Stone unturned

Drummers, for reasons I’ve never fully fathomed, have historically borne the brunt of rock humour. In Spinal Tap’s back story, they worked their way through 18 tub thumpers, including John “Stumpy” Pepys, who died in a bizarre gardening accident, Eric “Stumpy Joe” Childs, who choked on vomit “of unknown origin”,  Peter “James” Bond and Mick Shrimpton, who both expired in bizarre on-stage explosions, and Chris “Poppa” Cadeau, who was eaten by his own pet python, Cleopatra. 

Rock drummers are otherwise portrayed as the madcap members of the band, epitomised by Keith Moon “The Loon” and the Muppet he inspired, Animal, and invariably hidden behind a wall of tom-toms and a sea of cymbals of every diameter. Traditionally they are indulged by their bandmates by being provided with time in a live set in which to flail at their skins alone while everyone else disappears to do whatever rock musicians disappear off stage to take care of.

Charlie Watts wasn’t anything like that. He was, by any rock drummer's standards, a modest timekeeper. Resplendent off-stage in Savile Row threads, in contrast to Keith Richards’ ageing pirate look and Mick Jagger’s skinny-jeaned effete, Watts sat behind a simple kit - a single tom-tom, snare, hi-hat, bass and just enough cymbals to punctuate the rhythm only when necessary. Even his drumming style appeared conservative, by comparison to the more expressive likes of Moon, Bonham or Collins. Herein, though, lies the seat of what has allowed the Stones to endure for almost 60 years. Amid the partying, womanising, divorces, dysfunction of every kind (not to mention the Glimmer Twins’ occasional schisms), Watts provided more than just the backbeat. He was the quiet rock of stability, musically, of course, but I suspect also in the more colourful aspects of the outfit that can still justifiably call themselves the “the greatest rock and roll band in the world”.

He was also so much more than - so the somewhat apocryphal tale recounted in Richards’s biography, Life recounts - just “Jagger’s drummer”, too. Part of Watts’ magic was what he brought to the Stones’ music, and part was what he brought to the Stones’ personality. Musically, he was at heart a jazz drummer, but had been drawn into London’s R’n’B scene in the early 1960s, which had its epicentre in the west and south-west London suburbs of Ealing and Richmond. Watts had also worked with the Godfather of British Blues, Alexis Korner. A meeting with Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones in one of those R’n’B clubs led him to joining the fledgling Rolling Stones in 1963, an association that only ended 58 years later with his death, announced earlier this week. 

Amazingly, Watts became the first Stone to pass away in old age – at 80 – (with the previous departure only being Jones at the age of 27 through his own misadventure). No one knows quite what has kept Richards going, given the onslaught his constitution has been put under by years of chemical abuse, although the more popular theory is that he has consumed such a sustained cocktail of substances that they have somehow metabolised inside the human laboratory that he surely has become. Watts, by stark contrast – even to the macrobiotic, still-teenage waste-sized Jagger – has always projected a more sober image. Even when he surprisingly succumbed to heroin addiction, it was a brief flirtation rather than a fully-blown descent, and it was ended by Richards’ intervention. Even that dabbling with the darker side of the rock’n’roll lifestyle was conducted with modest privacy. It was, however, a surprising revelation from a musician who, by comparison to the other surviving Stones, had led a decidedly normal life. Watts had been married to the same woman, Shirley, since 1964, and away from the band lived privately on a Devon farm, raising horses, children and grandchildren. Little is known beyond that, as he had always shied away from the attention that the others courted, happy to let his drumming do the talking.

The statement, issued after his death by publicist Bernard Doherty, included the understated phrase “one of the greatest drummers of his generation.” That is the respectful custom on these occasions, but in Watts’ case, thoroughly justified. He applied his jazz chops to the Stones’ blues-infused rock with an intricacy that at times belied the more straightforward rhythmic form of the band in front of him. This stems from his early exposure to Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker records as a teenager before his parents bought him his first drum kit in 1955. This led to regular gigs at the age of 16 in London’s jazz clubs before joining Korner’s Blues Incorporated. In turn, that brought about the fateful encounter with his future Rolling Stones bandmates, though their initial approach to join them was rebuffed as Watts wanted to concentrate on his stable day job at an advertising agency. In fact, even after making his first appearances with the band, he continued to work in a Soho office, up until the point that Decca Records’ Dick Rowe signed the Stones in May 1963 after he’d seen them at the Crawdaddy Club, the legendary crucible of British blues hosted by the old Station Hotel in Richmond-upon-Thames.

Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, described Watts as “probably the most underrated of all the rock’n’roll drummers”, adding that his natural feel for the music was “just exactly right” and that “no masterclasses or tutorial books, no solos or fancy gymnastics” could ever embellish it. You could say, then, that a drummer knows a drummer. Mick Jagger may have been the Stones’ focal point for most of their 58 years as a performing unit, and Keith Richards the band’s soul, (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten the contributions Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and latterly Ronnie Wood have made to that elixir with their so-called guitar “weaving”), but Watts contributed probably more than most people will appreciate. 

So the story goes, Satisfaction was more of a traditional blues drawl before Watts upped its tempo, his crisp snare beat giving the band’s signature song a danceability that ultimately propelled it - which Watts had strongly advocated should be a single against Jagger and Richards’ initial reservation - instantly to No.1 in the UK charts, but more significantly, to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, where it remained for four weeks, cementing the foundations of the band’s global dominance for the next five decades. Think, too, of Paint It Black, which opens with an Indian-influenced guitar riff before Watts snapping snare, again, drives the verse. You could argue that this is simply what a drummer is in a rock band for, but the more you analyse Stones songs like these - as well as later hits like Start Me Up or Love Is Strong - and you realise how Watts wasn’t just the Rolling Stones’ drummer but a core component of what made the greatest rock and roll band in the world exactly that and pretty much unassailable in that status.

Watts, of course, would be typically self-effacing about his role. He stoically accepted that the Stones’ colour was provided by the more flamboyant band members, and that just suited him fine. He once famously described being in the band as “five years playing, twenty years hanging around”, but despite the truncation of their current No Filter tour (which began in September 2017 in Hamburg) due to the pandemic, they have remained more active than most other surviving acts of a similar vintage. 

The Rolling Stones will continue to roll on. Despite the others’ own advancing ages – Jagger turned 78 last month, Richards will do the same in December, and ‘junior’ Ronnie Wood is 74 – they remain committed to touring and even recording. It remains to be seen how Watts’ death will impact their appetite to continue, though given that they also hold the accolade for remaining one of popular music’s most lucrative operations, the health of the others not withstanding, it would be reasonable to expect that retirement is not in the plan. Bruce Springsteen endured the death of his wingman Clarence Clemons, but Led Zeppelin called an immediate halt after John Bonham’s untimely demise. The Who, it could be argued, were never the same after Keith Moon died before he got old.

It would be gloriously romantic to view the Rolling Stones continued longevity as the result of being inspired by their itinerant blues heroes who played until they dropped, but beyond mercenary need, there is a sense that they will carry on until forces of nature stop them. They will, however, not be the same without their quiet drummer, who kept time but also, passively, kept the order, too.

Defending the indefensible: Phil Collins - what's he done to you?

"No wonder people were annoyed with me! And I do apologise!” So said Phil Collins in a 2014 Daily Mail interview in which he was asked to atone for near-ubiquity in the mid-eighties and early nineties that subsequently led him to being charged in Britain with a number of alleged offences, such as:

• Getting married often (true)
• Getting divorced often and writing songs about it (true)
• Divorcing by fax (not true)
• Being a Tory (not true and flatly denied)
• Being mates with Prince Charles (true - he was a trustee of the Prince's Trust).
• 'Going Hollywood' (true)
• Being respected by US hip-hop artists (true)
• Footballer Steven Gerrard being a Collins fan, thus "dragging the game back into the Dark Ages" (partly true)
• Leaving the UK after Tony Blair became prime minister (true - he married a Swiss national)
• Divorcing for a third time...and now, apparently, moving back in with her (true)

Let's face it, not even Gary Glitter and his odious proclivities has been slammed as badly. So, on the occasion of Collins' 65th birthday, it's time to give the man a break because, frankly, all this hatin' is undeserved.

For a start, Collins was, to begin with, a reluctant pop star. This makes his subsequent superstardom (joining Macca and Jacko as the only performers to have sold over 100 million albums as solo artists and as band members) something of a paradox. That's not to say Collins regrets his success, but that his success has only really been a problem in his country of origin.

Despite being a child actor (including the Artful Dodger in the West End production of Oliver! and blink-and-you-miss appearances in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and A Hard Day's Night), being part of a touted late 1960s band, Flaming Youth, who went nowhere, and then joining Genesis in 1970, the Phil Collins most people know about only came to be at the beginning of the 1980s. 

When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, Collins was the last resort to replace him as lead singer. He would have been happy to have remained on the drum stool, applying a God-given drumming talent that had seen him play percussion on sessions for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, would later see him farmed out to play on Brian Eno's acclaimed Another Green World, as well as starting his fusion side project, Brand X.

