Martin Levac

Longueuil, drums at eight

Martin Levac was born on 10 November 1971 in Longueuil, across the river from Montreal. He started drumming at eight and had a band of his own together by thirteen. His first original material dates from 1988, written with a group called The Bob's, and he twice reached the finals of the Festival International de la Chanson de Granby, in 1996 and 1998 — a songwriting competition, not a tribute circuit.

Nothing in that first decade pointed towards a career spent interpreting another musician's catalogue. He was a drummer who sang and wrote in French, and the records came out under his own name: L'amour ou le sexe in 2000, Levac in 2001. Both predate the work he is now known for by a couple of years.

The Musical Box, and the man himself

2002 was the hinge year. Levac became the drummer for The Musical Box, the Montreal band that reconstructs early-1970s Genesis concerts with a near-archaeological attention to arrangement, equipment and staging. He held the chair from 2002 to 2007 and toured Europe, the United States and South America with them. Learning that repertoire from behind the kit — Collins's own station in the band at the time — is what made the rest of his career possible.

He also met Collins, more than once. The first encounter was in 2002 at the CKOI radio studios in Montreal. The second was in Geneva in February 2005, during a tour, where Collins took Levac's place behind the drums for the encore. They met again in 2010 at the Roseland Ballroom in New York.

Collins went on record about him on the Quebec talk show Tout le monde en parle in 2010: "He can play the drum! It was extraordinary to see something with so much detail." That kind of public endorsement from the subject is rare for anyone working in tribute, and it has underwritten Levac's billing ever since.

Records of his own, and Daryl Stuermer

Levac has kept releasing original material alongside the tribute work — seven releases between 2000 and 2018. Influences arrived in 2006. The 2015 album 1985 is in English, built around the production sounds of that decade and featuring Daryl Stuermer; it includes covers drawn from the mid-80s pop canon. Six, from 2018, is entirely in French.

Stuermer matters to the story twice over. Genesis's long-serving touring guitarist recruited Levac as frontman for his Genesis Rewired project, which ran from 2009 to 2011 and reworked the Genesis catalogue along jazz lines rather than reproducing it. That was the first sustained stretch of Levac singing the material at the front of a stage instead of playing it from the back, and the jazz-inflected Genesis recordings that came out of that circle sit in his discography alongside his own albums. He has also worked with Chester Thompson, Collins's other drummer from the Genesis touring years.

His own productions have changed shape over time. Dance Into The Light, built on Collins's solo hits, ran from 2009 to 2019. Phil Collins & Genesis… Live, which widens the window to take in the band years, has been the main touring show since 2020.

A barn in Lacolle, forty seats

The other half of Levac's current working life happens in a room he controls entirely. Studio Bapaume, in Lacolle in the Montérégie, is a restored ancestral barn dating from 1873 that he uses as a recording space and a venue. It seats about forty people.

Out of a book came a show. His autobiography, Musicographie d'un imposteur, is sold through leslibraires.ca and the Librairie Moderne in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu; the stage version turns it into twenty-two songs performed at the piano and at the drums, interleaved with an account of how and why a musician ends up making a living as somebody else. He handles the lighting and sound himself. The autumn run of nine performances sold out before it opened. A third strand, Collins/Gabriel, splits the Genesis story between its two singers and plays the same room.

His own listings put Musicographie at Studio Bapaume on 7 and 8 November 2026, with a return booked for 30 January 2027.

Where he stands, November 2026

The Quebec theatre run is the public face of it. Phil Collins & Genesis… Live plays Le Théâtre Capitole in Quebec City on 20 and 21 November 2026, both nights at 8.30pm, with tickets from $55.50 and the venue's dinner-show option available beforehand. A Trois-Rivières date follows on 28 November. The last show before this stretch was 16 October 2026 at L'Étoile Banque Nationale in Brossard.

Beyond that, the diary thins out in Canada and the next listed domestic date is 18 November 2027, back at L'Étoile Banque Nationale in Brossard. Whatever comes next at home, the band around him has been stable for a long time: the Capitole billing describes a group he has been touring with for more than fifteen years.

Eight Italian theatres, fifty people on stage

The largest thing Levac has coming was announced on 23 October 2026: he fronts Genesis — One Night with the Orchestra across eight Italian theatres between 9 and 19 December 2026. The dates are Mantova (PalaUnical Teatro, 9 December), Genoa (Politeama Genovese, 10th), Brescia (Teatro Clerici, 11th), Bassano del Grappa (CMP Arena, 12th), Ancona (Teatro delle Muse, 14th), Naples (Teatro Augusteo, 15th), Bari (Teatro Team, 16th) and Rome (La Nuvola auditorium at the EUR convention centre, 19th). Tickets are through TicketOne.

This is a different job from the Quebec show. Levac sings Collins's parts rather than drumming them, and his band makes its Italian debut behind him: François Larouche and André Lavergne on guitars, Mathieu Groulx on drums and Jean-François Duchesne on keyboards. They are joined by a reduced symphony orchestra and a choir, around fifty performers in total, playing from scores arranged by Dee Palmer and Tolga Kashif and sourced from the London Symphony Orchestra.

The programme is built on Seconds Out, the 1977 Genesis live double album, with Firth of Fifth, The Carpet Crawlers and The Cinema Show among the pieces named. Carlo Massarini, the broadcaster who introduced Genesis to Italian radio listeners more than fifty years ago, narrates — though not at the Genoa and Ancona dates.