Collins’s drumming ability made an immediate impact on Genesis’s sound. Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Peter Gabriel all have spoken frequently about the boost his skills brought to the band, and even Anthony Phillips, the co-founder of the group who left before Collins was recruited, has said that his own departure was a good thing for Genesis in that it ultimately resulted in Collins joining. Banks said that Collins contributed a lot to the arranging of the songs, as he would suggest different ways to play music that the others had written. The examples of great drumming by Collins in his early years with Genesis are too numerous to cite in any numbers, but songs like “Watcher of the Skies”, “Supper’s Ready” (particularly the “Apocalypse in 9/8” part), and the second half of “The Cinema Show” all have some great drumming, not to mention numerous tracks on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Interestingly enough, Collins has said that he didn’t think they sounded good on record until The Lamb because, while a drummer’s best take would usually be the second or third one, Genesis did so many takes that he would be playing it safe on the one that got used. Nevertheless, what did get recorded still sounded pretty impressive. As Gabriel said, “Phil is a very gifted musician. He’s someone who can pick up any sort of instrument and instantly produce something that feels good.”
Aside from his drumming duties, Collins also became the band’s primary backing vocalist behind lead singer Peter Gabriel, with his vocals on some songs almost as prominent as Gabriel’s. He sang lead vocals on two songs while Gabriel was still with Genesis. The first was “For Absent Friends” from 1971’s Nursery Cryme, his first album with Genesis, a very short track with music by fellow new member Steve Hackett and words by Hackett and Collins himself. The second was “More Fool Me” from 1973’s Selling England by the Pound, a song co-written by Collins and Mike Rutherford. Aside from these tracks, Collins did not do a great deal of writing in this period, except in group compositions (“Apocalypse in 9/8” and the second half of “The Cinema Show”, for example, were written by Banks, Collins and Rutherford, foreshadowing the later version of Genesis, while much of The Lamb was written by Banks, Collins, Hackett and Rutherford together or in various combinations). He apparently did write – or at least co-write – a song called “The Light”, which the group played live in the period just after he joined. This song was never recorded in the studio in its original form, but the opening section of it got turned into the verse sections of “Lilywhite Lilith” on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
In 1975, Peter Gabriel left Genesis. After the band has auditioned many possible replacements without finding anyone, Phil Collins somewhat hesitantly stepped into the role, and immediately proved himself more than adequate (Gabriel remarked in an interview that he was surprised that the band didn’t think of using Collins sooner). The first album to feature Collins as lead vocalist was 1976’s A Trick of the Tail, followed by Wind and Wuthering at the end of that same year, the live album Seconds Out (on which the band was augmented by drummers Bill Bruford and then Chester Thompson when Collins was out front singing), and then, after the departure of Steve Hackett, 1978’s And Then There Were Three.
Collins still was not writing a lot for Genesis in this period, though he made important contributions to group compositions like “Los Endos” (an instrumental that by some accounts grew out of something he wrote) and co-wrote tracks like “Wot Gorilla”. He wrote the music of the chorus for “Blood on the Rooftops” and came up with the title, though the rest of the song was written by Steve Hackett. He wrote the lyrics for “Scenes from a Night's Dream” and co-wrote “Vancouver” with Mike Rutherford. He was also keeping busy outside Genesis. He co-founded the jazz fusion group Brand X, recording several albums with the group between 1976 and 1982 and doing some very impressive drumming on tracks like “Nuclear Burn” and “And So to F” (the latter was credited as a Collins composition). He contributed lead vocals to solo albums by Steve Hackett and Anthony Phillips and played drums on several albums by Brian Eno, such as the critical favorite Another Green World.
The collapse of Collins’s first marriage at the end of the 1970s gave him the impetus to start writing songs on his own. He recorded demos for over a dozen new compositions at his home in this period. Two of these, “Misunderstanding” and “Please Don't Ask” he contributed to Genesis’s 1980 album Duke, with the former giving the group their first US top 20 hit. Most of the remaining songs appeared on Collins’s first solo album, Face Value, which was released in 1981. Led by the atmospheric “In the Air Tonight” and its iconic drum break, the album was a huge success, outselling all previous Genesis albums, and popularizing the gated reverb drum sound that Collins had developed with Peter Gabriel, engineer Hugh Padgham and producer Steve Lillywhite while playing on Gabriel’s third solo album. Much to the surprise of almost everyone, including Collins himself, he was now a star as a solo artist. However, he remained with Genesis, alternating between albums with the group and his solo work.
