This has been a difficult two years, we all know that, and it’s ongoing.

Whether you’re famous or not, things have been tough for some. A pandemic with a disease called COVID-19 at the centre of it has grabbed the newspaper headlines – and the world – for almost two years now.

And I’ve no doubt that there are many in this world who have suffered immeasurably as a result of some poor lab assistant who accidentally dropped a vial containing a bioweapon on the floor of one of the top virology laboratories in the world in Wuhan, China.

Most everything came to a complete stop, and in particular those things that it was deemed people could do without, or in thoses cases where the virus, once it escaped from China (which was very easy), could spread rapidly.

One notable area of life, which is at the centre of a surprising number of people’s lives, that came to a complete standstill was that of live music.

Yes, there are bands who are gazillionaires who tour by numbers, but many millions of people depend on it for their livelihoods and for a year and a half, they were blocked from doing it. While I could focus on those poor nameless unfortunates who lost their business on the back of an 18-month moratorium on playing live, I’m not going to. I’m going to focus on one of the gazillionaires: rock band GENESIS.

Often people will say, it’s a long story, if they do not wish to go into all the gory details of what exactly is wrong with them, but with Genesis, it really is a long story.

And you can find out an awful lot about them if you just Google, “Genesis Phil Collins“, and see what comes up. Forums, blogs, official sites, unofficial sites, all sorts. So, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ll not go into much of it here, except very superficially or if it relates to this rant.

Genesis have been a band for a long time; since around 1968. Initially, of the current lineup, only Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks were in the band. Phil Collins joined as the band’s drummer around 1971.

But, using the domino principle of which they are so fond and indeed wrote one of their epic songs about, this affected that which affected this which affected that, which affected this until they became a hugely successful band by the early 1990s.

But then Phil Collins upped and left the band back in 1993, for reasons we still don’t know to this day. Poor Messrs Rutherford and Banks tried to continue with a new singer, ex-Stiltskin singer Ray Wilson. That experiment failed. Why? Because there is only one Phil Collins. He is uniquely talented, a one-in-a-million personality. A gifted drummer and singer. At least, he was. When he went, all the air farted out of the Genesis inner tube, and the two remaining members were forced to call it quits.

…But Collins must have felt guilty about the manner of his departure, because in 2007 the band announced a reunion tour as a way of thanking the fans and saying goodbye to them properly. I went to two of the shows. They were magnificent. When that tour was ended, and the inevitable live album was released, that was it; it was over.

As the years went by, Phil Collins’ health took several turns for the worse. Despite declaring that he was “Not Dead Yet!” in 2016, he was eventually forced to perform entire concerts seated in a chair, after some botched operations to repair nerve damage left him with, well, nerve damage. He could no longer play the drums, one of the biggest tragedies in rock. Never mind, he had a solution: his then-16-year-old son Nic, who was just 16 at the time. The kid was a revelation. Not even old enough to drive, that boy played the songs with a maturity of Chester Thompson, Collins’ other drummer, who must be, what, fifty years older than Nic?

But fans kept calling for a Genesis reunion, especially a Gabriel-era reunion, which would have meant Collins was back on the drums for the entire gig, which was simply not gonna happen. But you could have knocked me down with a feather when the band said in early 2020, all right then, we’ll get together, but only as the pop three-piece.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic, which is now so endemic that it becomes the central argument of any discussion of any topic in the world today, in this context meant that the tour had to be postponed several times, and even now there’s some doubt whether they should have gone ahead at all. You’ve only got to look at Phil Collins to ask that question.

A number of performances were recorded by fans and placed immediately on YouTube. Genesis should have those taken down immediately if they want anyone to look forward to going to the gigs. Phil is in terrible shape, and I saw Elvis Presley’s final filmed concerts in June 1977, just eight weeks before his death. Phil looks worse than that. I saw Chris Rea soon after he almost died from pancreatitis. Phil looks worse than that. I’ve seen people days from death from COPD, thanks to smoking. Phil looks worse than that. Musically, this concert tour is not just one of, but THE worst thing I have ever seen in 40 years of attending concerts and watching them remotely on video. It’s shameful. And not because of the music itself, although it’s sad to listen to the band’s desperate attempts to accommodate Phil by transposing the songs so far down that they almost sound like slow dirges of themselves. And he still can’t manage it.

But more importantly, Mr Collins sounds horrendous. He’s out of tune almost the whole time, his voice is ruined. He can’t breathe properly and for the first time, Genesis are using backing singers to finish the lines that Phil Collins, one of the finest rock vocalists of the 1980s, cannot manage.

So, in order to massage these phenomenal egos, tens of thousands of people in the UK and the USA are being expected to pay over $100 a TICKET to see Phil Collins mangle the Genesis back catalogue when the band could have met in a garage somewhere and played through the songs for their own enjoyment. They probably still could have used better sound and lighting than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. You could go to a pub, buy a drink and watch an amateur Genesis tribute band full of six-year-old Dutch stage school kids that were better than the real thing on Monday inst.

I’m not angry, just very, very…sad. Of course, Genesis are well within their rights to tour if they want, just as the audiences are well within their rights to piss away their hard-earned money to go and see this, this, embarrassment. But if I was Phil Collins’ doctor I would never have signed off on his medical insurance certificate. What the blue blazes is going on here? Maybe we will never know. x