Phil Collins
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“I think my greatest achievement would be "Sussudio," hands down. Seriously. What are you laughing at?”
~ Phil Collins on himself
“I can't dance, I can't sing, I'm just standing here selling everything”
~ Phil Collins on himself
“A flower?”
~ Peter Gabriel on Phil Collins
“Who's callin??”
~ Oscar Wilde on Phil Collins
“I used to be a good drummer. Now I'm nothing. Just like Phil Collins!”
~ Bart Simpson on that time he was a jazz drummer and his arm got ran over by an elephant his sister Lisa was trying to keep in the attic.
Phil Bloody Collins (born Philip Haemoglobin Collins January 30, 1951 in a test tube, died February 25, 1988 in an airplane), was a British musician. He used to be cool, but now he's an old bore. That's what happens when you get old.
Phil Bloody Collins made his name as the drummer of 1970s prat-rock band Genesis. In 1975, when Peter Gabriel left the group to play with plasticine because a voice on a hill had told him, Bloody Collins took over lead vocals and remained there until he found a large burning cross on his front lawn with a message crudely carved into his door politely requesting they disband. During the 1980s, Bloody Collins achieved inexplicable solo success.
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[edit] Early life and career
Phil Bloody Collins was born in Chiswick, London. During his Christening ceremony Collins' parents dropped their prematurely-bald child into the font and said, "We shall raise him in the way our God advised us - this child, this sweet, slap-headed child shall be the world's foremost middle-of-the-road musician, whose music shall be played in lifts and extremely cheap restaurants throughout the world, and we name him.... Phil Bloody Collins." During the ceremony, the Vicar tried to push the young infant's head under the water and had to be physically restrained.
A moody, introspective loner in his younger days, Collins was plagued since childhood by a dream unrealized---all he ever wanted to be was a movie star. "Ever since his first film, he's had the acting bug," his mother has said. "Ach, Calamity," she sighed. Indeed, Calamity the Cow, Collins' first and only starring role, proved to have a prophetic title. Collins argued passionately with the director of the film about the direction it should take, and some of his best, improvised scenes were cut from the final version of the film by wicked movie executives. As late as 1987, it was hard for Collins to talk about those days. "It set the course of my life," he once said. There was then a gap in Collins' career due to a short stay in prison following a bank-raid where Collins wore two pairs of used tights over his ears, and was recognized in court by the prosecution's main witness who suffered from memory loss and could not remember where he lived.
Collins' friends swept him up into the music industry to try to assuage his deep-seated disappointment after his part in the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night was cut down to one split-second scene in which he appears as the seventeenth maniacal fan from the left, in the back row.
[edit] Genesis era
Collins is most well-known as the famously not-working class lead singer for the upper-class progressive rock group (Oh For Fuck's Sake, It's) Genesis. Collins was originally hired as drummer for the group during a rough period in his life, when singer Peter Gabriel discovered him drumming on garbage cans on a street corner outside his favorite pub. Gabriel was then told by a trusted source that Collins had been sent from heaven to absolve all drummers. Collins, who by this time was well-known around London as a drumming messiah and a successful economist, was down on his luck and had resorted to anal prositution and other acts of heresy to gain inspiration for his latest musical endeavors. Gabriel invited Collins to come play drums and sing some vocals for his band Genesis. This, however, would prove to be Gabriel's biggest mistake. Collins' percussion and vocals added so much to Genesis' sound that they eventually exploded.
Initially a public school boy-band churning out three-minute Protestant hymns about conservatism and how jolly good it was for moral fiber, Genesis ascended to stardom when they began exploring "art rock" (rock where the liner notes are more interesting than the actual music). Deciding that the world could always use really fucking long songs and more keyboards, Genesis went to work and recorded numerous pieces of tedious, pretentious shit including "We're Awful, Don't Listen To Us", "Supper Isn't Ready Yet, Fuck Off And Watch Telly" and "More Tea Vicar?". They soon hit upon the idea of recording 38-minute epic songs about flowers, alien postmen in disguise and Hitler's penis.
It wasn't until Peter Gabriel left the group that they reached international fame. Under Collins' rhythmic leadership the band abandoned their prog-rock leaning-on-a-bar leanings, and moved towards writing the sort of pop and rock music that is actually fairly enjoyable to listen to, which coincided with Collins' thoughts about a solo career. They then went on to work with Bob Dole to design a new Ipod Nappy 2.0.
