(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 11 January 2026 5:00, UK
For someone who has been in the game for as long as Phil Collins has, there comes a point where all of them realise there’s no such thing as perfection.
As much as people can try to get that perfect drum take or make sure that everything is perfectly in tune, the beauty of rock and roll is about things being a little bit rough around the edges. The whole point is to make people feel a performance rather than dissect it every time they hear it, but Collins knew that there was still a standard that he needed to hit to feel like he had a classic song on his hands when he walked out of the studio.
Then again, no one who has turned in time in a prog rock outfit was going to settle for “good enough” whenever they made their own albums. Collins’s solo career is clearly a much different animal than the massive exercises that he did in Genesis, but when hearing him on everything from Face Value to No Jacket Required, he was always looking out for those moments where he felt like a piece of magic was captured on tape. The same thing applied to Genesis, but the legends of rock had already done the dirty work for all of them.
Because in reality, there wasn’t anything that Collins was playing on drums that couldn’t have been played by John Bonham or Buddy Rich. Both of them were absolute legends in their fields, and while Collins could unleash that inner musical beast whenever he started playing through records like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, it was a much different story whenever listening to the melodic side of his career.
His voice didn’t sound all that dissimilar to Peter Gabriel’s in some spots, but when looking at the way he played piano and approached playing guitar, he was always falling back on the biggest names in Motown that he started out with. That explains why he managed to work so well with Philip Bailey, but there was always going to be a subtle piece of The Beatles trailing back into every tune he played.
Which is strange considering how rudimentary a lot of the Fab Four’s songs were in the beginning. Most prog fans would have been dismissive of something that sounded so simple when making their own records, but when looking at a tune like ‘She Loves You’, Collins was still convinced that everything that he played needed to sound close to those kinds of vocal harmonies.
The vocals were already doing most of the heavy lifting, but Collins felt that every piece of his career was designed to pass the test The Beatles set for everyone else, saying, “It’s very simple chords. I’ve got The Beatles’ chord sheets at home and said ‘This is remarkably simple’. It was what happened on top. It’s so obvious to me that I can’t talk about it and do it justice because I’ve absorbed it so much, it’s part of my fabric. I judge every band by that standard and every album by that standard.”
But it’s not like Collins is looking for a song having one specific harmony as his baseline of quality or anything. He was still willing to hear bands experiment with different kinds of techniques, but the key deciding factor is the thing that makes people’s ears perk up whenever they hear a certain tune on the radio.
That grand tradition stretched all the way from The Beatles to ELO to Collins’s solo work to even the beginnings of what Nirvana were doing, but the reason why all of them come back to it is because the Fab Four pretty much wrote the rules for what a hit song could be about. No one had to follow them to the letter, but the greatest lessons that they ever taught are what’s built into pop music’s foundations without anyone even realising it.
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