(Credits: TIDAL)
Thu 9 April 2026 16:00, UK
For all of the great hits that you hear out of Phil Collins, it’s hard to realise what an absolute monster musician that he always was.
There was a lot of heart behind that massive drum break on ‘In the Air Tonight’, but even if that put him in the percussion hall of fame until the end of time, that was only a precursor to what he did whenever he worked on one of Genesis’s masterpieces. His prog chops are half the reason why he was able to thrive for so long, but there were some drummers who left him dumbfounded by the way that they played whenever they started laying down a groove.
But while Collins had a deep love of all things rock and roll when looking at the way that John Bonham and Keith Moon hit the skins, there were a lot more interesting things going on in the jazz world when he looked around for it. The biggest names in the world had come from fusion, and despite Bill Bruford doing a fantastic job working with Genesis for a few years, Chester Thompson was practically Collins’s rhythmic brother when he started working with the band during their last legs.
Thompson had already become one of the most impressive members of Frank Zappa’s band when he worked with the mad musical scientist, but he had a much greater sense of dynamics whenever Collins worked with him. He knew when to remain faithful to the recorded version and when to go off on his own, but when it came to the way he set up his drums, Collins’s preferences for what his kit needed were miles different from what he heard out of Thompson’s kit.
Collins always used to have his sticks cut very short so that he could have a lot more power behind the kit, so when he saw Thompson’s setup, he couldn’t imagine playing the same way if he had to work with his friend’s kit, saying, “I find I do hit them hard. I mean, whenever I sit at Chester’s drums, sometimes, with his sticks, it feels like I’m about a foot too high and everything is out of my reach because the sticks are so long. I mean, I don’t know how he does it. It’s all a question of what you get used to.”
Then again, that probably explains why Collins was able to get a lot more power out of the drums on every single Genesis record. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is still a masterclass of drumming no matter what kind of setup that the drummer has, but when you look at the way that Collins was used to playing, some of those intense drum fills feel a lot more logical since every one of the drums are a lot closer to him whenever he went on those massive journeys around the kit.
Which makes it all the more impressive when you see Thompson doing the same thing. He was already one of the greatest virtuosos that the band could have asked to work with, but the fact that he was doing everything with a traditional drumming setup meant putting himself through his paces to play with the same sense of precision that Collins had whenever he was performing back in the day.
At the same time, it’s not like Thompson couldn’t mess around with what the groove was supposed to be doing every time. He didn’t join Genesis to be a hired gun every single time he played, and some of the best moments he’s had with the band were when Collins let him cut loose a little bit or when they locked in on the same rhythm when the singer went back behind the kit for a little while.
So despite Collins having trouble getting around Thompson’s kit, it wasn’t for lack of trying whenever he started working on many Genesis classics. He had the know-how when it came to making the best music possible, but while you can definitely hear the hours that Collins put into each of his performances, rarely has anyone made pure finesse look as easy as Thompson does whenever he plays.