Joining Genesis to begin with had been an act of professional curiosity. Having seen them as one of those bands that were always appearing in Melody Maker's gig pages, Collins had figured that they would be a good source of regular work when he was offered to audition at Gabriel's parents' house in Chobham, Surrey. While he paddled around in the swimming pool, as you do, listening to the other auditioneers, he absorbed the material, subsequently nailing the job.

Collins wasn't a particular fan of prog rock. His music was soul, R&B and jazz. But with the obscure time signatures and meandering fantasy songs of the early Genesis, Collins' drumming style evolved with intricate, jazz-like flourishes and melodic fills, taking the power of peers like John Bonham and Keith Moon (whom he could have replaced in The Who) and adding a musical 'voice' to the drums.

His contribution to Genesis wasn't, however, merely percussive. With Steve Hackett joining in 1971, the two grammar school-educated West Londoners provided a grounded buttress to the rarified environment created by Gabriel, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, who'd formed Genesis at Charterhouse, the public school better known for turning out prime ministers, archbishops and captains of industry than hairy rock stars.

As Collins has often remarked, band politics were often an extension of school politics, and arguments over pencil cases and protractors, long forgotten, easily erupted again over guitar tunings and piano solos and other petty musical disagreements. Collins, with his stage school self-assurance and considerably greater streetwisery, was the perfect pin with which to puncture the air when things became too overwrought.

But with a new album to record in the autumn of 1975, and no lead singer emerging from 100s of applicants, Collins - who had been coaching the auditions - was clearly better at singing the new material than those trying out for the job.

And so, on February 2, 1976, three days after Collins' 25th birthday, the first post-Gabriel Genesis album, A Trick Of The Tail, was released. Fans had heard Collins' voice before - perfectly complementing Gabriel on stage, as well as providing lead vocals on album tracks like Nursery Cryme's For Absent Friends and More Fool Me on Selling England By The Pound. But with the new album Genesis started to assume a new persona, with Collins its focal point.

With Gabriel out of the picture, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford took on more of the songwriting. A Trick Of The Tail retained much of the whimsy that Gabriel and his Lewis Carroll-like wordplay had laid over complex musical arrangements, and with Dance On A Volcano and Squonk the band's association with fantasy - rather than poppy romance -continued. But in Ripples and Entangled, in particular, Collins' vocals brought Genesis closer to Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the band started to become a little more accessible. Robbery, Assault & Battery also added some levity. No surprise, then, that it was co-written by Collins.

Live, Collins' precocious sense of fun provided a different dynamic. Gabriel had been a relatively shy individual, gauchely telling obscure stories between songs and dressing up in costumes to help illustrate the meandering music. Collins, at a glance, brought another energy and the cheeky-chappiness of an end-of-pier comedian (while not abandoning drumming duties - joining touring drummers like King Crimson's Bill Bruford and long-standing stickman Chester Thompson on the instrumental parts of the so-called "long songs").

When Steve Hackett left the band after the release of Seconds Out - still the best live album ever - Genesis contracted into a trio. Banks, in particular, and Rutherford were still the core of the band's songwriting, but Collins had emerged as the band's personality, and with it had some influence. The irony of this is that the next album, ...And Then There Were Three produced a hit single, Follow You, Follow Me, a love song that introduced the band to a female audience for the first time. And it was, in fact, written by Rutherford.

If A Trick Of The Tail "launched" Phil Collins, to some extent, the commercial success - and enormous US tours that followed - was the making of him. After the 1978 tour, Rutherford and Banks went off to do solo albums. Collins was struggling to save his four-year-old first marriage - arguably the victim of his workaholism - and he offered to move to Canada where his wife Andrea Bertorelli had moved to with their children. It didn't work out, so he withdrew to his now empty West Sussex cottage and started noodling around in a makeshift bedroom studio.

The outcome was only intended to provide catharsis for the divorce he was now going through, plaintive, heart-on-sleeve songs like If Leaving Me Is Easy, Please Don't Ask ('given' to Genesis for their Duke album) and, of course, In The Air Tonight - famously self-described as "not a happy song" about Bertorelli.

It's pioneering use of both drum machines and that now-familiar 'gated reverb' drum sound (created during Collins' contribution to Gabriel's third solo album) turned In The Air Tonight into a huge hit, taking the singer from reluctant front man to Top Of The Pops, famously appearing playing a keyboard on top of a Black & Decker Workmate with a paint pot on it, a dig at Bertorelli who'd apparently run off with the decorator.

This was two of Collins' most enduring qualities at work: firstly, his comic schtick and secondly, his lack of any typical English reserve. What you see is what you get, which is why Face Value's sleeve was dominated by Collins' full moon face on the front cover, and thinning hair on the back of his head on the rear.

