Interview with Phil Collins in Geneva 2005

Excerpts from an interview with Phil Collins immediately after the show with The Musical Box in Geneva.

DRS3: 30 years later, the same track. How do you feel?
Phil Collins: Well, I don’t really get sentimental about it. I thought The Musical Box’s performance tonight was extraordinary. They nailed every physical movement and… Martin, the drummer… I don’t know if I’ve ever played that well… maybe I have, but he played fantastically and he had everything I had. What I played, all the left and right hand stuff… it’s very personal and he copied it in a way that made it very interesting. So… it was great for me and I really enjoyed it.

DRS3: So you had to copy yourself a little today, as you used to be?
Phil Collins: Well, that was the hardest part. This afternoon I sounded like a complete amateur. I got there and I hadn’t really heard the song until today because I thought I knew it and I thought I could play it because I play drums on my tour. And I was wrong. I couldn’t do things that I used to do. It was cool because I really wasn’t playing that music anymore, complicated, fast stuff… I haven’t played like that since Brand X.

Sometimes on a Genesis tour we’d play some old instrumentals, but basically it was like putting on someone else’s suit. And… not being able to play, physically, because I hadn’t played like that for a long time, and then playing on someone else’s drums and a song that was 30 years in the past… it was all too much! (laughs…)

DRS3: Has it brought back an appetite for this kind of music?
Phil Collins: No. [laughs…] There are some things on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway that I really love… the atmospheric numbers… there’s The Waiting Room, Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats, Ravine… they’re some fantastic tracks that I haven’t heard in a long time. But… it’s a historical thing, a historical piece. We have to keep that in mind. But it hasn’t made me want to go back and write in that way again.

DRS3: What do you think of The Musical Box as a kind of replacement?
Phil Collins: It’s hard to find the right term for them… they’re not a tribute band, they’ve taken an era and reproduced it faithfully in the same way that someone would do a theatre production. Well, you can take Shakespeare to a place where nobody’s been before, or you can do it as it was written and as it must have been… I say that as an analogy, maybe a bad one, but that’s the way they do it. I asked ‘Do you come off stage at the end of Lamb?’ and they said ‘But no, you didn’t… you stayed on stage and played The Musical Box’.

So… that’s how they do it. It’s interesting. There were a lot of people here tonight who were seeing the show for the first time. It wasn’t a young crowd. But… basically people are rediscovering the music and also because so much has been said about The Lamb since we stopped, since Peter left, this is the only way to see the show because it was never filmed. So… if you want to know what it was like – they certainly come very close musically and I think the guys play it better than we do. But we wrote it, [smiles…] and that’s the difference… but they play it better than we do.

DRS3: You also had technical problems with this show in the 70s? What was it like… what kind of problems did you have?
Phil Collins: Today it worked. [laughs…] We played 104 shows? This show? And I think it worked maybe 5 or 6 times properly…because the slide projectors got stuck…there were three of them and only one man, you know…it was 1974…. I mean, just think back to 74… if we’d been lucky enough to have a mobile phone, it would have been three times the size it is now, or at least the battery of it. (laughs…)

It was really all low-tech. They have our slides, we gave them to them. And a few pieces of equipment are ours, I think, because they were hard to find. Everyone was very helpful… and… the show works! It was great, and I really enjoyed seeing and hearing them.

And like I said, it barely worked at the time… I mean, I never saw the thing until tonight. Martin has a mirror like that so he can see the slides! I had no idea what Peter was doing in The Waiting Room. I’ve never seen it! For me it was like seeing something for the first time.
Ok… [Martin Levac comes in] that’s all now… talk to Martin. [laughs…] He can play better than me and gives better answers than me! (laughs…)

Interview: Peter Walt
Special Thanks to Radio DRS3 (www.drs.ch)
Publication with kind permission
Photos: Martin Christgau
Photo (Header): Video freeze frame
This interview originally was a straight transcript to German, so we had to re-translate it to English for this 2025 publication