Celebratory tour affirms unlikely superstars’ place in rock history

Genesis Utilita Arena, Birmingham ★★★★☆

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 real sense of finality about Genesis’s Covid-delayed The Last Domino? tour. The keyboardist, Tony Banks, might have fudged questions about the band’s future, but the 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’d have thought they’d wheeled him on 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 that they became 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 the 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 more brooding than it did on MTV.

Its eeriness is amplified by the company it keeps. The setlist offers as much from the Peter Gabriel era as it does of the Patrick Bateman years – 1973’s Selling England By the Pound is as wellrepresented as Invisible Touch – which occasionally makes for some dramatic musical leaps: it’s an eyebrow-raising hairpin bend between the gloss of No Son of Mine and the knotty complexities of Firth of Fifth. But the show skews most heavily towards the period of Genesis’s career that lurks between them, when the band existed in a space between progressive rock and more mainstream concerns: the synth sounds brighter and brasher, the songs more straightforwardly melodic, but the very British weirdness that characterised early 70s Genesis not fully expunged. The result was some of the strangest Top 10 singles of the era: Turn It on Again dives along despite being in four different time signatures; Mama – a song about that reliable hit-making topic, a teenager who develops an Oedipal fixation on a middle-aged sex worker – remains authentically creepy nearly 40 years on. Collins is lit from beneath in red, a staging that deliberately turns his weathered face into a sight that could haunt you in the small hours.

It’s not the only time that the show makes reference to his health, although it’s usually played for laughs: he mockingly points to himself when I Can’t Dance reaches the line about having “a perfect body with a perfect face”; in lieu of the complex and lengthy drum duets he used to perform with Chester Thompson, he glumly bashes his elbow and forehead with a tambourine during I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), hammily beckoning for applause afterwards. More poignantly, there are moments when Collins seems to lose himself in the music: gazing at the drum kit, where his son Nic is deputising for him, he starts miming along to the drum parts he can no longer perform.

But, for the most part, the atmosphere doesn’t feel affecting so much as celebratory. Collins is drily funny between songs, and whatever else has happened to him, his voice still sounds strong. And the story the show tells is worth commemorating: that of a band who seemed implausible candidates for global ubiquity, but achieved it nonetheless.

Their hits gave them such omnipresence that they became emblematic of an era

At Utilita Arena, Birmingham, tonight, then touring.