Defend Phil Collins

It was totally the other guys pushing pop, after the departure of Steve Hackett. it just so happened that the band's first pop success, after Follow You Follow Me at least, was a Phil track iirc. Misunderstanding? plus his solo stuff gave him clout.

I think Follow You Follow Me was Mike-driven but a group effort

Granted 'Misunderstanding' was a hit but those three post-Hackett albums are dominated by Mike and Tony's 'pop' songs with Phil being a relatively figure

*marginal

I ignorantly just assumed it was Phil pushing the pop since he's the frontman + there's all these Genesis songs I used to think were Phil solo songs. I don't really know Genesis. I love "turn it on again", that is my jam

Yeah. Along the same lines I was baffled as a kid looking for “invisible touch” on the PC solo albums

yeah, brimstead, it wasn't Collins.

'Invisible Touch' began life much the same way as 'Turn It On Again'... as a Mike Rutherford guitar riff! This whole thing about Collins pushing the band towards "pop" is a line that's even people who are allegedly hardcore Genesis fans follow, which I've never understood.

Why would he need me to defend him? This thread makes no sense.

Problem for PC (not that it's done him much commercial harm) is that he doesn't come across as particularly likeable.
The official take on classic-era Genesis personality types is:
Rutherford: Likeable
Hackett: Likeable
Gabriel: Likeable/creative
Collins: Del-Boy
Banks: Passive-aggressive control freak

Banks is the only one that seems like an asshole.

I think the Collins bad rap came from his later solo career, actually, when he had no one to blame for his mawkishness but himself. Which maybe he always veered toward, anyway, but minus the musicianship/proggy veneer or cool spare arrangements he became mired in mushy A/C.

Reallllly don't think Phil was the driving force behind pushing Genesis towards 'pop' when Mike and Tony were the principal songwriters throughout their transitional period (and beyond)

― PaulTMA, Thursday, October 18, 2018 4:36 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It was totally the other guys pushing pop, after the departure of Steve Hackett. it just so happened that the band's first pop success, after Follow You Follow Me at least, was a Phil track iirc. Misunderstanding? plus his solo stuff gave him clout.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 18, 2018 4:39 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'Invisible Touch' began life much the same way as 'Turn It On Again'... as a Mike Rutherford guitar riff! This whole thing about Collins pushing the band towards "pop" is a line that's even people who are allegedly hardcore Genesis fans follow, which I've never understood.

― Le Baton Rose (Turrican), Friday, October 19, 2018 1:28 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've heard this a couple of times on ILM and it may well be true as a lot of you guys know a lot more about Collins/Genesis than I do. Still, though, as early as 1973, doesn't "More Fool Me" (Collins/Rutherford?) stand out pretty dramatically from everything else on Selling England by the Pound? I think it does anyway. And, as with brimstead, a lot of 80s-onward (esp mid-80s-onward) Genesis does seem more of a piece with solo Collins than with Gabriel-era Genesis to my ears. Afaict, he is credited as a co-writer on most or all of it. I think Turrican gave the example of solo Gabriel: to me, this is instructive because solo Gabriel (even his pop moves) does feel much more like the version of Genesis that I love responding to the 80s and 90s. Could just be that Gabriel was important enough as a frontman presence for me, more so than any of KC's singers or even Jon Anderson (whom I like a lot), idk.

Gabriel also experimented a lot and pushed boundaries, whereas Phil and Genesis, for whatever reason, established the default sound of the decade.

Well, yeah, the version of Genesis I love was one that experimented (in the broad sense) and pushed boundaries [cue argument for the boundary-pushing experimental nature of "I Can't Dance"].

That was ornery (and maybe there's a case that establishing the default sound of a decade requires pushing some boundaries) but I feel like it's something more than that as well.

We may be giving Gabriel, whom I adore, too much credit for innovation and too little credit to Genesis/Collins for hit-making.

P sure I'm the only one here who's doing that.

I do think that Collins/Genesis made some classic pop singles in the 80s, btw!

Lots of people had hits in the 80s, and Collins had a lot of them. Not many artists were as innovative and experimental as Peter Gabriel, and he still managed to have hits. I do give more credit for that, fwiw.

Again, I love Gabriel, and his hits weren't particularly innovative or experimental. Me, I don't love artists because they experiment; songs come first, and Gabriel had them for a while. Notice that with one exception his albums outsold each other through So.

I think that e.g. the 7/4 groove in "Solsbury Hill" was p creative for something that is popular enough that it could be described this way on another thread:

it's been used for so much that it barely registers as a song that can be good anymore

(I would also give credit to the makers of "In the Air Tonight" for sonic creativity.)

