The mark of any great drummer is being able to get any song going out of nothing. As much as people like the idea of banging on things for a living as their gig, Phil Collins knew it was always more than that, but he never imagined the day when he would find one of his greatest musical gifts stripped away from him.
Granted, it’s not like fate so much as snapped its fingers and forbade Collins from ever playing again. He was always a powerhouse drummer and could perform virtually anything that he could, as long as it fell into his wheelhouse, but you have to remember the kind of drummer he was. Yes, he made one of the greatest drum fills of all time on ‘In the Air Tonight’, but if you look at any of Genesis’s records with Peter Gabriel, Collins was playing the kind of stuff that no one else could touch.
Aside from being the backing vocalist, an album like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway could give Neil Peart a run for his money in terms of how complex it can be. It’s incredibly impressive to listen to out of context, but even when he took a step back and started going to the front of the stage, there were moments where things started to feel a little bit off whenever he got behind the kit again.
Chester Thompson was a fantastic substitute for Collins whenever he stepped into the lead singer role, but when going through Genesis’s tour in 2007, something didn’t feel right. He had spent years honing his craft, but that much wear and tear on the body was bound to get to anybody, and Collins remembered that everything started to fall apart once he played a show with Eric Clapton.
Despite being good friends for years, Collins felt that playing the Royal Albert Hall would be like any other gig, but things went south the minute he got onstage, saying, “I played with Clapton at Albert Hall for one song, and I had that feeling of ‘This isn’t happening.’ That kind of scared me. The one thing I could rely on in life was that I could sit down at the drums and it would sound good, and suddenly I couldn’t pull it together.”
While Collins was able to scrape things together and actually produce a beat again, it’s hard to look at that show as the final time he was himself. Because if we look at the touring schedule that he had on his solo tours, he was usually at the front of the stage, usually leaving most of his drum duties to his son, Nic, and occasionally joining in on a cajon when the drummers onstage would start duetting together.
And once Genesis came out of the woodwork for their final tour, Collins was left in a chair for the majority of the gigs, only ever spending time singing while his son covered for him behind the kit. Some fans may have been disheartened seeing one of the greatest drummers in the world bow out like that, but it wasn’t like he was trying to prove himself as one of the finest percussionists or anything.
He had spent over a lifetime making people happy whenever he got behind the microphone or behind the kit, and even if he couldn’t play drums anymore, it was well worth it for people to hear him out there onstage giving it his all. Not all rockstars are meant to play for the rest of their lives, but Collins’s legacy is more than secure after years of performing in his old band or delivering those massive drum fills from his solo years.
