(Credits: Warner Music)
Sat 8 November 2025 10:30, UK
It’s easy to see the arguments for Phil Collins being both the best and the worst thing that the 1980s had ever produced.
As much as people adored his radio hits, the idea of any hardened Genesis fan wanting to throw Collins off a cliff for turning them into a pop group was certainly understandable given their prog roots. But part of the beauty of listening to Collins a little bit closer is that he was never looking to stay in one sound for very long.
Even in the Genesis days, he would be the first person to tell you that he wasn’t itching to become a pop musician. A lot of what he did during his solo career was what came naturally to him, and if he had his way, he would have wanted his first solo album to sound like bands like Weather Report than anywhere close to the brewing anger of a song like ‘In the Air Tonight’. But once he had a career at his feet, he wasn’t about to shoot himself in the foot when it came to having hits.
While Collins turned out to be an absolute natural in front of the microphone, he could have made an entire living out of being one of the greatest drummers in the world. It often goes unnoticed these days, but outside of that one drum fill everyone loves to play along to, Collins could hang with the best jazz fusion players of all time, even if projects like Brand X were never going to get off the ground.
But before Genesis even started, Collins was already accustomed to playing in a band dynamic. Not many kids have the potential to play with George Harrison when they’re first starting out, but after playing around in various bands in England, Flaming Youth was the first time where he seemed to have a stable foundation.
Or at least he thought he did. Their only album, Ark 2, is far from terrible, but it’s also clearly indebted to the sounds of the day, and if Collins had had his way, they would have been writing their own tunes instead of sticking with tracks that the label had forced them to record half the time. You can hear him slowly trying to put his own spin on things, but even he had to admit that there was no future there.
For Collins, this was a decent start, but there was no way any of his fellow bandmates were going to go the distance playing together, saying, “It wasn’t a very good album, and we weren’t actually playing that kind of music ourselves, but this was a job, and we got £5 each. We did that for a year, but we weren’t working enough and I then started looking around and saw the advert for Genesis.”
While the band was still an upstart at that point, they had the bones of a great band that just needed Collins’s touch. ‘The Knife’ showed a lot of promise on their sophomore record, but as soon as Collins got behind the kit, Peter Gabriel didn’t let anyone else try out because he knew that they had found the guy they were looking for.
So while Flaming Youth is a morbid fascination for anyone that’s looking to delve deeper into Collins’s non-prog outings, you’re only hearing the raw ideas of what he could be. Could he have become big enough to rival Genesis on his own? Maybe, but looking at how little the band were filling up clubs, it wasn’t like they were showing as much promise as he had hoped once everything got started.
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