The prog-rock band Phil Collins never wanted to listen to: “It took me ages”
It’s hard to really classify Phil Collins in any one genre.
As much as he was known as one of the most badass drummers to walk the Earth when Genesis first started gaining traction, there are others that think that drumming is only a side hustle for him in between his career of pumping out some of the most saccharine ballads of all time. But two things can be true at once, and Collins had a lot more to offer than having a bunch of ballads in his arsenal whenever he sat down to make a record.
If anything, his heart was always more interested in making challenging music. He was immensely proud of the job that he did in Genesis, and even during his solo career, it’s telling that one of his personal favourite records from that time was Both Sides. The whole thing was played by only him, and considering what the rest of his solo career is like, hearing him stretch some songs out was a lot more interesting than him trying to recreate another version of ‘Sussudio’ or ‘Take Me Home’.
While a piece of his heart was always going to be in Genesis, he wasn’t as much of a fan of the kind of bands that they were lumped in with. It’s undeniable that the band were one of the forebearers of prog rock, but even if you ask some of the biggest names in that genre, it’s not like everyone was completely comfortable with that description. David Gilmour didn’t consider Pink Floyd prog, and Collins was more than happy to call some of the other prog acolytes pretentious.
He was never that much of a fan of bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer for instance, and the more that he listened to their brand of rock and roll, the more he was turned off. Say what you want about the prog experiments that Genesis did, but they were at least more interested in making songs that took people on a journey than worrying about how many different sections they could fit into one 20-minute epic tune.
So if his contemporaries were turning him off with their brand of rock and roll, he had no time for the bands that he inspired, either, saying, “It took me ages before I heard Marillion. I kept on hearing about these second-generation Genesis groups and I didn’t want to hear them. I wasn’t even that keen on first-generation Genesis stuff.” While it’s hard to take Collins at his word, it’s not like he doesn’t have a fair point.
While the Peter Gabriel era of the group did have some fine moments, it’s not like From Genesis to Revelation got everything off on the right foot. They were still clearly trying to make baroque music, and while that would have been interesting, things were only to get better when they started crafting odysseys on records like Selling England By the Pound rather than making whimsical ditties.
Although Marillion does take that kind of whimsy and stretch it out for entire albums, it’s not like that approach doesn’t have merit in its own way. There are plenty of artists that try to add a bit of a fantastical element to their music, so if someone like Paul McCartney can write the odd witty tune now and again, what was stopping Marillion from doing the same thing with a few more time signature changes?
That was all well and good, but Collins’s was focused on much more adventurous directions. Genesis had clearly done that in the past and realised that it wasn’t for them, and to Collins’s credit, there’s a good chance that they would have never made it to the pop years of their career on Invisible Touch were it not for them shedding their earlier skin.
