Utilita Arena, BirminghamPhil Collins is on drily funny form for the band’s final tour despite poor health, as era-defining hits are performed with strength and poignancy
In an era when no artist seems to genuinely retire – as the recent example of Soft Cell shows, heavily promoted farewell gigs can lead to new albums and new albums can lead to further live shows – there’s a genuine sense of finality about Genesis’ Covid-delayed The Last Domino? tour. Keyboardist Tony Banks might have fudged questions about the band’s future, but frontman Phil Collins hasn’t. This, he’s declared, is definitely it, his firmness underlined by audiences’ apparent shock at his visible frailty in interviews to promote the shows: judging by some of the reactions to his recent appearance on
BBC Breakfast, you would have thought they had wheeled him onscreen connected to a life support machine.
In truth, anyone with an interest has known Collins has been in poor health for years: he was performing seated and walking with a stick on a 2016 solo tour. Perhaps the expressions of surprise have something to do with how firmly the image of Collins in the 80s is fixed in the public consciousness. Tonight features a string of hits from 1986’s Invisible Touch, which catapulted Genesis to such omnipresence they became not just hugely famous but emblematic of an era in a way they hadn’t perhaps intended – in Bret Easton Ellis’s vicious satire on 80s consumerism,
American Psycho, they’re the favourite band of yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman. Collins snarls his way through the title track, adding the bitter divorcee energy that became a trademark of his early solo career; Tonight Tonight Tonight sounds far more brooding and atmospheric than it did in the days it was never off
MTV.