[edit] solo career
During the 1980s as a solo artist, Phil Collins had a plastic bagful of hit songs, which consisted of lyrics based on "Oh, Girl", "I Love You Baby" and "Baby I Love Your Bald-Headed Baby Ohhh" and purportedly releasing them 10 or 20 times a month under pseudonyms such as "Bloody Collins", "The Balding Man", "Bill Collins", and "Peter Gabriel". Phil later admitted that his fervent drug experimentation during this era was the inspiration for these hits and their mystical, obscure lyrics and complex, odd time signatures. His bank account reached peak popularity through the TV show Miami Vice when he played himself in an episode where he was found to be importing 90% of America's cocaine and spent about a quarter of the episode burying his face in a pile of white powder (which the producers insisted was glucose powder although they admitted they only had Collins' word for that), inhaling it and laughing. Collins had subsequently revealed that he wrote this episode himself.
Phil Collins was also part of Live 8. On one day in 1985, Phil Bloody Collins flew to three different continents on a Concorde to prove once again that he is the coolest person on earth. He even sang and played drums for some people who were just standing in the parking lot, without ever being asked. The sponsors were quoted as saying that they ended up spending more money on gas for flying Collins around the globe than he actually helped raise for impoverished Africa.
The story of this hectic period in Collins' life could best be told by the trail of one-night lovers and peeved hotel managers he left in his wake. Few performers have been able to imbibe so much alcohol and still be able to function enough to (nearly) reproduce the complex drum solo of his big solo hit "In the Arse Tonight." During these years, Collins reconvened with Genesis several times to record more albums and do more tours, in a successful attempt to make sure Collins' voice and drumming were heard all over the fucking planet on radio and television as much as possible between the years 1981 and 1988. Now known at the insistence of Collins' lawyer as Phil Bloody Collins And His Genesis Three, the other members of Genesis grew weary of Collins' constant shallow prating and his irresponsible, shameless flights of uninhibition---a far cry from the old glory days when he was a moody, introspective loner. "There was never ever shutting him up, honestly," Mike Rutherford, the band's guitarist, revealed in an interview years later. "It was always 'Let's use a drum machine for this tune,' 'Let's do another sugary three-minute pop song,' 'Let's use the drum fill from "In the Arse Tonight" in all of our songs at some point,' 'Look at that girl's bum'; at some point we all just learned never to pay any attention to him, and that was that."
It is a tribute to the other band members' compassion that they were able to keep Collins alive for so long. "I remember many a night when we had to get Phil to the hospital to have his stomach pumped," Tony Banks, the band's keyboard player, said later. "You wouldn't believe the things that he would ingest! And sometimes not even on a dare. He once bet Chester Thompson that he could eat a whole double-neck guitar. It took him several months, and fifteen stomach pumpings, but good God, he did it!" Added Banks in an undertone, "It was really one of the only things he ever accomplished." At the time in interviews, Collins always claimed that the band were getting along well and that all three had equal participation and creative control in the group's music. Later in the same interview, Collins shared his views on the musical direction the band was currently taking and when asked what the opinion of the rest of the band was on the subject, Collins said, "Their opinion doesn't matter."
A little known fact about this period of Collins' life is that he not only worked as a vocalist and musician, but also picked up a weekly paycheck as a Physics professor at Harvard. Between Genesis gigs in 1982 he discovered the secret to cold fusion. "You can tell from his drumming how mathematical his mind is," Mike Rutherford said in a magazine article at the time. "It's all sequential and time based." As the 1980s wore on, Collins devoted more and more of his time to quantum physics, in the hope of discovering the one theory that would link together existing scientifc laws and unlock the key to the universe. "I'm also working on a new album," Collins added sheepishly in a 1986 Rolling Stone article about his scientific achievements. Collins wrote over 500 papers and claimed seven honorary degrees from seven different universities. He was quoted as saying that he hoped to some day journey through a black hole, "like in that song by Rush."
During the 1980s, there was much criticism charging that Collins was not quite as good as the other British musicians he often worked with during the 1970s, particularly singer Peter Gabirel. "If the choice is between being remembered as a bald midget who sang pop songs or as a grown man who proudly prodded all over Europe dressed in the costume of a fucking sunflower singing shit about dungeons and dragons, I'll take short, bald, and poppy any damn day of the year," said Phil Bloody Collins, responding to this criticism in a veiled reference to his former band mate's eccentric past.
