Phil Collins will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this weekend. He’ll become one of a select club who have been inducted twice, once as a solo artist and once as part of their band (in Collins’ case, Genesis).
The Hall of Fame clearly means a lot to him. “I’d gotten quite used to being overlooked,” he told the New York Times. “I didn’t go looking to see who was nominated this year, so I was quite surprised when I heard I was up for induction. It’s just a pat on the back, you know.
“If it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be craving it,” he continued, kind of contradicting his first sentence. “But it is there, and I’m very, very pleased.”
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The Genesis man was an early starter – from the age of 5 he was playing a mini drum kit that had been constructed out of biscuit tins and a tambourine. “Being self-taught as a drummer and a keyboard player, I would come up with things that were unusual,” he said. “Sometimes if you don’t know the rules, you don’t know if you’re breaking them.”
The NYT piece also included some interesting thoughts about Collins’ style from Mastodon’s Brann Dailor: “He really perfected the ability to camouflage odd time signatures and interesting hi-hat work and rhythms where you’re like, “Oh, there’s more than meets the eye,’” the drummer said. “The layman can still shake their ass to it. But if you’re a schooled musician, or if you pay attention and you’re a player, you can hear that he’s doing lots under the surface.”
As we know, he’s been in poor health in recent years, with knee, back and kidney problems being among the many health issues he’s faced. They’ve all meant he’s pretty much retired from the live stage.
He hasn’t played since the final Genesis show in 2022 and won’t be performing at the Hall of Fame ceremony on Saturday – “I’m not match fit,” he says. And he hasn’t released any new music since his 2010 covers album Going Back.
In previous interviews, he’s suggested that they may yet release new material – earlier this year he said he was targeting going into his home studio to “have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music”.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if there’s been any progress on that front: “At one point, if I went down there, it meant work,” he says of his setup. “When I was trying to retire, I used to go the longest way around to avoid being in it, you know? But I will get down there.”
