He may not always have been life and soul of the party, but he’s been the heartbeat behind songs across a huge range of genres – to his lasting pride
Phil Collins still has the T-shirt that Genesis’ touring drummer Chester Thompson gave him on a long-forgotten birthday many years ago. The logo on the front says: ‘Plays well with others’ – words that still resonate today.
“I thought about it, and it pretty much summed up my life,” says Collins. “People kept asking me to be on their records; and, nice person that I am, I could never turn them down.”
He’s repurposed the phrase for the title of a new compilation, which brings together his countless collaborations over the years, from work with fellow prog regents Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and his old Genesis oppo Peter Gabriel to more mainstream musicians such as Eric Clapton and Robert Plant.
“I suppose, listening back to it, the thing that makes me proudest is the breadth of things I’ve been involved in,” Collins says. “It goes from A to Z. Or at least from A to B.”
We’re here to talk about his career as the go-to drummer for rock’s A-list, though he starts with an apology. “I’m afraid I don’t have many sex, drugs and rock’n’roll stories for you,” he says. “That was always someone else’s job.” That’s not a problem. Even without Genesis in the mix, Collins’ extracurricular musical history is rich and interesting enough on its own.
George Harrison
Collins was just 18 when he got a call asking if he wanted to appear on a session for the Beatles guitarist’s third solo album All Things Must Pass. “I can’t remember how it came about; I just know that Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton and all these other people were involved,” says Collins. “I was fairly cocky at that point, but I was definitely overawed by it all.”
Collins was enlisted to play congas on the song Art Of Dying, a job he threw himself into – a little too much. After the initial run-through, his hands were so blistered and bloodied that he couldn’t hit the instrument properly during the actual recording. “I really did give it my all, but my hands were fairly bashed up,” he says. “When I listened back to the album, I couldn’t hear any congas at all.”
The £15 fee he received for his part in the session was some consolation – and his relationship with Harrison didn’t end there. “I got to know George later on,” he says. “He was a very funny man, very droll. And he loved to play jokes on people.”
Collins would be the butt of one of these jokes: In 2001, Harrison sent him a new reissue of All Things Must Pass, on which his congas had been restored. “And they sounded bloody awful,” says Collins. “I thought, ‘Was I really that bad? No wonder they didn’t use them!’ Then I found out that George had got percussionist Ray Cooper to purposely re-record them as badly as possible and sent me that version. I never did get my own back on him.”
Peter Gabriel
“Me and Peter always got on really well,” says Collins of his predecessor as Genesis singer, “so I kind of suggested myself when he was looking for a drummer. I’d just done the early demos for Face Value and I was going though a divorce so I needed something to occupy myself with.”
Their unlikely reunion, on Gabriel’s third self-titled album, would produce something even more unlikely: a drum sound that came to define the following decade. “Ah, the old gated reverb,” says Collins. “The sound that built the 80s. It was a pure accident.”
I could never be the person Peter Gabriel was when I started singing with Genesis. It was hard enough being the person I was
This unique beat – clipped, compressed, direct – made its bow on the album’s opening song, Intruder; one of five tracks he played on. According to Collins, he was playing regularly when his drum sound was picked up by the microphone that connected the recording space with the control room.
“Those mics weren’t made for recording music and apparently it came out sounding completely different,” he says. “Peter was in there and he said, ‘What’s that? I like it.’ And he went away and tinkered with it, and the next thing you know, he’s got this new… thing.”
Collins’ relationship with Gabriel remains friendly. “We were never rivals,” he said. “I could never be the person he was when I started singing with Genesis. It was hard enough being the person I was.”
Robert Fripp
Collins can’t recall exactly where or when he first saw King Crimson, but the feeling he got has stuck with him. “They were absolutely phenomenal,” he says. “Like nothing else I’d ever seen. This was before progressive rock was even called ‘progressive rock,’ but it was clear they were doing something that was completely new and fairly astounding. And while everyone else was wearing capes and flouncing about, there he was in his suit, sitting on a stool.”
Despite moving in the same circles, Collins and Fripp wouldn’t work together until the early 80s, when the former played drums on Disengage and North Star, two tracks on Fripp’s debut solo album, Exposure. “That was an interesting experience,” says Collins. “Robert doesn’t work like anyone else. He’s very professorial and very focused – there’s no messing around.
“That’s not to say he’s not a warm person, because he is, but he knows what he wants from himself, and from you. And listening back to North Star, I think it’s one of my favourite pieces of music that I’ve ever played on.”
Did Fripp or anyone else ever try to tempt you away from Genesis in the 1970s? “Not that I can remember,” Collins says. “I don’t think I would have gone anyway, even if they had.”
Brian Eno
“Ah, Brian!” says Collins with a laugh. “The mad professor. Except he wasn’t really mad, just had his own way of doing things.” Their paths crossed when Genesis and Eno were working in the same studio – the former recording what would be their greatest prog rock blowout, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, the latter working on his second post-Roxy Music album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
“I wasn’t really a huge fan of Roxy Music, but Brian came along and helped out with some vocal effects on one of our tracks [credited as ‘Enossification’], and I was sent upstairs to play on one of his as a sort of payment in kind,” says Collins. “For some reason we hit it off. I liked his sense of humour and he must have liked mine, because he asked me back to play on another three albums.”
