The unique bond of Robert Plant and Phil Collins: “He was a brother”
It was a good thing that the rock and roll machine of Led Zeppelin came to a grinding halt at the end of the 1970s.
Ultimately, the opulent and hedonistic brand of rock and roll that the four-piece had perfected swiftly became unfashionable at the turn of the new decade, with only the hair-metal admirers of Zeppelin continuing on the trend like a fleet of outdated relics.
The ‘80s brought with it a wild cultural change that rendered the crunching sound of Led Zeppelin somewhat antiquated. Capitalism and technology were put at the forefront of this cultural revolution, and so the music sought to mirror that. The commercialised introduction of synthesisers not only changed the landscape of pop, but laid the foundations of the sort of electronic music many would regard as the arch nemesis of rock and roll.
Then there were bands like Genesis, who slipped between the cracks of these moving tectonic plates, blending rock and roll sensibilities with a more modernised approach, so they kept the rock and roll torch burning, while presenting themselves as something of an antithesis to those who came before them.
You simply couldn’t imagine these prog-rock nerds rubbing shoulders with the classic rockers at any industry party, for their differences represented wildly varying spectrums of the music industry. But ultimately, such a reductive take as that fails to acknowledge a key source of mutual respect: the music. As opulent as they may have seemed, Zeppelin cared deeply about the music they were releasing and while evolving, so did Genesis, and hence, when the time finally came for them to meet, an unlikely relationship started to blossom.
“I didn’t know Phil [Collins], but he was on Atlantic,” Plant remembered, “And as I spent more and more time with Ahmet Ertegun and we became closer friends, Phil came into the picture. He was breaking away from Genesis and the Brit prog stuff, and he was getting more on it. He sent me a message: ‘John Bonham was the absolute inspiration for everything that made me pick up a pair of drumsticks’. He then said that, if in the band a chair was empty, he would come and help me.”
Plant and Collins struck up a kinship rooted in their shared approach to music. The sonic outcomes of Collin’s work to date may have been slightly different, but Plant respected the drummer’s meticulous approach to songwriting, and so, together, they bridged the gap between eras and got to work on collaborating.
“From the first moment I met him,” he added. “It was like he was a brother, and his enthusiasm was insane and positive and charming, and his energy, how he drove the band members on, he took the onus on himself, and we did Pictures At Eleven and [1983’s] The Principle Of Moments.”
Ultimately, it was Collins who helped resurrect Plant’s solo career in the 1980s and take him forward into a new era of rock and roll that his previous style would have struggled to adapt to.
