Standing backstage at the Memorial Auditorium in Kitchener, Ontario, Phil Collins wondered if he’d made a terrible mistake. It was March 27, 1976, and the second night of Genesis’s tour supporting their new album A Trick Of The Tail. The last time they’d played in Canada, Collins was the band’s drummer, and Peter Gabriel their frontman. Now, Gabriel was gone, and Collins had taken his place.
Peter Gabriel was a natural showman who had used costumes, masks and dramatic mime to transform himself into the characters he sang about: he wore a flowing red dress and a fox’s head to illustrate The Musical Box, and a huge flower mask during Genesis’s biblical epic Supper’s Ready. Naturally, Phil Collins didn’t want to do the same, but he was still trying to fathom out what he could do.
Whatever it was, though, it wouldn’t involve wearing a one-piece mustard-orange jumpsuit again. Seconds before showtime that night in Ontario, Collins realised the suit’s synthetic material had already caused him to break into a sweat. Worse, the ensemble was a little too snug around the crotch. “My tom toms were showing,” he confessed later.
Too late. The house lights dimmed and his bandmates took up their places on stage either side of Collins’s lead singer’s microphone. There was nowhere for him, his sweaty jumpsuit or ‘tom toms’ to hide. How had it come to this? How had Genesis’s drummer become their lead singer?
In March 2022, the reunited Genesis (Collins, bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford and keyboard player Tony Banks) bowed out for good with The Last Domino Farewell Tour.
By the time Collins left Genesis the first time, in 1993, they had enjoyed the best part of a decade as a multi-platinum-selling act. The earlier 70s era, defined by Gabriel’s dressing-up box, was long gone. Genesis had turned the base metal of progressive rock into commercial gold.
However, in that sweet spot between the likes of Foxtrot’s wordy 70s prog and the Thatcher-era stadium pop of 1986’s Invisible Touch came A Trick Of The Tail. Genesis’s first album with Phil Collins as lead singer straddles both worlds, and this year celebrates its 50th birthday.
Collins was a child actor in the 60s, whose Artful Dodger in the stage musical Oliver! was the talk of London’s New Theatre. By 1970 he was a rock’n’roll drummer looking for work. At the time, Genesis had regular bookings on Britain’s thriving university and underground club circuit, but had just fired another drummer.
Theirs was an uneasy and sometimes challenging dynamic, though. Gabriel, Rutherford and Banks had all met as pupils at Charterhouse public school in Surrey. They’d been billeted in dormitories together for years, and were adept at putting each other down. “When you’ve all been in shorts together, nobody can get away with any airs and graces,” Rutherford told me.
In contrast, Collins and newly added guitarist Steve Hackett were grammar school-educated interlopers. They lightened the mix, but it still remained combustible.
“Most arguments between Tony and Peter, especially, went back to school days,” observed Hackett. “They’d have these almighty bust-ups that could easily end with: ‘Well… you stole my protractor.’”
Yet the creative friction paid off. 1971’s Nursery Cryme, 1972’s Foxtrot and 1973’s Selling England By The Pound sold in increasing numbers to an audience charmed by Gabriel’s stage presence and the band’s strand of bucolic prog rock. But then the wheels began to come off.
In 1974, Genesis released The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, a concept album full of psychosexual dramas but light on hit single material. While making the record, Gabriel, who had considered going to film school before committing to the band, received a surprise offer from The Exorcist director William Friedkin to collaborate on a film script. Friedkin apparently loved Gabriel’s surreal short story on the back cover of the recent Genesis Live LP. Gabriel considered leaving Genesis to commit to the project, but Friedkin and the rest of the group persuaded him otherwise.
Soon after, though, he quit the Lamb sessions to be with his wife, Jill, and newborn daughter Anna-Marie, both of whom were seriously ill after the birth.
“Tony and I were too selfish to understand what he was going through,” Rutherford admitted. “We were horribly unsupportive.”
Gabriel stayed on for the Lamb tour, a theatrical event in which he played both a leather-jacketed Puerto Rican street punk and the Slipperman, a creature whose body was festooned with what appeared to be huge rubber testicles.