The child actor-turned drummer from Hounslow was no longer the reluctant front man. In The Air Tonight would make Collins part of the 80s zeitgeist: Michael Mann included it in the pilot episode of Miami Vice - its hissing Roland CR78 drum machine and simple three-chord arrangement played on a Prophet 5 keyboard underlaying a pivotal scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs driving moodily down - appropriately - Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

Face Value's follow-up, Hello, I Must Be Going! (a title quoting Groucho Marx) took Collins up another notch, its cover of The Supremes' You Can't Hurry Love - to some, a throwaway retread of an old soul number - becoming a global pop hit in 1982.

In 1983, and with another Genesis album behind him, Collins came to work for no less a figure than Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin had broken up following John Bonham's death, and Plant turned to Collins to kick start his solo career. "I was graced by my first two solo records, Pictures at Eleven and The Principle of Moments," Plant has said more recently. "A drummer contacted me and said, 'I love Bonham so much I wanna sit behind you when you sing'. It was Phil Collins. His career was just kicking in and he was the most spirited and positive and really encouraging force, because you can't imagine what it was like, me trying to carve my own way after all that."

Having scored another global hit about divorce with the power ballad Against All Odds, the title song of Taylor Hackford's film of the same name, 1985 came around. He'd begun the year drumming on Band Aid's Do They Know Its Christmas?, but things took off spectacularly with the album No Jacket Required. Its lead-in single Sussudio was a bold, brassy hit of the age - all electronic drums and synths, though it bore great similarity to Prince's 1999 (Collins admits to have been a fan). Still, that didn't stop the album garnering more hits, including Take Me Home, the video for which featured Collins at various points on a world tour that seemed to just say "I'm now a global superstar".

And he was. On July 12, 1985, he managed to be at both the Wembley and Philadelphia ends of Live Aid. In his inimitable manner, Collins maintained that he was just trying to do the cause a favour: originally a number of the London performers were going to try and get over to Philadelphia on Concorde, but in the end it was only Collins. However, what seemed like a good idea turned out to be anything less as, along with doing another solo set, he was asked to drum for Led Zeppelin (who already had The Power Station's Tony Thompson on board). With Jimmy Page apparently "drooling in a corner", what should have been a magnanimous gesture ended up as an unrehearsed nightmare. Not that the crowd would have cared.

That year, Collins even made an acting appearance in Miami Vice, playing dodgy game show host "Phil the Shill". By 1986 - in which Genesis sold out Wembley Stadium for a record four nights - he was, literally, everywhere, even playing Great Train Robber Buster Edwards in a supposed romantic comedy that had largely been written with the singer in mind. Though Collins hadn't signed up for Buster purely to act in it, songs for the soundtrack were inevitable, and the old Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders song Groovy Kind Of Love gave him yet another hit.

At the same time, in Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, we had Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman indulging hypothesising on Collins' career while entertaining a pair of hookers: "I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist", he suggests, having just instructed one of the girls to "eat it". Phil Collins was now an inextricable feature of the era.

Genesis, for much of the 1970s, had been a band that that the music press appreciated, but hadn't always raved about. There were cooler bands, quite frankly, but Genesis were regarded as merely "interesting". That, though, didn't hamper their inexorable rise. But with Collins becoming the band's breakout star on the back of his own solo work, when he returned to the group that had launched him, the trio found a camaraderie and creativity that only they could achieve together. Thus, via the albums Abacab, Genesis, Invisible Touch and We Can't Dance, they became darlings of the nascent MTV, their profoundly American-orientated videos for singles playing on both the band's sense of humour and, in particular, Collins' own love of hamming it up. 

Being everywhere via Genesis, his own solo music, and his myriad side projects created a monster that would always be at odds with the press back in the UK. Things reached their nadir with the NME's Steven 'Seething' Wells writing a vicious piece headlined "Ugly Bald Bastard Speaks (to Phil Collins)". By then, I had possibly been the last author of any review in the NME of a Collins gig. Quite why he'd agreed to speak to the paper baffles me still. The NME and its IPC stablemate Melody Maker had taken to baiting Collins, with the Maker's letters page even printing his home address as an attempt to close off a correspondence that Collins himself had persisted with, such was his anger at comments the paper had published.

With the release, in 1990, of But Seriously, Collins reached the zenith of his fame. An album featuring then-neighbour Eric Clapton, his ubiquity - both in the charts but also at the all-star charity gigs so in-vogue at the time - saw him achieving commercial success few other British solo artists had reached then and certainly not since.

