where the band would go after that, that kind of song was almost quaint, especially with how much the band were taking the piss in the video by “playing” the horn parts while holding nothing.
This was clearly a means of testing the waters, but even though they didn’t have the best reaction, they were never going to slow down. The goal of any rock and roll band is to follow their bliss, and there was no use getting stuck into one sound and doing the longer songs that the audience wanted. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of progression, and Collins was more than happy to shake things up whenever he had the chance.