[edit] Death
All of Phil Bloody Collins' years in Genesis could not make him forget his one true passion---being a movie star---nor could they stop him from yearning for something more—real fame, the adoration of millions. In 1987, after an unsuccesssful ten-month world tour with Genesis during which they played to packed tents and outhouses all over the world and their tour bus kept breaking down, Collins left the band, plagued by rueful memories, and sought to realize his childhood acting dream by taking a starring role in the British porn film Buster, which was shot on location in Australia during the winter of 1987-88. On the way back to England after shooting wrapped, Collins' plane went down near Hawaii and everyone aboard died. This was on February 25, 1988. Due to an elaborate mafia coverup, Collins' death was not widely reported at the time and in fact albums of new music continued to be released under his name for twenty years afterward, including the infamous Disney movie soundtracks. However, these albums----which often epitomized all that is bland and boring about adult contemporary pop music---were not the work of Collins, whose singing, drumming, and songwriting skills were seriously a head and shoulders above that stuff. It is rumored that posthumous "Collins albums" were actually the works of Bloody Collins' former bandmate Peter Gabriel, who always secretly wanted to write bland, sugary adult contemporary pop music but was too embarrassed to do so under his real name. Other more plausible rumors speculate that these albums were actually recorded by Danny DeVito or Bob Hoskins.
[edit] Discography
[edit] Albums
[edit] With Genesis
- 1971 - Nursery Lyme
- 1972 - Trotfox
- 1973 - Selling Women By the Pound
- 1974 - The Lamb Lies Fucked on Broadway
- 1976 - A Trick of the Dick
- 1977 - The Black and White Album (not to be confused with the album by the Hives)
- 1978 - A Seconds-Long Live Album
- 1979 - ...And Then They They Were Fucked...
- 1980 - Dyke
- 1981 - Letters
- 1983 - Shapes
- 1986 - Fingers
- 1991 - People
[edit] Solo career
- 1981 - Tesco Value Face
- 1982 - Hello, You Must Be Göring!
- 1985 - No Trousers Required
- 1987 - Dingleberries Down My Throat
- 1990 - But Seriously (I'm Not Putting Out Another Album)
[edit] Singles
- 1982 - "In The Arse Tonight"
- 1982 - "In Soviet Russia, Love Can't Hurry YOU!"
- 1984 - "Sleazy Lover"
- 1984 - "Against All Odds (People Bought This)"
- 1985 - "One More Shite"
- 1985 - "(Can Security Please Escort My Estranged Wife Out The) Stu-Stu-Studio"
- 1986 - "Separate Wives"
- 1988 - "A Groovy Kind Of Widow's Peak"
- 1988 - "Two Hearts" (which was also Phil's best poker hand ever)
[edit] Trivia
- Phil Collins could sing any song he wanted to.
- Phil Collins could lay out any kind of drumming rhythm he wished to...and kick ass at it.
- Phil Collins could do a kick-ass tambourine dance in time with the music.
- Phil Collins could do wonderful tricks with his tambourine.
- Phil Collins could keep time with his tambourine by playfully smacking it on Mike Rutherford's head.
- Phil Collins could run around a circular stage for minutes (at least) only to stop and belt out a song perfectly.
- Phil Collins could play any damn instrument he wished to... and rock at it.
- Phil Collins could sing and drum at the same time...perfectly.
- Phil Collins could do a drum duet on a drum kit, a stool, the sidewalk, on Hobo Bob's back, in the air (tonight), in a gorilla suit, underwater, or in space.
- Phil Collins has the world record for being the most player the most times in one minute.
- The last 20 years' worth of music released under the name "Phil Collins" was not actually created by him. That includes the Disney soundtracks.
- Contrary to popular belief, Phil Collins never actually played drums for Genesis. As his devine drumming power could shake the very foundations of the universe, a skilled acolyte was brought in to cover for him. This was the eighth time that Phil Collins saved the Universe.
- The genre and movement of progressive rock was developed by the music industry to give an easy-to-understand definition of the music of Genesis. Their true genre name is more than ten thousand syllables long, and if correctly spoken, could end the world. A similar situation exists in the case of the term "adult contemporary," which was developed by the music industry to give Phil Collins' earth-shaking, mystifiying solo output a definition. Unfortunately, in this case, many less talented, less interesting artists then jumped on the "adult contemporary" bandwagon over the course of the 1980s and thus by the time of Collins' death they had given the genre an extremely bad name.
- Enjoys attending Church fetes and is a big fan of raffles.