However, the album's hit single, Another Day In Paradise, a song about the plight of the homeless, drew derision. How could a multi-millionaire rock star be claiming to trying to solve the problem of urban homelessness? Undeterred, the Collins machine rolled on, with another Genesis album, We Can't Dance in 1992, more hits and another mega tour.

But in 1993 the machine hit turbulence. With Genesis on hiatus (Collins was never to record an album with them again), he released his next solo album, Both Sides. Recorded mostly at home on his own, it sounded like a collection of bedroom demos. Face Value may have begun that way, but Both Sides was committed to release in that form. It appeared that the man with the golden touch of the previous decade was losing it. A live jazz album - A Hot Night in Paris - followed, featuring arrangements of Genesis and solo songs that, actually, wasn't bad.

Collins was far from over at this point, but even with the next album Dance Into The Light, it felt like Collins was coasting. Towards the end of the 1990s Disney invited him to write songs for the animated Tarzan film, producing an Oscar-winning smash hit in You'll Be In My Heart. This, though, just added to the British disease of sniffing at success, with Collins being regarded at the start of the new Millennium as having "gone Hollywood".

In marrying his third wife, Swiss translator Orianne Cevey, Collins moved to Switzerland, settling down in a small village near Lausanne. This, of course, became interpreted as "Tory Phil leaves UK" in the wake of the Blair government coming to power in 1997. The Sun also claimed that Collins had divorced second wife Jill Tavelman "by fax" (the truth of it was that certain documents had to be sent by fax but this wasn't allowed to get in the way of a good story). Of course, much of this was the doing of the media, a classic case of a Brit being built up and then knocked down. By comparison, the US didn't stop being a fan, though Collins' increasing invisibility while he enjoyed playing dad in Switzerland started to place him on "Where are they now?" lists.

With Genesis reforming for a limited, greatest hits-spinning tour in 2007, Collins was still not committing himself to a major return to the fore. By the tour's end, Collins was having to play drums with the sticks gaffer-taped to his hands, the result of a worsening back problem. More medical problems were to follow, with an infection causing hearing loss in one ear. Not long after the lame Motown covers album Going Back came out in 2010, Collins announced his retirement. By this stage, the music press didn't care. Even some fans were of the view that Collins was no longer the writing, drumming and performing force he had once been. Perhaps success had changed him.

It is, though, time to reassess the album that took Phil Collins from drummer and then singing-drummer with one of Britain's hardest-to-place bands, to becoming a solo star who, in many respects, was the 1980s.

With a hint that he might be reconsidering his retirement, Collins has this week re-released Face Value, adding previously unreleased tracks, and updating the iconic black and white cover shot with a new picture showing the considerably aged and somewhat gaunt Collins of today.

It requires listening to afresh. For an album that was supposed to be about a bitter divorce, once past the truly innovative In The Air Tonight and, later, the quite obvious If Leaving Me Is Easy, This Must Be Love and Thunder & Lightning joyfully celebrate moving on. The album ends with a stunning cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, embracing all that the studio had to offer the Fabs themselves on the original. Behind The Lines is a cover version of the Genesis song Collins co-wrote for their Duke album, and with the addition of Earth, Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns, it is a totally different song, and even better for it. Likewise, I Missed Again is a riotously uptempo song. The Roof Is Leaking, with its depression era theme and mournful banjo, captures Collins' sadness as well as an expected nod to other musical styles not previously in his oeuvre.

Face Value was, for Genesis fans, a shock, especially when the same horn section turned up on the next Genesis album, Abacab. Those still wedded to 20-minute epics like Suppers Ready and Cinema Show took a while to adjust to "their" lead singer pouring his emotions out in heart-on-sleeve ballads. Even In The Air Tonight, a song which has since found new life in hip-hop (the tribute album Urban Renewal featured artists like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Kelis and Montell Jordan doing Collins covers), sounded like nothing any of his previous outlets had ever produced. And even now, from the first hiss of the drum machine through to the now-famous tom-tom fill, it is a song to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In the hairs tonight, if you will.

I won't pretend that I went off Collins' music as it lost its edge at the turn of the Noughties. But in Collins himself, his history as one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, the accessibility he brought to Genesis before they became music TV mainstays, and his work as a producer and collaborator with people like my musical hero John Martyn, warrants greater appreciation than the short cuts too many take to ignorantly dismiss him for his supposed politics, his personal life and the unashamedly populist end of his music.

You don't have to love him at all, or at least love the bits of his career you don't have to like, but if you like music and appreciate musicianship, there are parts of Phil Collins' musical history that deserve enormous credit. And I would start by listening to an album that was released 40 years ago next week, A Trick Of The Tail.