Phil Collins has been slowing moving back into the spotlight lately, though it’s been as a vocalist rather than a drummer. The dislocated neck vertebrae which originally sent the former Genesis star into an unhappy retirement continues to bother him.
That said, he feels little nostalgia for the instrument he once furiously pounded on hits like “In the Air Tonight,” “Mama” and “I Don’t Care Anymore.”
“I don’t miss it, no,” Collins tells the Express. “The only time I’ve tried recently was in Miami a couple of weeks ago. I sat down at the drum kit and it was like my left arm and hand belonged to someone else.”
Collins performed both “In the Air Tonight’ and “Land of Confusion” during a middle-school spring concert at Miami Country Day School, hardly the stage you might expect. But he’s also reunited with Genesis, at least in the form of a five-person interview for a forthcoming documentary on the band.
In that scenario, Collins adds, he happily becomes the drummer again — at least in the sense of where he fits into the band’s personality dynamics.
“You’ll see in the documentary we all revert to type,” he adds. “I’m not the leader or the singer of the band; I’m just the drummer, the one that makes jokes and diffuses the tension. Steve Hackett is the dark one, Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel are a little bit niggly towards each other, while Mike Rutherford is trying to calm the waters. But you’ll also see there’s a lot of affection between us.”
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