50 years ago today Phil Collins joined Genesis replacing John Mayhew on drums. It took him 10 years to contribute any songs. “Misunderstanding” was the first they recorded. Marriage woes motivated Phil Collins to write it. It was on the album “Duke” and made it to number-14 on the Billboard Hot 100. Here is Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks on how the song “Misunderstanding” marked the emergence of Phil Collins as a songwriter:
“’Misunderstanding’ was the first song we recorded that Phil wrote. Phil didn’t used to write all that much of Genesis’ material in the early days, up to and including Duke, really. He just didn’t rate himself as a writer that much, I don’t think, and he’d never really tried it before. But after his problems with his marriage in that year, he started to write songs. And he played us a load of the songs he’d written and we picked out of them two songs. One of them was ‘Misunderstanding.’”
