The rookie musician who “surprised the shit” out of Phil Collins
Music history is littered with family affairs.
We all know about the Davies brothers causing hell in The Kinks or the Oasis brothers channelling their loves of both The Beatles and themselves into their music, but long before either was the Carter Family, and now we’ve got Haim, First Aid Kit and the Kings of Leon. Then, there are also the nepo babies.
You could re-create the Fab Four through the original members’ musical offspring, though it wouldn’t be quite as exciting to see James McCartney, Dhani Harrison, Sean-Ono Lennon and Zak Starkey twisting and shouting together as it would to watch Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr in their prime.
You can find them all across the musical map; there’s Miley Cyrus (who is actually great and deserves any credit she receives), Whitney Houston (whose mother, Cissy, was a better singer than Billy Ray Cyrus), Enrique Iglesias, Norah Jones, Nancy Sinatra, and countless others. Unbelievably, Jakob Dylan, of The Wallflowers fame, is now the same age that his dad Bob was when he made the comeback classic Time Out of Mind.
Of course, despite the overwhelming encouragement and material and financial support that each of them received from their parents, stepping into the shadows of your world-famous mother or father comes with its unique set of anxieties, because not only will you always be asked about your more-famous forebearer in every interview, but their music will always be the marker by which you and everybody else in the world judges your own output.
Moreover, people will come to you when they can’t get to your parents. After Elvis’ tragic early death, his daughter Lisa Marie found that there were always people coming to her own shows, hoping to hear her sing her father’s songs, sometimes unsettlingly dressed as ‘the King’. If it’s hard enough to deal with the pressure of following in such iconic footsteps, then it must be even more daunting when your dad is right there on the stage with you. Just ask Nic Collins, who took over the sticks and sat behind the kit and behind his father, Phil Collins, night after night on the 2017 Not Dead Yet tour.
Just 17 at the time, Nic remembered an occasion on the tour when playing at Hyde Park, and he noticed his dad standing and watching him by the drum riser: “At first I was like, ‘Oh God, what is he gonna critique me on afterwards?’” But far from getting ready to critique or castigate his son, the elder Collins was having the opposite reaction entirely.
“I mean, he surprised the shit out of me,” Phil said, “I mean, when I was living in Miami, I guess Nic was 16. But I knew he’d been playing, I mean, him and Matthew actually, they’ve had two drum kits and my drum kit down in the playroom, and we all used to play together, and then they played together, and Nic just got better and better.”
Once he realised that his dad was looking at him with admiration rather than admonition, Nic began to enjoy the interactions between father and son onstage and the musical moments that they’d share, noting, “I’m grateful that he felt confident enough in my ability to go on stage with them and to play these parts”.