The tour was beset with technical problems; the band’s projected images of gritty urban streets were rarely in sync with the music, and the Slipperman’s ‘bollock head’, for want of a better description, was too large for Gabriel to get the microphone close enough to his mouth to sing properly.
After the fifth date of the tour, in Cleveland, Gabriel informed everyone he was leaving at the end of the run. Banks, especially, was furious. “There was a lot of fear about whether we could carry on without him,” he admitted.
Gabriel had no such doubts: “I had much more confidence in the band’s ability to transcend my departure than they did.”
In May 1975, the tour stuttered to a halt in Besançon, France, when the planned last gig was cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
Two months later, a Gabriel-less Genesis began jamming in a basement studio in Churchfield Road in Acton, West London. Within a couple of days they’d pieced together two songs: Dance On A Volcano and Squonk, the first building blocks of what would become A Trick Of The Tail. The band had kept Gabriel’s departure a secret from the press. Then, in August, their management placed a not-quite anonymous advert in music weekly Melody Maker, seeking “a singer for a Genesis-style group”. Days later, the paper announced Gabriel’s shock departure.
Between 100 and 400 hopefuls (nobody in the band can agree) applied for the job. Among them were Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s Mick Rogers, and Jahn Teigen, vocalist with Norwegian artrockers Popol Vuh. In 1978, Teigen had the ignominy of becoming the first contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest to receive “nul points”. Pub-rocker Nick Lowe told the press that he too had applied, but later confessed it was a wind-up instigated by his manager Jake Riviera.
With the list whittled down, four or five hopefuls were invited to audition at Churchfield Road every Monday for several weeks. After seeing around 30 and finding them all lacking, the band began to despair.
Genesis were already booked into London’s Trident Studios to start work on a new album with producer David Hentschel. Still, their predominantly public-school upbringing meant they maintained a stiff upper lip.
“We kept writing songs,” Rutherford confessed, “trying to ignore the fact they’d be a bit boring without a singer.”
Looking in from the outside, it seems a miracle that the group stayed together at all. Steve Hackett was absent for the first few sessions, busy finishing his debut solo album, Voyage Of The Acolyte. “Contrary to myth, I believe I only missed a day,” he later insisted.
Meanwhile, Collins had just been invited to play drums with the jazz-fusion group Brand X. “It was never an alternative to Genesis,” he said. “But it was fun.”
By October, Collins was flitting between different studios at Trident, playing on both A Trick Of The Tail tracks and Brand X’s debut LP Unorthodox Behaviour – and Genesis still didn’t have a vocalist. “The tracks were recorded, and we finally agreed to let one singer past the door,” said Collins. History records that vocalist Mick Strickland went on to sing and play flute with a band called Witch’s Brew. Beyond that, nothing more is known.
“We gave Mick Strickland Squonk to sing, but the first line – ‘Like father, like son’ – is a bitch, and the poor guy wasn’t in key,” Collins recalled. With Strickland gone, Collins half-heartedly offered to sing lead vocals instead, just so they could finish the album. “My thinking, though, was that we would still find someone who could sing lead vocals on tour.”
In hindsight, the ideal candidate was right there in front of them. Steve Hackett was a gifted musician and writer, but a more reserved character. However, Collins wasn’t afraid to make his presence known from behind the drum kit.
“When Phil made a suggestion, you listened, even in the days when Peter was still in the group,” said Rutherford.
Collins had sung backing vocals on many Genesis tracks in the past and lead vocals on two: For Absent Friends (on Nursery Cryme) and More Fool Me (on Selling England By The Pound). He’d also been in charge of coaching the band’s auditionees.
It was also Collins who’d suggested David Hentschel as producer, after meeting him when Hentschel was producing Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road at Trident. “I was always putting myself about,” Collins explained, “playing sessions, meeting other musicians.”
Nevertheless, once Collins began singing, his bandmates experienced what they later called “a lightbulb moment”. Sort of.
