To the beat of his own drums
Phil Collins often seems to have only two artistic settings — both profitable, if artistically null. Following the triumph of 1981’s “In the Air Tonight” — his first solo hit — Collins has veered between the painfully glib (eg., the Genesis-in-brownface hit “Illegal Alien”) and the painfully mawkish (anything he wrote for a film).
And yet, damn: “In the Air Tonight” is undeniable. It’s just about the only song Collins has written that has lasting power and musical depth, but most musicians would kill to have even one like it in their back catalogue. It also showcases something Collins ought to be more recognized for: his drumming. Collins on the drum stool is a very different beast from Collins off. (See: any track from Genesis’s album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.)
It’s as a drummer, one who stumbled into pop stardom, that Collins frames himself in his memoir, Not Dead Yet. The book is his own account of how a working-class English teen obsessed with music became the balding, avuncular face of the 1980s. Even when recounting a period of fame so intense he was pals with royalty (rock and actual), he repeatedly notes a desire to return to the back of the stage. “That’s where I live,” he writes. It’s a position he relinquished forever when he replaced Peter Gabriel as Genesis’s singer in 1975.
The book is also an extended apology to the victims of Collins-mania. Not us, but his (three) ex-wives and his children, all of whom were shunted into second place by his inability to say no to musical work. Overall, Collins’s memoir is breezy and self-deprecating. When he lists his failures as a husband and father — especially in the final chapters, about a recent and near-fatal slide into alcoholism — he gets uncharacteristically serious.
The book ends on a cautiously optimistic note, but with news of a loss Collins tries his best to shrug off: due to persistent nerve and back problems, he may never drum again. The next time “In the Air Tonight” comes on the radio, pour one out for Phil. Nathan Whitlock’s latest book is Congratulations on Everything.