Phil Collins didn’t get into the business to be merely a good drummer.
Though many people may have preferred that he not be one of the most omnipresent faces in British music throughout the 1980s, you couldn’t deny that he didn’t have a lot more good tunes to back him up every time he ripped into one of Genesis’ hits. He may have been a touch overexposed to some degree, but if you had the opportunity to play with as many people as he did, you probably wouldn’t shake a stick at the offer, either.
In fact, Collins didn’t seem all that tied to Genesis even when he joined. The progressive rock juggernauts were one of a few bands that he had auditioned for that month when he started putting together his work schedule, and while he knew they had something when they began working on their masterpieces like Selling England by the Pound, it wasn’t all that out of the ordinary when they began working on their solo records in between their mainline albums.
If we’re being honest, most people should have taken that model when looking at how they operated. Throughout every facet of their career, Collins didn’t seem to have any bad blood with Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, and even when he decided to leave the band after We Can’t Dance, he wanted to know that the band was going to continue and not have him be the schmuck that split up Genesis.
But, really, Collins needed to move forward from being a pure pop songwriter. He had already begun work on the soundtrack to Tarzan, and even if soundtracking children’s movies wasn’t the coolest thing for a rock star to be doing, he could have cared less when looking at the bands he was working with. He already had the opportunity to work with giants like Eric Clapton, but the real test was him trying to work out with some of the best big bands that the pop world had ever known.
It’s one thing to work with the biggest names in Motown on a record like Going Back, but Collins was willing to dive headfirst into the world of easy listening with what Count Basie had done. Even when everything was lined up to work with a crooner like Tony Bennett, Collins would later admit that he was horrified at the prospect of trying to match the same band that made classics like ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.
It was a challenge, but this was one of the first times where Collins held back a little bit, saying, “If we attempt the songs that Count Basie et al. had done, there is, frankly, a chance we’ll fall well short. Those were some of the best players and vocalists in history.” But, really, when has that stopped him before?
I mean, this is the same person who went onstage at Live Aid multiple times and even managed to do his best when playing next to the other members of Led Zeppelin, but that might just show you more about what Collins valued as a drummer. Compared to any other rock and roll band, you can’t really fit into a groove with the Count Basie arrangements and squeak by. Every note is immaculately chosen to be the perfect one at every second, and no amount of improvising was going to save him.
Collins remembered Bennett being a bit cold to him after he called the whole thing off, but it’s a lot more respectable for someone to realise that they weren’t going to match perfection. Any other artist would be well over their heads if they even tried to work out some of their best work on the fly, but Collins was truly in an elite few who had the foresight to realise when he was heading towards a brick wall.