On Duke, Banks, Collins and Rutherford had written much of the material as a trio, with each additionally contributing a couple of individually written tracks. On 1981’s Abacab, they decided to write nearly all the album together, with each member contributing only one individually written track. Collins’s solo composition, “Man on the Corner”, was a minor hit for the group. While the band written songs were generally composed by all three equally, sometimes one member’s contributions would be more apparent than the others, and for all the group compositions the one who felt most motivated by the song would write the lyrics. Thus while Collins contributed to all the group compositions, on some his contributions were somewhat greater than others. This was also true of songs on the subsequent Genesis albums, the eponymous Genesis (1983), Invisible Touch (1986) and We Can’t Dance (1991), all of which were written by the trio together in the studio. Collins wrote lyrics for a lot of the songs from these albums, with songs like "Driving the Last Spike", "No Son of Mine" and "Jesus He Knows Me" (not everyone's favorite, but I think it has some great lines) from the last one being among his best lyrical efforts.
In this period, Collins’s solo career was also thriving. His second solo album, 1982’s Hello I Must Be Going, also sold well, though slightly less than his first. But in 1984, “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)”, a ballad that Collins had left off Face Value and rewritten for a movie soundtrack, was released and became a No. 1 hit in the US (it subsequently won a Grammy and was nominated for an Academy Award). His duet with Philip Bailey, initially released in the US at the end of 1984, hit No. 1 in the UK and No. 2 in the US the following year. Later in 1985 he released his third solo album, No Jacket Required, which included two US No. 1s, “Sussudio” and “One More Night”, as well as top 10 hits “Don't Lose My Number” and “Take Me Home”. Also in 1985, “Separate Lives”, his duet with Marilyn Martin (composed by Stephen Bishop) also hit No. 1 in the US. He appeared in both the US and UK Live Aid shows, and the following year’s Genesis album, Invisible Touch, contained 5 top 5 US singles, including the number one title track. It is no wonder that Collins seemed ubiquitous in this period, such that one radio station in the city where I grew up had a special “No Phil Collins Day”. He did suffer from overexposure in this period, though he can't really be accused of deliberately courting publicity, unlike many celebrities.
In 1988, Collins starred in the movie Buster and sang several songs for the soundtrack. One was a cover of the drippy 1960s hit “A Groovy Kind of Love” and the other was a new song written with the great Motown producer Lamont Dozier titled “Two Hearts”. Though both were US No. 1s, they weren’t Collins’s best moments. In 1989, he released the album …But Seriously, which contained the number one anti-homelessness song “Another Day in Paradise” and the gospel-flavored “I Wish It Would Rain Down”, which featured his friend Eric Clapton on guitar. In 1993, Collins released the highly personal Both Sides, which he wrote and performed entirely on his own. Though “Both Sides of the Story” and “Everyday” were moderate hits, the relatively dark, non-commercial tone of the album meant it didn’t sell as well as his previous releases. The more upbeat Dance into the Light (1996) sold even less, as Collins’s commercial profile had diminished considerably. His soundtrack to the Disney movie Tarzan in 1999 was more successful (the song “You'll Be in My Heart” even won an Academy Award), though his last studio album of original songs, 2002’s Testify, also only sold moderately. In 2003, he made his last solo concert tour, titled jokingly the “First Final Farewell Tour”.
Collins had quit Genesis in the mid-1990s, but after participating in various retrospective activities over the years, in 2007 Banks, Collins and Rutherford, together with longtime touring members Chester Thompson and Daryl Struemer, launched a reunion tour. Subsequently Collins revealed that he had dislocated some vertebrae in his neck during the tour, so that it had become difficult to drum (he had also started to lose his hearing in one ear). In 2010, he released an album of Motown covers titled Going Back and played several shows to support the album. In 2011 he announced his retirement from music.
Phil Collins has been blamed by some self-proclaimed Genesis fans for the changes in the band’s sound in the 1980s. It is certainly true that albums like Genesis and Invisible Touch sound very different from ones like Foxtrot or even A Trick of the Tail, but leaving aside the subjective question of whether they are not as good (I would say that Genesis, at least, is as good as the earlier albums), how much Collins was responsible for the changes is debatable. It is true that the change took place around the time Collins began to participate more equally in the writing, and his fondness for more simple pop songs like those from Motown had something to do with the simplification of the group’s sound. However, the change also had more to do with the changes the band made in their writing process. Whereas in earlier years someone would present a song or idea that the others would build on, on the later albums they were writing from scratch by improvising together. The use of drum machines and the gated drum sound also made a difference. Finally, both Banks and Rutherford also changed their approaches to writing to some degree. It’s worth noting, for instance, that Rutherford wrote almost as many of the band’s love songs as Collins did (“Follow You, Follow Me” and “Taking It All Too Hard” being just two examples), and a song like “That’s All” owed its melodic sound largely to Banks, as Collins’s vocal melody was just an elaboration on what Banks played. The change in direction was something that all three band members wanted, not because they were deliberately aiming for commercial success, but because they wanted to do things differently. Only those ignorant of how the band worked would lay all or even most of the blame (or credit) on Collins.
