Chester Thompson not only played drums live with Genesis for more than 30 years, but was also an integral part of Phil Collins’ touring band. Now the drummer remembers that time and reveals that he wasn’t always treated fairly by Phil Collins. On his first solo tour, he took a hard look at him every time something went wrong.
Phil Collins was hypercritical
When Collins asked drummer Chester Thompson to support Genesis in live performances without an audition in 1977, he didn’t expect much from the opportunity. At first, Thompson believed the position was just a short-term job.
However, Thompson was very wrong. He took part in every tour of the band from 1977 onwards and was also an integral part of Collins’ solo group from the first “Hello, I Must Be Going” tour in 1982. However, his start in the band wasn’t really relaxed, as Thompson is now in one Interview with the US edition of ROLLING STONE revealed.
As the head of the band, Collins initially acted like “some kind of dragon”. During the first solo tour, he blamed Thompson for every mistake the band made. “He just really referenced the drums,” Thompson explained. “So when the brass made a mistake, he would turn around and look at me. He figured it out pretty quickly.” Eventually, however, Thompson had enough: “But on the first tour I said, ‘Come on, man. That’s not me.'”
Additionally, Thompson probably wasn’t treated like an actual band member by Collins and therefore didn’t enjoy the same kind of luxuries as the core of the band. “It was a much larger group. Even if [Gitarrist] Daryl [Stuermer] and I’m not technically part of [Genesis] we toured as a band. But with Phil you are one of thousands of musicians. It wasn’t the same kind of luxury and stuff, which is fine.”
Nevertheless, the chemistry between the two when it came to music was right from the start. Thompson recalled that he “immediately hit it off” with Collins. “Phil and I, from the very first rehearsal when he sat down and we started jamming together, we just clicked,” he said. “It was just there. And Phil and I had a lot of the same things that inspired us. He was into many of the American jazz drummers. The difference was that I wasn’t that into the English drummers like Keith Moon, and he was. But he still had that American stuff in the back of his mind.”
Thompson didn’t understand the Genesis members’ accents
In addition to the initial differences, his biggest problem on the Genesis tour was much more banal. Thompson had considerable difficulty understanding the heavy English accent of his band colleagues.
“It was really worrying because I couldn’t follow a single conversation for the first two weeks,” he admitted. “It was okay in private, but they talk much, much faster than we do. There were all these conversations going back and forth and I was trying to follow them. I could just about understand one guy, but then another guy intervened. It was a strange, lonely feeling being in a room with people who supposedly spoke the same language and not being able to understand what was going on.”