Phil Collins 'Not Dead Yet'

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   I finally got around to buying this and found it to be an enjoyable read. I wish it had more detail about the Genesis years. The book seems rushed in many places and that might be because Collins was so busy in different stages of his career, that when he reflects on certain periods it comes off as a blur. One thing I have noticed about this and some of the recent baseball biographies I've read, is that some people are obsessed about one particular thing they really like. For Ted Williams it was hitting a baseball, almost non-stop throughout his childhood that turned him into one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. Collins seems to have had a similar obsession with drumming. It appears through his childhood and teenage years, he was doing it all the time. In one part of the book he describes drumming along with the music on the television, while his parents are watching it!
He appears to have liked a wide variety of music: Motown, jazz, British pop and rock of the 1960s, even mentioning Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets album. This really isn't far off from influences many other rock musicians had growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. He was influenced by several jazz drummers and was a big fan of Ringo Starr, John Bonham, and Keith Moon.

The one overarching theme seems to be that he can't seem to sit still. Even prior to his joining Genesis, he was a very active person, possibly what you might call a workaholic. He's also a "yes' personality, meaning when someone asks him about doing something, he always says yes. This would explain the flurry of activity from the 1980s. Immediately after the success of his first solo album, Phil Collins became the "in" thing for musos back in that period and it gave him the opportunity to work with some people he considered heros, like Eric Clapton. He admits he was everywhere and he now understands why people were sick of seeing or hearing him constantly on radio and television.

Another theme that is brought out is his insecurities about his own songwriting and anything he does from outside the drum kit. This includes performing as a vocalist in front of the stage during the Trick of the Tail tour to having Ahmet Ertegun convince him his first solo album was worth releasing. In fact, he was doubtful of his abilities as a composer until Disney approached him about the Tarzan animated movie.

It's a very personal autobiography, dealing with his father's death, his several divorces, an affair he had that broke up his second marriage, his guilt of not being there for several of his children while constantly touring, his medical issues, how touring became grueling in the late 1980s, his battle with alcoholism in his later life, and several attempts at retiring.

Overall the book seems rushed, yet it's personal and has a good deal of self-reflected humor in a British sort of way. The Genesis years could do with a bit more detail. He doesn't spend much time on Brand X. The 1980s period seems rushed, but there is a lot of ground to cover there. There was so much going on for him in the 1980s that he seems to focus one one aspect of it, then reverses it in the next chapter, so there is a lot of back-and-forth temporally. He spends a lot more time on his pre-Genesis years than I expected. Still, an enjoyable read, but not as much detail on Genesis as Mike Rutherford's autobiography.

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