“But we still weren’t sure Phil would want to get out from behind the drum kit and sing live,” said Rutherford, who remained quietly cautious about the possible role change.
Collins was also unsure about singing some of the heavier material, especially Banks and Rutherford’s Squonk. That said, A Trick Of The Tail also took Genesis in musical directions that suited Collins better than they might have done Gabriel.
The opening and closing tracks – Dance On A Volcano and Los Endos – explored the drummer’s love of jazz-rock, especially Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report. Collins later told this writer that Los Endos was inspired by Promise Of A Fisherman, a track on Santana’s 1974 album Borboletta. Listened to side by side with Los Endos now, the comparisons are obvious.
These new songs the band came up with referenced the past but also Genesis’s future. Squonk spliced a lyric about a mythical beast, taken from Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s Book Of Imaginary Beings, with a John Bonham-esque drum sound “Physical Graffiti had just come out, and I remember us playing Kashmir on the bus when we were touring America,” said Collins.
Robbery Assault And Battery was a typical Genesis ‘story song’, with Collins reprising his Artful Dodger character from Oliver!, and giving the track’s hapless thief a broad cockney accent. Heard again now, though, it hasn’t aged well; think: Danny Dyer goes prog.
A Trick Of The Tail’s unsung hero, though, is guitarist Steve Hackett, who co-wrote one of its finest songs, Entangled. When Hackett showed Collins his lyrics for it – ‘Over the rooftops and houses… sentenced to drift far away now’ – the drummer thought the song had “a Mary Poppins feel to it”.
Most of A Trick Of The Tail had a similarly dreamy atmosphere, capturing those moments between full consciousness and sleep. Tony Banks’s party-piece, Mad Man Moon sounded as light and airborne as Entangled, but also explored its composer’s love of what he described as “fruity chords”.
“The opening two chords of the verses of Mad Man Moon are unusual inversions, yet sound very natural,” Banks explained. “It’s in the vein of Brian Wilson, who was keen on that kind of thing too. I tend to be more fruity with the chords, and that takes me into a slightly softer, more romantic area.”
“Tony had what I call his feminine Rodgers and Hammerstein chords,” pointed out Rutherford, who with Banks co-wrote Ripples, a melancholy ballad about old age and fading beauty. Collins’s vocals also sounded completely at home on the title track.
“It was something I’d written many years before,” said Banks. “But with Peter’s departure, I liked the idea of slipping in something lighter and more quirky.”
Lyrically, this was Genesis back in the netherworld of elves and sprites, but with a cautionary message. Banks had been reading William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors, which used the story of a Neanderthal tribe as a fable about modern social mores. The song about ‘a beast that can talk’ displayed in a public ‘freakshow’ had both a social message and the album’s most infectious melody.
“I think we knew we’d made a good album,” Rutherford said of A Trick Of The Tail. “It already felt like a new chapter.”
But later he acknowledged that some songs suited Collins’s voice better than others.
“Back then, Phil had a pure, choirboy voice. Whereas Pete had the R&B raunch, which was what you needed for a song like Squonk. After a little more un-choirboy-like living – life on the road, drinking and drugs – Phil got the raunch too, but back then he was still a bit too healthy.”
As implausible as it might seem to some of their audience, Rutherford was Genesis’s resident party animal (a role he’d later share with Collins, but never Tony Banks), and his nose suffered as a result of taking too much cocaine. “I had to have my septum operated on in the late seventies,” Rutherford told me. “You know, that bit in the middle of your nostrils…”
A Trick Of The Tail was released in February 1976, in a sleeve created by the art house Hipgnosis to resemble the cover of a Victorian fairy tale book. Hipgnosis’s illustrator Colin Elgie drew a masked burglar (for Robbery, Assault And Battery), a withered crone (Ripples), a satyr (the title track) and poor old Squonk, crying ‘a pool of tears’, all rendered on a faded yellow sleeve designed to resemble parchment.
The single A Trick Of The Tail followed a month later. Rather than Peter Gabriel dressed as a daffodil, the promo for it showed Collins in a floor-length scarf, orange hat and white snow boots, looking like a stoned window cleaner who’d got dressed in the dark.
