{"id":629077,"date":"2026-06-09T11:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T11:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/629077\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T11:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T11:13:11","slug":"the-1981-song-phil-collins-forced-himself-to-retire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/629077\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1981 song Phil Collins forced himself to retire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Credit: Alamy<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really the artist\u2019s decision what songs they want to perform for a paying audience whenever they get onstage. While it\u2019s commonly a good idea to play the hits that people know, there are occasionally going to be those deep cuts that get dusted off and leave hardcore fans speechless when they actually hear them in a live setting. <\/p>\n

Phil Collins<\/a> was never afraid to take a few chances whenever he performed live, but when Genesis returned for various reunion tours, he admitted that \u2018Abacab\u2019 deserved to be laid to rest after years on the live stage.<\/p>\n

For a band with a catalogue as expansive as Genesis, deciding what stays in the setlist is never straightforward. Every tour forces difficult choices between fan favourites, deep cuts and songs that the musicians themselves still feel connected to, and not every classic survives that process indefinitely.<\/p>\n

Then again, was there ever anything that Genesis wouldn\u2019t do when they first emerged? Even though Collins remained sat at the back behind the drum kit during the Peter Gabriel years of the group, seeing the frontman dress up as everything from a flower to a fox in a dress to the embodiment of a disease was something else to witness during each performance.<\/p>\n

Once Gabriel left the fold, though, everyone seemed to get Collins\u2019 musical direction wrong these days. Compared to his reputation as the pop crooner who ruined the band, the message behind A Trick of the Tail seemed fairly straightforward: what if we had a stage show where the music mattered more than the costumes?<\/p>\n

\"Phil<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ TIDAL<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bold goal to reach, I know, but up until \u2018Follow You Follow Me<\/a>,\u2019 the group was actually on steady ground throughout the late 1970s. But once they started going towards pop, Abacab marked a weird point in their discography. There were still great tunes and eventual pop hits like \u2018No Reply At All,\u2019 but they hadn\u2019t lost the will to take a chance and write episodic songs like \u2018Dodo\/Lurker\u2019 or get heavy on \u2018Keep It Dark\u2019.<\/p>\n

But which Genesis members wrote the song?<\/p>\n

Just because they had started to veer towards pop didn\u2019t mean they had to lose their edge. This was the same band that wrote monumental epics like \u2018Supper\u2019s Ready\u2019, so they were never afraid to dabble in a few unconventional structures if it meant adding to the track. While most of their epics normally had working titles, Rutherford ended up titling his song after the structure they were working with.<\/p>\n

Despite being his song, Collins recalled that the phrase \u2018Abacab\u2019 stuck when they were working around different names, saying, \u201c[It] was a way of remembering the sequence of the song. A was the verse, B was the chorus, and C was the bridge. That wasn\u2019t the way that we did it in the end. The way that we did it was unpronounceable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given that they were moving in a slightly different direction, the title seemed to work perfectly. Pairing along with the abstract art from the cover, most of the band figured that having a nonsensical title would be a great way of introducing a different flavour to what they had been doing, just like other various art movements had done in the past such as dadaism.<\/p>\n

Even by Genesis\u2019 standards, the title track was a bit of a weird beast to tackle. For everyone trying to figure out what the hell language the title is derived from, the only reason the group called it that was to make sure that they knew how the song was arranged, arranging the sections as A, B, and C, respectively. <\/p>\n

It seemed straightforward enough, but Collins remembered having enough of that kind of mental gymnastics when running through the tune during soundchecks, saying<\/a>, \u201cThat happened with \u2018Abacab,\u2019 which I\u2019m sure everyone expects us to do. Halfway through the first verse, I said, \u2018I don\u2019t really want to sing this. I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s about.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Collins\u2019 comments reflected a recurring tension that many artists experience with older material. Songs that once felt exciting can become increasingly detached from their creators after decades of performances, particularly when their original inspiration becomes difficult to remember.<\/p>\n

And since the song was pared down for radio from its original six-minute runtime, it probably wasn\u2019t the best idea to try to please the fairweather fans with the shorter version. That way, you\u2019d be playing a song named after its structure and then have to work around said structure on the fly, to the point where it\u2019s better to call it \u2018Ababcb\u2019 because that\u2019s more pleasing to the fans.<\/p>\n

Still, Collins has earned the right to do whatever he wants with the tunes, even if it means dropping a handful of them during the setlist. There are some hearts that might be broken along the way, but if they throw something like \u2018That\u2019s All\u2019 on instead, most of the people in those arenas are not going to complain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite Collins\u2019 reluctance, \u2018Abacab\u2019 remains an important chapter in the Genesis story. It captured a band in transition, embracing new ideas while still retaining traces of the adventurous spirit that had defined their progressive-rock beginnings. Even if Collins eventually grew tired of revisiting it on stage, the song continues to stand as one of the clearest examples of Genesis successfully reinventing themselves without entirely abandoning their roots.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Alamy It\u2019s really the artist\u2019s decision what songs they want to perform for a paying audience whenever…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[196569,96,44712,128,10869,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-629077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-196569","tag-entertainment","tag-genesis","tag-music","tag-phil-collins","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}