The “underdog” musician Phil Collins wanted everyone to hear
The entire ascent of Phil Collins seemed almost like a mistake in his earliest days.
He didn’t want to be a solo superstar when he first got started, but when he started to make songs that were from the heart, it didn’t take long for his higher-ups to sweet-talk him into turning some of his greatest tunes into a solo career. It may have been a long shot for any legacy band like Genesis to think that the drummer would have had the greatest success, but it all comes down to the people in the background, like Collins was.
The drummer never wanted to get all that confrontational when Peter Gabriel was fronting Genesis, and even when they motioned for him to become the singer, he felt like he was far better suited to be the drummer first and maybe sing the occasional background vocal for fun. If you look at any great band, though, most of them have people like Collins as their secret weapon whenever they make one of their classics.
Led Zeppelin always had John Paul Jones to help fill out their sound, and there are hardly any drummers who can claim that they weren’t influenced by Mitch Mitchell just as much as guitarists emulated Jimi Hendrix. But the real musical minds were the ones who didn’t even think in the realm of traditional musical instruments. Music comes from everywhere, and it takes the right person to find pieces of it out in the wild.
This is what made prog music such an open canvas for musicians. Pink Floyd had their fair share of longer songs, but whereas a band like Yes would spend their time going through some of the most technically difficult music of their career, it wasn’t out of the question for David Gilmour and Roger Waters to go into the avant-garde world and start making songs the same way that sound designers make sounds for movies.
It didn’t have to be the most musical thing in the world every single time someone played their instrument, but that didn’t matter to the visionaries of the world. After all, prog rock sprang up around the same time that art rock did, and while there were bands like Genesis carving out their place in history, Brian Eno was doing the same thing with a synthesiser. Roxy Music was still managing to pull in many passive rock and roll fans, but Eno’s solo career was all about expanding the vocabulary of what recording technology could do.
Collins was from a much different world, but when listening to the textures that Eno put into every one of his songs, the drummer began to realise how important he was in the conversation of rock and roll pioneers, saying, “I played on this track, actually. I’ve done a couple of albums with him and he is very fresh to work with. He’s got a lot of good ideas and a lot of strange ideas. He really should be listened to, because he is doing some very nice things. He works in (those) two minute soundtrack moods, which is a lot of what we’re about, I think, Genesis. So I feel very strongly about what he’s doing. (He is) another one of the underdogs.”
And when looking at the way that Collins interacted with other musicians, he and Eno seemed to be on parallel tracks once they reached the 1980s. They were looking to revitalise what people listened to when they put on a rock album, and had Collins not seen what Eno’s experiments were, perhaps he wouldn’t have stumbled upon the drum sound that gave birth to the 1980s drum sound when working with Peter Gabriel.
Because as much as people love the idea of straight-ahead rock and roll, Collins knew that it was much better to take a chance whenever you could. It’s not easy for anyone to make music like this from scratch, but even if Eno wasn’t going to appeal to everybody, his entire motivation was to make music that satisfied his soul before focusing on what the masses were going to want.