Nominal hits like Games Without Frontiers and Shock the Monkey are plenty weird and innovative. Even the stuff on So is kind of weird and innovative, it was just a huge smash album, so perhaps sounds less so now that it is a touchstone. I don't think that necessarily makes it better than Phil Collins pop hits, if that is your preferred thing, but it certainly makes it more compelling to me. It persists outside of its popularity, not because of it.

An album like No Jacket Required, it's sort of the apotheosis of all the things that Gabriel and Collins had been doing for the previous five years. It's not at all innovative, but it's built on the backs of many interesting innovations.

Nominal hits like Games Without Frontiers and Shock the Monkey are plenty weird and innovative.

So is 'In the Air Tonight'! I mean, the thing doesn't exactly scream "HIT SINGLE!", but it somehow was.

The thing about his cover of 'You Can't Hurry Love' is how much it sticks out like a sore thumb on Hello, I Must Be Going... the rest of the album is in competiton with Face Value as his darkest/most personal work. 'You Can't Hurry Love' feels like it was beamed in from another Collins LP entirely.

The recording of the drums in I Don't Care Anymore is incredible, starting close micd and dry then morphing into the more familiar huge room Phil sound.

In the Air Tonight is of course weird and awesome, but I want to say it's an outlier.

In hindsight, maybe Collins should have suggested that Genesis have a hiatus rather than leave the band entirely to focus on solo work. While the ...But Seriously period was successful for him, it's hard to think of how he could have kept up the same level of success in the '90s with his solo work. The hardcore Genesis fans would have continued to follow the band regardless.

pretty clearly sounds like a drum machine at the beginning of "in the air tonight", not live drums unless they are super processed

The recording of the drums in I Don't Care Anymore is incredible, starting close micd and dry then morphing into the more familiar huge room Phil sound.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, October 19, 2018 4:09 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I like the snare sound on 'Another Day In Paradise', actually! The noise gate has been set to close after allowing for a little more decay on the reverb.

The beginning of 'In the Air Tonight' is a Roland CR78, yeah.

Phil's drum machine work (did he do the programming?) helped define the era as much as Jam/Lewis/Prince.

Eno (!) told me (!) that Phil told him his work with Eno was formative in that it showed him how to make an album more or less by himself.

He would have done the programming on the No Jacket Required stuff. The drum machine on 'In the Air Tonight' wasn't programmable, although you could manipulate the presets a few different ways and of course treat the output with something else afterwards, like anything.

More importantly, he knew he wanted them!

Who besides Sly Stone used them as much before him? Not many.

It's the same rhythm box used on OMD's 'Enola Gay', Ultravox's 'Hiroshima Mon Amour', several Numan tracks circa 1981-1983, and I suspect Blondie's 'Heart of Glass' ...

Same drum machine on Duke?

Genesis' 'Duchess', too.

(x-post) Yup!

i love the sound of those super early drum machines so much

I own an Ace Tone Rhythm Ace. Kind of fun to just turn it on and let it go.

oh wow i bet....that really dead, dry sound is so cool really cuts through a mix

On another hand, it just seems like sour grapes and jealousy that Collins was everywhere and super successful on a huge scale.

Er, what? Who exactly is jealous and why? Unless you're a singing drummer who used to play in a British prog rock band and had a solo career but it turned out Phil Collins was more successful than you?

Bill Bruford's still made they shelved his Stock Aitken Waterman produced solo ablum

Yeah, those early rhythm boxes sound quite organic and even kinda funky. By the time of No Jacket Required I suspect he would have been using LM1's and 909's. 'Sussudio' sounds like it has a couple of drum machines on it at once.

(xxpost)

That R&B inspired solo album by the drummer from Gentle Giant should have been smash but Collins had cornered the market. Seriously though, well not seriously at all, I think being a Tory and divorcing his wife via a fax and running off with the au pair harmed his reputation - except I think both have been debunked? Well, he did run off with the au pair I believe.

Section 5 of his enormous wiki entry is titled 'Criticism and praise' and has four subsections...

5 Criticism and praise
5.1 Critical and public perceptions
5.2 Criticism from other artists
5.3 Collins on criticism
5.4 Praise

... though it's dwarfed by the section that follows...

6 Personal life
6.1 Family
6.2 Wealth
6.3 Court case
6.4 Health
6.5 Honorary degrees
6.6 Politics
6.7 Other interests

Like few others, I would venture, he has an separate page dedicated to the lists of awards and nominations he's received, titled List of awards and nominations received by Phil Collins.

Phil's drum machine work (did he do the programming?) helped define the era as much as Jam/Lewis/Prince.

― Josh in Chicago,

He programmed and played almost every percussive element on his albums, and played most of the keyboards. It's interesting how he and Peter Gabriel have similar instrumental talents (maybe Gabriel's the better keyboardist and Fairlight programmer, idk)