Another related criticism of Genesis in the 1980s is that it is indistinguishable from Collins’s solo work. Again, no one who has really listened to both can reasonably make such an assertion. Of course there is a superficial resemblance because Collins is the vocalist. What’s more, as in the jam sessions in which the Genesis songs were written Collins would sing over whatever Banks and Rutherford played, the vocal melodies were largely Collins’s responsibility, particularly on the songs he wrote the lyrics for (on the others the lyric writer would usually flesh out the basic melody ideas that Collins had come up with in the initial jam). But Banks and Rutherford composed music that was quite different from the kind Collins wrote on his own, and even when Collins wrote the melodies, he was doing so over chord combinations that were not typical of his own writing, as noted above in the case of “That’s All”. In fact, with the exception of a few of the ballads, it’s hard to imagine Collins on his own writing any of the songs on the Genesis albums. Even the most “pop” Genesis songs have an underlying complexity that few other pop songs, including Collins’s, have. There is also greater variety in the Genesis material.
So how would I assess Collins’s solo career? As noted earlier, he was an incredible drummer, though this comes through most clearly in some of the recordings he did in the 1970s rather than on his solo albums. He was also a good singer, with a particular knack for more soulful material. He was a decent interpreter of other people’s songs, with his covers of classic songs like the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Golden Slumbers”, the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love”, Elton John’s “Burn Down the Mission”, Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colours” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin'” all being worthy of comparison to the originals. The main criticism of his own material is that it was very “middle-of-the-road” or that it was just plain bland. There is some basis for this assertion. Most of his songs are not all that adventurous in terms of composition, arrangement or production, and many of them tend to sound a bit similar, which is why I prefer the musical variety to be found on Genesis albums to Collins’s solo material. Another problem with some of Collins’s solo songs (and a few Genesis songs from the same period) is a sometimes excessive reliance on drum machines. But most of Collins’s songs are enjoyable to listen to, even when they aren’t exciting. He’s a solid if not brilliant lyricist, and his melodies are generally appealing. On the occasions when he did try something different, such as “The Roof Is Leaking”, "Long Long Way to Go" or “I Wish It Would Rain Down”, the results were usually worth listening to. His very best songs, such as “In the Air Tonight” and “I Wish It Would Rain Down”, are among the best songs of the 1980s. While it’s been years since I would have rated him among my very favorite artists, I still like a lot of his music and think he deserves much more credit than he usually receives – though he has gotten recognition from some in the R&B and hip-hop community, including a tribute album called Urban Renewal.
Phil Collins for some reason has gotten an enormous amount of criticism from all sorts of people, ranging from Genesis fans who hate songs like “Misunderstanding” because it’s a catchy, Beach Boys-style pop song (as if there’s anything wrong with catchy, Beach Boys-style pop songs) to people who attack him for his personal life or even his appearance. Since taste in music is highly subjective, reasonable people can say they aren’t fans of his songs, though anyone who claims they hate everything he ever did almost certainly hasn’t given his music a fair hearing, if they’ve even heard most of it. But some of the personal attacks are practically slanderous and are certainly ignorant. For instance, he was falsely accused of divorcing his second wife by fax. He was accused of moving to Switzerland because he was a diehard Conservative who wanted to escape high taxes, when in fact he moved because he met and married a Swiss woman (he has said he is not a Conservative – not that it would be as bad as being a Republican in the US if he was). Like other stars who talk about social problems such as Bono and Sting, he has been criticized for talking about issues like homelessness when he has great personal wealth (never mind that drawing attention to such problems is a good thing or that Collins has actually donated quite a bit to charity, not to mention that he does not live the life of a high roller). Regrettably, many reviewers seem to feel compelled to take some sort of cheap shot at Collins along these lines, and trolls on comment boards just insult him. In fact, having watched a lot of interviews with him, I would say Phil Collins seems like an affable, easy-going person with a good sense of humor. His interviews are always entertaining to watch because he’s always laughing and joking. There are many people in rock and pop music whose music I love but who I suspect would be difficult or even unpleasant people in person. But Collins seems like one of the few who would be fun to hang out with at the local bar.