Tony Banks once suggested that “some of the public found Genesis with Peter Gabriel a bit too strange”. A Trick Of The Tail proved his point. It reached No.3 in the UK, out-selling The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and tying with Selling England By The Pound as Genesis’s highest charting LP yet.
“We had to prove we could do it without Peter,” Banks told Melody Maker, before adding boldly: “We think it’s the best album we’ve ever done.”
However, Collins felt increasingly nervous as the tour approached. For a time, the group still considered finding a new singer for the upcoming shows. When Collins married his first wife, Andrea, in September ’75, one of the wedding guests, Yes’s singer Jon Anderson, took him aside and encouraged him to take the job.
Years later, Yes’s bassist Chris Squire told Steve Hackett that A Trick Of The Tail was his favourite Genesis album.
Ultimately, it was the new Mrs Collins who persuaded him. “Andrea and I had been at drama school together, and I’d always sung in my school band from behind the drums,” Collins recalled. “In the end, she said: ‘Why don’t you do it, Phil?’”
Collins reluctantly agreed, but neither he nor the rest of Genesis wanted a singing drummer on stage. 10cc’s Kevin Godley and the Eagles’ Don Henley managed it, but they weren’t their respective bands’ only lead singers.
The problem was resolved when Bill Bruford, formerly of Yes and King Crimson, dropped by one of Brand X’s rehearsals and offered his services temporarily for the tour. “Suddenly, Genesis had a new drummer and I had no excuse,” Collins admitted.
Interviewed in music weekly Sounds ahead of the opening dates, Bruford, a notoriously plainspoken musician, damned his new employers with comically faint praise. “I’d never seen Genesis or heard their albums before,” he confessed cheerily. “But I respected Phil and knew he wouldn’t be involved in any rubbish.”
The A Trick Of The Tail tour commenced in London, Ontario, on March 26, 1976. As Collins walked on stage, his shaking hands clutched a piece of paper containing prompts of what to say to the audience.
“We knew from the start costumes wouldn’t be part of the show,” said Rutherford. “You only had to look at Phil to realise he wouldn’t have looked good in a flower mask.”
It took some time for Collins to work out what to do instead. On that first night, he didn’t need his notes, but clung on to the mic stand, like a security blanket, for the entire show. It would be some time before he built up the confidence to put his hands in his pockets as he sang. Even longer before he took the mic off the stand and walked around with it.
Without any props or costumes to hide behind, Collins engaged the audience with his directness and down-to-earth humour. He was as ‘everyman’ as Gabriel had once been ‘other-worldly’. Furthermore, Phil also sounded remarkably like Peter when he sang the ‘old stuff’.
As the tour progressed, Collins slowly grew into his new role. “People didn’t want to give up on Genesis,” he said later. “They wanted us to stay together, so they backed me up.”
Peter Gabriel slipped quietly into one of Genesis’s six sold-out nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. “It was a very strange experience and I had mixed emotions,” he told me. “I always compare it to seeing your ex-wife with a new man, or watching someone else drive your car.”
Rutherford’s comment about Collins in the 70s – “When Phil made a suggestion, you listened…” – would become even more significant in the near future. Firstly, when Genesis went back into the studio to record their next album, 1976’s Wind And Wuthering, and again when Steve Hackett’s departure reduced the band to a trio for 1978’s And Then There Were Three…
Nowadays, Steve Hackett tirelessly cheerleads for both A Trick In The Tail and Wind And Wuthering in his solo shows, but said: “In conversation, people tend to say there was the ‘Pete era’ and the ‘Phil era’. They sometimes forget what came in between.”
Listening to the album today, A Trick Of The Tail sounds like the last hurrah for the old Genesis and the beginning of something completely new. The day after that first show of the tour for the album, in Kitchener, Ontario, the mustard-orange jumpsuit was consigned to rock’s great landfill, and neither Genesis nor Phil Collins would ever be quite the same again.
