I won’t miss him. I’ve nothing against the guy but his solo stuff and the late Genesis music were just not for me. I loved Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett era Genesis. He used to be a great drummer in the seventies and I loved his sound then, pity he took up singing. (I suppose he still is a great drummer, it’s just he stopped playing the drums in a way I enjoy.)
**Patrick Bateman **is in the house!
I’d go completely opposite: one of the best drummers ever (even though I am not much of a Genesis listener), but a very plain, boring singer.
You can’t hurry love… But Phil did rush the beat when he played for Led Zeppelin at Live Aid…
There for a while everybody wanted to work with him. It must totally suck to go from that… to… crickets…
He sounds awfully depressed in the interview.
I think you’re on the right track… but the missing ingredient is Hugh Padgham. He engineered PG 3 - the one with Games Without Frontiers and No Self Control on. And no cymbals at all. Collins drummed on some songs and was impressed by HP and got him to co-produce and engineer his 1st album. That sound was being sought by producer Steve Lillywhite on album after album - see XTC’s Black Sea amongst others, using HP as engineer throughout.
From memory it was the drum room at the Roundhouse that inspired the sound.
HP worked on XTC’s Drums and Wires in 79, PG 3 and Black Sea in 80, Collins’ Face Value and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming in 81.
I think Phil Collins was a really inventive drummer - my favourite playing of his is in the extended instrumental parts of old Genesis songs ie Cinema Show or with Brand X - And So To F is on youtube I’ll bet. Never a big fan of his solo work but a really tasty drummer.
MiM
Since he’s ill, rather than bag on him for the endless stream of forgettable pop ditties he created in the 80’s and 90’s, I’ll just point out that Face Value is a very, very good album.
If he had made more music like that, he’d have a much higher stature with rock critics.
He has produced a lot of music that I don’t particularly like, but his brilliant work with Genesis before Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett left, and his fantastic work with Percy Jones and Morris Pert in Brand X have forever earned him my respect. I will be very sorry to see him retire.
As a teenager in the 80s I very much enjoyed most of his work, both Genesis and non-Genesis, up through Invisible Touch. Sorry to hear he’s not well and I feel quite grateful for his career.
Brilliant. I was going to mention that Hugh Padgham’s engineering was the essential part here. You can here the gated drum sound in Terry Chambers’ drumming with XTC before the Phil Collins stuff in the 80s.
I grew up listening to Genesis - first led by Peter Gabriel, then Phil Collins… He was an amazing drummer, and I thought he really grew into his own once he became a front-man, but the band got too poppy for my taste after Duke and ABACAB. However, his solo work stands on its own, and shows he was a way better artist than his pop-singles might suggest… as an example: The Roof Is Leaking
"he’d have a much higher stature with rock critics. "
I have NEVER… in my WHOLE life met ANYONE who cares what music critics say about music. I’m not kidding. You either like the music or you don’t.
Well I dispute that claim. Unlike you, I found 1980’s Duke to be their last worthwhile release, for the precise reasons you like the post Duke material - the emergence of Phil’s writing. To each his own.
Genesis has been my favorite group of all time, and Phil was a big part of the reason why I liked them. Anyway, I was registered on his website and he sent out the following in response to the recent articles:
C’mon, tons of people care. We have a rock critic with a regular column in our weekly alternative newsrag who’s constantly generating outraged letters to the editor over his trashing of various people’s favorite acts.
What’s likely is that very few people over time base their listening habits on what music critics suggest they should like.
I suspect Phil Collins is very well aware that the most startling/newsworthy part of any interview is what’s going to make headlines. Maybe he didn’t realize how foolishly self-pitying he’d sound and regretted it later.
Just a submicroscopic blip in his long and highly successful career.
For me, it’s actually quite interesting. I do find that reading a piece or listening to a rock critic talk about their favorite music and why they like it will lead me to insights and appreciation for that band. For example, I really don’t like Pink Floyd. But one night, years ago, I heard an album dissection of Dark Side of the Moon or perhaps it was Wish You Were Here and, after listening closely to the critics and the music, discovered that, hey, this actually is pretty good, once you know what’s going on.
I don’t have time to research music myself these days so I actually do look to rock critics whose tastes are similar to mine, and start digging there. YM obviously varies.
I think Duke is one of Genesis’s best albums, but I pretty much like if not love all incarnations of the band. Well, except for their first album which isn’t very good. And I actually was introduced to Genesis, and from there to progressive rock in general, through Phil Collins’s solo output. So even if the music he wrote might not have been all that great all the time, he’s still in a sense the man who introduced me to music.
Just so everyone knows, this is a verbatim quote from American Psycho. It seems like everytime somebody mentions Phil Collins or Huey Lewis, some wag thinks it’s clever to go quote Patrick Bateman.
Did anyone know previously about his Alamo interest? I find that intriguing and, well, a little surprising.
D says: *"Mr. Collins dates his interest in the Alamo back to his childhood when he became fascinated with Fess Parker’s portrayal of Davy Crockett in the long-running TV series. Over the years he has amassed what has been called one of the largest private collections of Alamo memorabilia in the world.
Among his most prized possessions is a receipt signed by Alamo commander William Barrett Travis for 32 head of cattle to be used to feed the Alamo defenders. By his own estimates, Mr. Collins has hundreds of cannonballs, documents and other artifacts from the Alamo at his home in Switzerland. He is currently co-authoring a book on the Alamo and the Texas Revolution with Gary Zaboly that will be published early 2011."*
That’s pretty cool.
No straightjacket required?
Seriously though, much of his contribution to music deserves high praise, but his Adult Contemporary, post-1992, Disney pap is generic and contemptible.
See also: Sting