The “worst” performance Phil Collins never wanted to play again
In a perfect world, there’s a good chance that we would have never seen what Phil Collins would have been like as a solo artist.
He felt that his heart was in Genesis from day one, and even when he started to make records like Face Value, a lot of the songs he was writing weren’t necessarily music that he wanted to release if he could help it. He wanted to have the chance to make a couple of great songs, but he wasn’t above hanging in the back and getting to be the drummer every time he put on a show.
Because despite all of the accolades, drumming was always going to be Collins’s first love. He had the power to create some truly timeless ballads throughout his career, but the initial bug that he had for wanting to play music happened the minute that he heard people like Buddy Rich and wanting to make the same kind of classics that people like him were doing whenever he stepped behind the kit.
But Genesis wasn’t an easy band to drum for even at the most simple of times. Peter Gabriel was looking to put together a band that made music that was a lot more forward-looking than anything else, and that meant making rock songs that stretched well beyond what everyone was used to whenever they made a record. Side-long epics weren’t off the table, but that suited Collins fine.
He loved the idea of expanding his musical palette, but the performance aspect was going to take some getting used to. Gabriel wasn’t going to be the same flamboyant type that you would see out of someone like Little Richard, and when he came out onstage dressed like a flower or wearing a fox’s head, seeing everyone look on in awe was exactly what he was going for out of every performance.
And for Collins, that was never a problem. None of the band members were willing to ham it up onstage as much, so if they managed to get a picture of Gabriel on the front page of a music magazine, that was all that mattered. Or at least that’s how it felt for a while. Anyone can have their star power limited by their bandmates, but Gabriel felt that he needed to go even further with the performance.
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is already a broad spectacle when you listen to it on record, but since Gabriel wanted to play out many of the greatest parts of the storyline, Collins felt ‘The Colony of Slippermen’ was the nadir of their live catalogue, saying, “All that stuff was frustrating, but the worst was ‘Slippermen’ where he came dressed in this inflatable dick. A truly horrible outfit which sometimes got a little bit stuck on the way out, and when he did make it out, the microphone could barely reach his mouth, and he was out of breath. I don’t think he really thought it through.”
The storyline is already weird with the ‘Slippermen’ in the story having to castrate themselves during that song, but dressing up as this strange entity was going to come off as disturbing, gross, and everything that wasn’t high art as Gabriel had intended. Which is probably why the band and their frontman ended up going their separate ways before the tour was even properly finished.
Collins was a natural fit to fill the shoes of Gabriel at the front of the stage, but if there was one thing for certain, it was that he was never going to be doing his version of ‘Slippermen’. That had its time and place, and with years removed from it, the live piece seemed to have a lot of potential but with none of the precision that you would need to get the idea off the ground. Instead we can all look at it with a Spinal Tap sense of wonder, which really is a feat unto itself.
