"Initially, I thought, 'Oh no, what's he going to critique next?' But once I realized he was just there to support me, it changed everything": How Phil Collins helped his son Nic navigate his debut performance.] - Guitar | Technique

Phil Collins turns 75 at the end of this month and to mark the occasion the ex-Genesis man has sat down with Radio 2’s Zoe Ball for an interview that will broadcast that week.

The interview is part of a longer podcast series Eras: Phil Collins, four episodes of which are already on BBC Sounds. Aside from talking to Collins, Ball also spoke to his son, Nic, who played drums in place of his dad on the final Genesis tour, The Last Domino?

Now 24, Nic made his big time debut playing on his dad’s Not Dead Yet tour in 2017, at the tender age of 16, and he remembers a tender moment from the Hyde Park gig on that jaunt “He (Phil) would come by the side of the drum riser on some of the instrumental bits. At first I was like, oh God, what is he gonna critique me on afterwards?

“And actually he just kind of wanted to be there once I figured out that he wasn’t sitting there to kind of judge me.”

Phil Collins – In The Air Tonight (Live BST Hyde Park, London – June 2017) – YouTube

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“It was a really nice moment every show when he’d sit there and it was just kind of having that kind of unspoken moment between each other was really nice, and I’m grateful that he felt confident enough in my ability to go on stage with ‘em and to play these parts.”

“I mean, he surprised the shit out of me,” his dad adds. “I tell you. I mean, when I was living in Miami I guess Nic was 16. But I knew he’d been playing, I mean, him and Matthew actually, they’ve had two drum kits and my drum kit down in the playroom and we all used to play together and then they played together and Nic just got better and better.

“We talked about Genesis going out again. And, but we didn’t, we wanted to do something different, think it was at the Albert Hall when I saw Mike and Tony Banks. I saw, I said, ‘you saw Nic. He was very good, isn’t he?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he is. He’s fantastic.’ So I think they eventually had the idea.”

Collins Sr has been in poor health in recent years, with knee and back problems and kidney issues, but he told Ball that he hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of making new music. “The things that are ahead for me would be, apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy, is go in there and have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music ‘cause you know, you tend to sort of feel, that’s it, I’ve done that.