Phil Collins: the ordinary man with an extraordinary career

English version of GoGuide’s Bulgarian edition. Bulgarian translation from Italian: Kristiyana Burdeva.

Anyone who loves the fertile world of British progressive rock in the Seventies

will have a whole gallery of musical heroes. Genesis occupy a special place in it, and one drummer changed their story for good. Phil Collins was not there at the beginning. After From Genesis to Revelation and Trespass, the group entered a period of change. Collins joined in 1970; guitarist Steve Hackett followed in 1971. The combination would become the band’s classic line-up.

Collins brought an instinctive understanding of music,

rather than a dependence on reading a score. Hackett brought his own formidable musical imagination. Collins, from a different social background to the band’s Charterhouse-educated founders, arrived without grand expectations. He wanted to play, and he could play exceptionally well.

Alongside Peter Gabriel, keyboard player Tony Banks and bassist and guitarist Mike Rutherford, he gradually became part of the group’s fabric. His contribution went beyond the rhythm section. Backing vocals and a strong melodic instinct helped make him a complete musical presence rather than simply the foundation beneath everyone else.

He also sang lead on individual songs.

That line-up made Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a run of records revered by fans. Gabriel left in 1975 after touring the last of them. Following an exhaustive search for a replacement singer, the band found the answer behind its own drum kit. Collins took the microphone and led Genesis towards a new chapter.

For the audience, he became something different while remaining recognisably himself: the unassuming drummer now standing closest to the crowd. His appeal was unlike Gabriel’s theatrical mystery. A Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering followed, before Hackett also left. Then came ...And Then There Were Three..., its title spelling out the new configuration. Collins’s voice became the group’s identifying sound,

and, eventually, one of pop’s most familiar voices.

“Follow You Follow Me” brought a broader audience. Duke, with “Turn It On Again”, kept a connection to their progressive roots while pointing towards the Eighties. Abacab, Genesis and Invisible Touch followed. They were on radios around the world, filling stadiums and appearing on television wherever you looked.

Collins’s appeal also lay in the sense that he was an ordinary person, with ordinary happiness and pain, alongside extraordinary successes. His family life included five children and three marriages that ended in divorce. The breakdown of his first marriage fed into Face Value, his 1981 solo debut, recorded between Duke and Abacab. Demos made in private became a record that almost overshadowed the fame of his band.

His solo work reached an even wider audience.

He approached it with the same apparent lack of ceremony that had marked his arrival in Genesis: a man wanting to make music. No Jacket Required (1985) brought another run of huge hits. ...But Seriously (1989) included “Another Day in Paradise”. Millions of records later, the drummer and singer had become a musical institution. Many listeners knew him first as a solo artist, rather than as the colleague of Banks and Rutherford.

Then there was the Oscar nomination for “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)”, followed by the award he won in 2000 for “You’ll Be in My Heart” from Disney’s 1999 film Tarzan. In later years, health difficulties affected his ability to perform, a painful change for someone whose musical life began at the drums.

As he turned 75 on 30 January 2026,

there was plenty to celebrate: an extraordinary body of work, with and without Genesis, and songs that have accompanied millions of people through moments they will never forget.

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