(Credits: TIDAL)
Wed 1 April 2026 15:30, UK
There isn’t a single musician on this Earth who has had the kind of mixed opinion that Phil Collins has.
Most people would at least have fond memories of Collins had they grown up in the era where he was making Disney soundtracks, but for anyone who was around during the days when he was the biggest thing in the world, the main problem on all of his albums is that he never seemed to go away after one too many times of people listening to ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Collins was definitely a workaholic when he first started having hits, but he could already see himself moving away from the early ideas that Genesis were doing.
You have to remember that Collins earned his legend status by being one of the greatest drummers that the world had ever seen, and he wasn’t about to put down the sticks the minute that he started having hits. There’s a reason why audiences roared in the few seconds leading into that signature drum fill on ‘In the Air Tonight’, but he could be a lot more complicated than that whenever Peter Gabriel had the right idea for a song.
Collins was already familiar with technical drumming ever since he began, and since he was working with Brand X alongside his time in Genesis, he wasn’t afraid to have some fun with more demanding drum parts. But when it came to Genesis recordings, it was a constant battle over what the band was going to sound like once Gabriel got hold of the music and layered his lyrics on top of everything.
No matter how you look at it, Gabriel was always going to be the person everyone focused on at every Genesis show, and as long as he was dressed like a flower or in a dress with a fox’s head, people weren’t going to be paying attention to the musicians behind him, creating some of the best prog-rock of the time. If you were to ask Collins, though, there was a fine line between Gabriel being a master frontman and becoming an albatross around their neck half the time they played.
It wasn’t out of the question for Gabriel to suddenly start throwing in different ideas for lyrics over top of what they had already made, and while that was what made them so great, not all of them were the best fit. One can only hope to make a masterpiece like ‘Supper’s Ready’, but ‘The Battle of Epping Forest’ was the moment that Collins realised that there needed to be some kind of change.
The song itself wasn’t bad by any means, but Collins felt that they needed to rethink the way that Gabriel’s lyrics fit over the music, saying, “‘Battle of Epping Forest’ is a classic example of where we had a well-recorded piece of work, with counter polyrhythmic things, and Peter took the song and wrote the lyrics, and it’s like 300 words a line. There’s no space. All the air had been sucked out of it. Not to say that we were in the wrong or he was in the wrong. But we did play it live, but it was always a barrage of information. It had got a little bit out of hand.”
And looking at the final result, it’s not like Gabriel disagreed with Collins, either. Everyone was working their hardest to get their ideas in, but even if they were trying to please everyone in the band, the fact that they were making records that had more elements than most people could figure out wasn’t exactly conducive to them having any kind of hit apart from Gabriel’s lavish outfits.
So while many people got pissed the minute that Genesis started to become a pop band when Collins joined, it was only a natural evolution from where they had been. They didn’t want their music to be too busy anymore, and the best that they could hope for was to make songs that might actually have a shot on the radio.
