Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now, Phil Collins has revealed how his ongoing health issues have affected not only his ability to make music, but his desire to do so.
“I keep thinking I should go downstairs to the studio and see what happens,” Collins tells MOJO’s Mark Blake. “But I’m not hungry for it anymore. The thing is, I’ve been sick, I mean very sick…”
Collins suffered severe nerve damage following a spinal injury in 2007 and has had deteriorating mobility in recent years, meaning that for Genesis’s farewell shows in 2022 he had to sing sitting down while his son Nic played drums.
While Collins’ former bandmate Peter Gabriel didn’t take part in the concerts, he explained to MOJO why he felt he should be in attendance at London’s O2 Arena for the final performance by the group he, keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford formed at Charterhouse boarding school as teenagers in the 1960s.
“Phil wasn’t in as great a shape as he used to be, but they did a great job,” said Gabriel. “Me going was a rite of passage, really. I’d been part of the creation of Genesis, so I wanted to be there at the end.”
In UK shops and available to order for delivery HERE, the new issue of MOJO features extensive interviews with Collins, Gabriel, Rutherford, Banks and guitarist Steve Hackett, 50 years on from Gabriel’s departure from the group.
Following inauspicious beginnings touring the UK in a bread van, Gabriel had led Genesis for a series of quixotic and quintessentially English prog rock explorations, both on record and on stage, culminating in 1975’s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, which celebrates its 50th anniversary with a lavish boxset treatment this spring.
After a deterioration in his relationship with his bandmates, Gabriel left to pursue a highly successful solo career, leaving Collins to become Genesis’s new lead vocalist almost by accident. When the remaining members couldn’t find a replacement they liked enough, he offered to do the job and was surprised when they said yes.
“I honestly thought we could just carry on and be an instrumental group,” Collins says. “Of course, the others didn’t!”
Elsewhere in the feature, Collins, who grew up in Hounslow, West London, and had depicted the Artful Dodger on stage in Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, recalls answering the ad Genesis had posted in the Melody Making following the departure of their third drummer John Mayhew.
“They [were] a bit bottled up” Collins remembers of his public school-bred future bandmates. Not quite so reserved, before his audition at Gabriel’s parents’ home in Surrey, Collins took a dip in the family swimming pool in his Y-fronts.
“I remember Pete and I, especially, being very impressed,” Banks recalls of their impression of Collins. “We were a bit amateurish, and Phil made it sound good. But he was also funny. Every time we met him he had another funny story.”
Collins, however, was less impressed with Genesis’s early music, likening it to “a blancmange”.
“It was sort of formless,” says the drummer. “At my audition we’d listened to some of [first album] Trespass, and it wasn’t one thing or the other. There were harmonies that reminded me of Crosby Stills & Nash, but when it was meant to be hard, like on The Knife, it didn’t sound like they really meant it.”
“People often imply that we planned to go more commercial. We didn’t. We just couldn’t write hit singles before…” Get the latest issue of MOJO to read the interview with Collins, Gabriel, Banks Rutherford and Hackett in full. For more info and to order a copy HERE!
