Liking Phil Collins has never exactly been the coolest thing for anyone to admit.
As much as Collins’s music has been the soundtrack to multiple generations of pop fans, there are always going to be those looking at the more sentimental ballads and going into a sugar-induced coma for how overly schmaltzy they could be. But that’s because, despite being one of the biggest rock stars on the planet circa 1985, Collins was never given the same kind of upbringing that the rest of the biggest stars of the time did.
In fact, he was always a little bit behind most of the legends that he shared company with on the charts. Genesis had a later start after the Summer of Love, so they were all finding their chops by listening to what bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were doing, only this time with a few more time signature changes. Everyone might have had their influences from blues, but Collins felt more of a kinship in the jazz world.
If you think about the kind of artists that he worked with outside of rock and roll, a lot of what Collins was working with didn’t exactly cater to the blues tradition. He did have a healthy dose of soul in everything he made, thanks to listening to the best Motown songs ever written, but when going even further back, most of his time was spent listening to everyone from Buddy Rich tear up the drum kit whenever he played to getting into bands like Weather Report when putting together Brand X.
But that’s not where rock and roll was supposed to start. The entire ethos of rock and roll seemed to go mainstream the second that Elvis Presley got to the top of the charts. Before then, there had been artists like Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis knocking down the door for what rock and roll could do, but for Collins, he would readily admit that he never completely understood what people like Bill Haley was on about.
The songs were definitely exciting at the time, but Collins felt like he had completely missed the boat on that era of rock and roll, saying, “My brother was eight or nine years older and he was always listening to Radio Luxembourg which played Bill Haley, Eddie Cochran, stuff like that, which didn’t interest me at all. I never ever liked that music, but when I started playing seriously, the English beat thing was just happening, the Shadows and bands like that.”
Granted, it’s not like The Shadows were a bad entry point into rock and roll. Their songs did have the same kind of swagger that a lot of those early rock songs did, and Hank Marvin did give England one of its first major rock guitar heroes, but maybe that common language was what held him back from being one of the biggest names in rock and roll at the time.
He could still jam with the best of them, but Collins’s lack of interest in the classics might have been what made his work with Led Zeppelin go down a lot worse than working with Eric Clapton. ‘Slowhand’ could practically play with anyone, but even if Collins had the stamina to compete with anything that John Bonham played, that common understanding of old-school rock and roll was something that was baked into Jimmy Page’s riffs. So if someone wasn’t doing their job and really soaking that in, there were bound to be a few hiccups.
Still, that doesn’t discount Collins being a phenomenal player in every sense of the word. Eddie Cochran didn’t necessarily need to be there for him in the early days, and given the fact that he has helped carve out a niche in rock and roll that was more indebted to soul music, his decision to stick to his own principles is what made some of his songs sound a lot more structured than anything else on the charts. He spoke the language of pop, so who cared if he didn’t have every rock giant in his collection?
