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Tue 18 November 2025 17:16, UK
Although he joined Genesis a few years into their journey, Phil Collins slipped in as seamlessly as rain into the sea, finding his footing among like-minded musicians with a similar ambition.
At first, he joined the group by responding to an advert but admitted that he didn’t know an awful lot about the band beyond what was listed on the page. He had been raised on Motown by and large, and the emergence of prog was not something he had been paying a great deal of notice to.
“My only knowledge of Genesis was through seeing the ads for their gigs. It seemed like they were constantly working. … I thought, ‘At least I’m going to be working if I get the gig,’” he recalled in the book Genesis: Chapter and Verse.
After a few sessions, Collins realised that he was in a creative haven. Surrounded by the likes of Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Peter Gabriel, Collins could pursue his dream of equalling the success of his rock ‘n’ roll luminaries of the 1960s.
As devout prog-rockers, Genesis led by The Beatles’ example, creating abstract, progressive sounds with pop sensibilities. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece of 1967, is often regarded as the signpost to prog-rock, and rightly so.
However, chasing this lineage back one step, we arrive at The Beach Boys’ 1966 album, Pet Sounds. “I played it to John [Lennon] so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence,” Paul McCartney told interviewer David Leaf of the impact of Pet Sounds in 1990.
“If records had a director within a band, I sort of directed Pepper. And my influence was basically the Pet Sounds album,” he added. “John was influenced by it, perhaps not as much as me. It was certainly a record we all played – it was the record of the time, you know?”
Collins and his Genesis bandmates were influenced greatly by both The Beatles and The Beach Boys. However, when listing some of his favourite songs of all time for BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years in 2016, The Beach Boys seemed to come out on top.
Amid selections from The Four Tops, Two Door Cinema Club, Adele and The Ronnettes, Collins saved a special place for The Beach Boys’ 1973 single, ‘Sail On Sailor’. “One forgets about The Beach Boys sometimes, the amount of great songs that Brian Wilson wrote, you know,” Collins said, announcing the song. “But this album, Holland, that this song comes from, has got a lot of good songs on it, and it appeared when they were on the hip, you know.”
“It was on one of their quieter eras,” he continued. “But ‘Sail on Sailor’ got such a fantastic groove that I wrote ‘Misunderstanding’, which Genesis did. I would have done it on my solo album, but Genesis chose it. I wrote that because I love the groove of this. So it’s my nod to the Beach Boys, but it’s just a great melody and great feel.”
That groove has been appraised by plenty of others, too, with Bob Dylan famously declaring envy when it came to the Californians in this department. “Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smithsonian,” the original vagabond said. “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.”
That same sense of catchy rhythm and layered sound inspired Collins to no end, especially when it came to ‘Misunderstanding’. You can listen to both the tracks and compare the grooves below.
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