Spotlight: Nic Collins
photo credit: Véronique Pelletier
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Nic Collins landed what could be the most enviable freelance gig in all of rock: manning the drum kit for Genesis’ first tour in 14 years. And he was well prepared for the challenge, having absorbed the full spectrum of their music—from prog epics to pop smashes—as the son of the band’s famous frontman and one-time drummer, Phil Collins. But, naturally, that prime-time position did still require a fair amount of homework.
“Some of the progressive [material], like ‘The Cinema Show’—that’s always been one of my favorite Genesis pieces,” the 20-year-old phenom says, detailing the evolution of their Last Domino? Tour’s setlists. “I didn’t really need to worry about that. But they threw around some, like ‘Los Endos’ and the back end of ‘Supper’s Ready,’ and those were super challenging.”
Luckily, he had the most logical teacher he could think of sleeping under the same roof— even if some of his tougher questions went unanswered. “It was helpful to have my dad there because I was living at home at the time,” he says. “So I’d be tearing my hair out in my little practice room, and I’d go downstairs and be like, ‘OK, I need you to explain this to me. What happens in the ‘Apocalypse in 9/8’ [section] from ‘Supper’s Ready?’ And [my dad] would say, ‘They wrote that riff one day when I wasn’t there, and I just showed up. And that record is like my second time playing through it.’ I was like, ‘That doesn’t help me!’”
The younger Collins’ chops were never an issue, which anyone who saw him play with Phil during the 2017-2019 Not Dead Yet tour could surely attest. That gig, in fact, helped catalyze the entire Genesis reunion, with both of the band’s other members (keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist/ bassist Mike Rutherford) intrigued by the possibility of adding Nic’s youthful energy. After Banks attended one of the elder Collins’ shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the idea started to pick up steam—both within their camp and in the press. The whole thing seemed inevitable by the summer of 2019: Mike & the Mechanics opened some European dates, and they blew up the Prog Internet when Rutherford joined the Collins band to play guitar on Genesis’ 1978 hit “Follow You Follow Me.” And, when the trio were spotted at a New York Knicks game, the speculation reached a fever pitch.
“We were doing our first rehearsals in New York to see if it could work,” Nic says, before adding with a laugh, “We had this whole thing set up: If somebody asks why everybody’s here, it’s because we’re going to a wedding. I remember sitting there and thinking, ‘What if it came up on the Jumbotron at halftime saying, ‘Genesis is in the building!’ That would completely [ruin] all the secrecy.’”
Genesis announced the trek at the worst possible time—two months before the COVID-19 pandemic brought live music to a standstill. But when they finally achieved liftoff with a fall 2021 U.K. leg, Nic’s muscle memory was more than solidified, having spent months studying those drum parts in detail—part of his ever-evolving relationship with their catalog.
“When I was a kid, songs like ‘Invisible Touch’ and ‘Throwing It All Away’ were the ones I knew,” he says. “I went through a phase where I was really into the We Can’t Dance album because I feel there are a lot of hidden gems on that one, musically. Then, I went through an early ‘80s phase: the Duke/Abacab era. But the most recent one was going through the really old stuff: Seconds Out and backward. My favorite Genesis is the proggy stuff from the mid- ‘70s but done with the early to mid-‘80s lineup. You listen to songs like ‘Cinema Show’ or ‘In the Cage,’ and, hearing them done live 10 years later, they’re like two different songs. They’re powerhouses. It has a lot to do with the drumming because, with the older stuff, my dad was taking a more fusion-y approach to some of the songs. But then, from the early ‘80s onward, he got this massive power behind the kit, which just escalated those tunes in my opinion.”
Collins became a sponge, and he brought that mindset into the rehearsals—soaking in the notes of his “three bosses,” picking and choosing moments to add his own flair. “[‘The Musical Box’] is very early prog with lots of fills around the drum kit, and I remember doing those [during rehearsals] because I listened to the record,” he says, noting how they cut the song from the final set. “Tony Banks looked at me and said, ‘Nick, that sounds great, but could you not make it sound so 1970? Could you just modernize it a little bit?’ And that is completely fair because bands develop. They were never afraid to tell me if a tempo was too slow or too fast, and I was receptive to it. The more you listen, the more you understand their tendencies and what they’re trying to accomplish.”
Perhaps it’s inevitable given his lineage, but the drummer’s already bringing some of that Genesis vibe into his own band, alt-rock quartet Better Strangers— experimenting with time signatures, unconventional song structures and drum machines.
“My dad is the one who taught me everything I know about the drums,” he says, “so it’s impossible not to sound like that to an extent.”
