(Credits: Will Ireland – Concord Music Group)
Sun 22 February 2026 16:30, UK
Despite the ups and downs of the band, Phil Collins still has a lot of pride in Genesis.
First as the band’s drummer and then stepping up to the post as their lead singer, the group’s most successful period was crafted by his creativity, but that doesn’t mean he’d give everything a gold star.
Collins can feel proud of Genesis without really feeling the need to engage with it, especially since his worsening health has pulled him away from performance, with the artist admitting that he doesn’t really like to listen to his own music, perhaps because it’s still too emotionally painful that he can’t play it.
But when it does creep up on him, playing on the radio or spun in his honour, he can appreciate the might of what they did. He’s coy about his favourites, mostly enjoying tracks he sees as capturing the spirit of days in the studio and the synergy of the band; however, he does have some tracks that he can’t reach for the skip button fast enough.
“You know, Genesis have been around for such a long time that I kind of feel a love-hate relationship with it,” he admitted to Drumeo during a deep dive into his career. Again, that feels inevitable as Collins isn’t looking in with a critical lens here; he was in the band, so any sort of evaluation of the group’s music comes tainted with good memory, bad memories or even the unending insecurity that all artists feel, regardless of how big they get.
Overwhelmingly, that’s the thing that causes Collins to dislike a song, where it’s not so much about the track, but about the feeling that he could have done it better.
“’Living Forever’, for example, on We Can’t Dance, I think it is, that flashes into my brain,” he said with his answer for the Genesis song he likes least on the tip of his tongue. “It’s one of those songs with an instrumental sequence in the middle of it. And in those days, we just did it once or twice,” he said, recalling how the band would record live takes quickly with no fuss and then move on.
That’s good in some ways as it helps capture the energy of live performance without being polished too clean and losing the heart, but on the other side, it can lead to moments like this, where Collins, decades on, still only hears himself fumble.
“There’s plenty of things that listening back I’m probably a bit embarrassed about,” he said, with that song being a key one, but to him, it’s a feeling that always comes with age.
“Having good ears and growing up and having a bit of taste, you know, or thinking you have,” he said, listing off reasons as to why, after a stretch of time, “you see things a bit more in perspective”, including the things you perhaps did wrong on a recording, no matter how successful or iconic that recording remains.