The song Phil Collins never wanted to give to Genesis: “They wanted it on the record”
Comparing Phil Collins as a solo artist to what he did in Genesis hardly seems fair.
While both of them ended up sounding a little too similar by the time that Collins started working on the band’s pop albums like Invisible Touch, it’s not like he was actively trying to scrub every single piece of progressive music from his DNA. He was still the same musician that he always was, but he did have a bit more of a problem when the band started taking songs away from him that would have been a lot more personal.
Then again, that’s the big compromise that comes with being in a band. You don’t get to call the shots if the whole thing is a democracy, and while Collins was more than happy to contribute everything he could during the Peter Gabriel era, something different was happening when he made Face Value. He wasn’t trying to have hits, but when he started writing songs all about the dissolution of his marriage, he wanted to make sure that the more personal tunes ended up staying on his record.
But if you look at what he brought in for the album Duke, there are more than a few songs that would have been better suited to what he was doing on his own. ‘Misunderstanding’ does have a decent groove that Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford can sink their teeth into, but when listening back to ‘Please Don’t Ask’, Collins always felt that the song was way too emotionally raw to put on one of his band’s albums.
Since those were the two that his bandmates picked, though, Collins felt that he was sacrificing one of his masterpieces to serve his band, saying, “In a way the other guys thought that my writing had come to a point where it was touching them as well and they wanted it on the record. It’s all good, but I thought it was probably better if it had been on Face Value. I just feel that during that period, I just wanted to play what I was writing, and it’s a different song for Genesis to do.”
If we take a closer look at this, though, Collins wasn’t changing up his style all that much; it was Genesis that was evolving. The rest of his bandmates may not have seen the kind of massive hit that ‘In the Air Tonight’ was going to be as far as Collins could tell, but when they started to see what else he was bringing to the table, ‘Please Don’t Ask’ was still in the traditional ballad form that made a lot more sense after their knockout hit with ‘Follow You Follow Me’.
At the same time, this is the moment where Collins really started playing with fire a little bit. He didn’t want to be shackled to the band for the rest of his career, and when he started perfectly balancing his solo career and his time with the band, there came a point where he started to become one of the most omnipresent faces in music. That’s all well and good, but when you see the same guy singing songs on TV and on the radio, there comes a point where you really want it to stop.
You can’t really judge the other members of Genesis for wanting to turn towards pop, but it did come at the expense of Collins as well. His voice was integral to the band after Peter Gabriel left, but even when he was making the greatest music that he could, there came a point where even he had to wonder if he really needed to have the rest of the group behind him to work on some of his tunes.
So while ‘Please Don’t Ask’ is an important song in the evolution of Genesis, it also does have more than a few questionable moments on it as well because of what came after. It got them back into the pop realm for a few more years, but since the rest of the world was already having issues with the Collins-fronted version of Genesis, seeing them everywhere wasn’t exactly going to make everything better.