The first of the lists below focuses on the Genesis songs that Collins wrote or played a major role in writing, as well as his first recordings as a lead vocalist for the band. I haven’t tried to include all the songs featuring great drumming, as these are too numerous. Obviously on the later Genesis albums he had a significant role in writing everything, so for those I’ve chosen the best songs that he is known to have written the lyrics for, especially those that he seemed to have a major influence on musically (though this can be hard to tell; on “Mama”, for instance, the drum machine riff was actually created by Mike Rutherford, not Collins, though I still included the track because Collins's vocals and lyrics are also key elements). Among the tracks that got left off this list are "Harold the Barrel", a Peter Gabriel composition that Collins helped write the lyrics for and sang in unison with Gabriel; "Match of the Day" and "Me and Virgil", two mid-period songs that Collins wrote the lyrics for but later stated that he disliked; a few of the less interesting album tracks; and several songs that I couldn't confirm he wrote the lyrics for, such as "Behind the Lines", "Abacab" and the non-album track "Hearts on Fire". For the second list, I’ve chosen 25 of what I consider his best or most interesting solo songs, though I’ve left out ones that he did not write himself, so no “You Can’t Hurry Love” or “Separate Lives”. Neither of these lists includes his work with Brand X, much less his session work with other artists, some of which is also certainly worth a listen (examples range from the abovementioned Brian Eno albums to Peter Gabriel’s third album to his production job on Howard Jones’s “No One is to Blame”). The only exceptions, both listed among the “Honorable Mentions”, are “Easy Lover” (recorded with Philip Bailey) and “Hero” (recorded with David Crosby), as he co-wrote these songs and sang on them. I don't have Testify or his Tarzan soundtrack, though I have listened to them a couple of times. My choices from these albums might vary if I listened to them more. For that matter, as is usual with these things, several of the "Honorable Mentions" could easily replace several of the songs in the main list.
Phil Collins with Genesis
(All songs performed by Genesis; lead vocals on tracks 1 and 4 by Peter Gabriel)
The Light (Music: Collins [primarily?]; Lyrics: [?])
For Absent Friends (Music: Hackett; Lyrics: Hackett/Collins)
More Fool Me (Rutherford/Collins)
Lilywhite Lilith (Music: Collins [verses]; Lyrics: Gabriel)
Dance on a Volcano (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford/Hackett; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Los Endos (Collins/Hackett/Rutherford/Banks)
Wot Gorilla? (Banks/Collins)
Blood on the Rooftops (Hackett/Collins)
Scenes from a Night's Dream (Collins/Banks)
Vancouver (Collins/Rutherford)
Misunderstanding (Collins)
Please Don't Ask (Collins)
Man on the Corner (Collins)
No Reply at All (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins?)
Paperlate (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Mama (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
That's All (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
It's Gonna Get Better (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins?)
Invisible Touch (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Tonight, Tonight, Tonight (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
In Too Deep (Music: Collins/Banks/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
I'd Rather Be You (Music: Collins/Banks/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
No Son of Mine (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Jesus He Knows Me (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Driving the Last Spike (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
I Can’t Dance (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Hold On My Heart (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Since I Lost You (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Collins)
Best of Phil Collins Solo
(All songs written and performed by Phil Collins except where otherwise noted)
In The Air Tonight
The Roof Is Leaking/Droned
I Missed Again
I Don't Care Anymore
Thru These Walls
Don't Let Him Steal Your Heart Away
Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)
Sussudio
Long Long Way to Go (Backing Vocals: Sting)
One More Night
Take Me Home
We Said Hello Goodbye
Another Day in Paradise
I Wish It Would Rain Down
All of My Life
Find A Way to My Heart
Both Sides of the Story
Everyday
We Wait and We Wonder
Dance into the Light
Lorenzo (poem by Michaela Odone)
You'll Be in My Heart
Two Worlds
Wake Up Call
Don’t Get Me Started
Honorable Mentions: Hand in Hand, You Know What I Mean, Like China, Easy Lover (Vocals: Phil Collins & Philip Bailey; Music: Bailey/Collins/East; Lyrics: Collins), Don't Lose My Number, Do You Remember, Heat on the Street, We Fly So Close, Survivors, Hero (Vocals: Phil Collins & David Crosby; Music: Collins; Lyrics: Crosby), It’s in Your Eyes, River So Wide, Strangers Like Me, Testify, Driving Me Crazy
No comments:
Post a Comment