Those records – Another Green World, Before And After Science and Music For Films – were, as Collins puts it, “a world away from Genesis. It was like painting by numbers, but in a really leftfield way. They taught me a lot about making music in completely different ways.”
Peter Banks
The beginning of Collins’ tenure in Genesis coincided with their transformation into a fully-blown progressive rock band, as hinted at on 1970’s Trespass. However they were still playing catch-up with their contemporaries, such as King Crimson and Yes, who were already twisting music into strange and fantastical new shapes.
“We were totally aware of what Yes were doing, and even though we were very different, they were still an influence,” says Collins. “Especially Bill Bruford, who sounded like no other rock drummer at the time. But there wasn’t any rivalry with them. There was plenty of room back then for everybody.”
Collins himself hooked up with former Yes guitarist Peter Banks, lending his talents to four tracks on 1973 solo album Two Sides Of Peter Banks. “Peter was a strange man, very quiet, not massively sociable outside of music,” says Collins. “But he was a very impressive musician, and overlooked. He was definitely one of the founding fathers of the whole progressive rock thing.”
John Martyn
If the musical partnership between Collins and hellraising singer-songwriter John Martyn was unlikely, their long-standing friendship was even more so. “John was a character,” says Collins. “A great man to be around, and he liked his booze. I did a little, but I was a bit too straightforward to do it on the same scale.”
I don’t think Robert Plant was running away from Zeppelin, but I don’t think he really knew what he wanted to do
The pair first worked together on Martyn’s nocturnal 1980 album, Grace And Danger. At the time, both men were going through respective marriage break-ups. “Oh, it was the Divorced Rock Stars Club,” laughs Collins. “He actually moved into my house at one point. You can imagine what that was like for both of us. John definitely knew how to put his problems behind him, put it like that. He didn’t exactly not live up to his reputation, but he was always focused on the music.”
In fact, the two musicians got on so well that Collins returned to produce the follow-up to Grace And Danger, 1981’s Glorious Fool. “John was one of a kind,” says Collins. “He’s somebody I really miss. George Harrison too.”
Eric Clapton
“Eric played on the George Harrison album that I wasn’t on,” says Collins, “but I only met him years later through John Martyn. I remember one time, the three of us were sitting in this pub somewhere in the country, just plotting and drinking. I’m not sure people knew who we were. Or if they did, they kept quiet.”
Collins and Clapton first worked together on Martyn’s Glorious Fool, which featured a guest appearance from the former Cream and Derek And The Dominos guitarist on Couldn’t Love You More. Four years later, the pair hooked up again when Collins produced Clapton’s Behind The Sun album.
“I really liked working with Eric,” says Collins. “And we recorded a lot of it in Montserrat, at Air Studios. The budgets were decent – those were the times – but it wasn’t a bunch of rich rock musicians living the life of Riley. We were there to work, especially Eric. We stayed in nice hotels, but there wasn’t any messing around from anyone.”
Robert Plant
Collins was an early adopter when it came to Led Zeppelin. “I was there at one of their first London gigs, at the Marquee in 1968,” he says. “They were truly phenomenal. Especially John Bonham. There was no one who was doing what he did. But I didn’t get to know them because we were both off in our different worlds back then.“
It would be well over a decade before Collins got a chance to work with any members of Zeppelin, by which time the band had disbanded in the wake of Bonham’s death. “I got a call from Robert – who I didn’t know – asking if I fancied playing on this solo album he was putting out,” he recalls.
Brand X allowed me to branch out and do things I could have never got away with in Genesis
“So I jumped at the chance. He was in quite a strange place. I don’t think he was running away from Zeppelin, but I don’t think he really knew what he wanted to do. I think he just wanted to have a good time.”
Collins appeared on Plant’s first two solo albums, Pictures At Eleven and The Principle Of Moments, as well as playing with the singer’s band on a US tour in support of the latter. It was this association that led him to being drumming with Zeppelin during their ill-fated reunion at the American Live Aid in 1985. “Yes, that gig,” he says wryly. “Was it as bad as everybody says? Well, I’ve been involved in better gigs…”
Brand X
If Plays Well With Others shows anything, it’s the sheer breadth of Collins’ output, from prog to blue-eyed soul. But many connoisseurs of his imperial years in the 70s and early 80s point to Brand X, the jazz rock group put together by bass supremo Percy Jones.
“Brand X allowed me to branch out and do things I could have never got away with in Genesis,” he says. “With Genesis, things were very structured and ordered. With Brand X, things were… not looser, but that bit freer.”
Collins was a fan of the great jazz fusion bands of the era. Ask him who he wishes he’d had a chance to play with and he replies instantly: “Joe Zawinul from The Weather Report. He could do incredible things on the keyboard. No one sounded like him.”
With that, our time is up. “I suppose I’ve done well out of it all,” Collins reflects. “People kept asking me to come and work with them, so I must have been doing something right.”
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