The 1978 song Phil Collins never wanted to hear again: “A period piece”
Anyone who was alive and well during the 1980s would be forgiven for never wanting to listen to any Phil Collins song ever again.
From one moment to the next on MTV, it was almost as if you couldn’t escape the guy, and while it did help that he was a fantastic pop songwriter across his entire career, there’s a fine line between someone being everywhere for a good reason and becoming severely overexposed. And while Collins even admitted that he was tired of himself more than a few times, there were a few moments where he felt like some of his songs didn’t deserve to be remembered for the right reasons.
But it’s not like he wasn’t giving his all into every record that he made. Anyone else would have found it hard to straddle the line of being a frontman and a solo artist at the same time, but most people could take a cue from what Collins did throughout his career. He knew his place as a solo singer, and when he needed to return to Genesis after a few years, there was never a moment when the music suffered too much.
Even when they were making their biggest hits during the Invisible Touch era, Collins was still used to turning in great songs on albums like But Seriously, but it took a long time for him to feel comfortable in his own skin. He never thought for a second that he would be the lead singer of the band, and even when he did eventually get behind the mic, you could still hear him trying to work out the bugs of his sound a little bit.
A Trick of the Tail is still one of the best prog albums that the band ever made, but Collins needed a little bit more time before he felt like he could completely settle into everything. And right when it seemed like the band were ready to get going all over again, And Then There Were Three was the first time that they felt lost. Steve Hackett had left the band, and even if that opened the door for songs like ‘Follow You Follow Me’, the drummer couldn’t help but see the album as a little bit fractured.
Because while no one would have complained about having a hit record at that point, Collins didn’t feel that all of the songs were up to snuff like they should have been. There were moments where everything seemed to sound great, but on a record like ‘Down and Out’, Collins couldn’t help but hear the moments where he felt like the music was lacking a little bit whenever he heard his performance.
The songs themselves weren’t godawful by any means, but by the standards that they were holding themselves to, Collins felt that it was starting to not work, saying, “I do some fills on ‘Down and Out’ that I couldn’t do today. They worked great. I did them in the studio, and they worked great. But that was when I was, you know, only just becoming the singer a couple of albums in.”
Adding, “So I was very intent on chops, trying to do things that I had never done before. So ‘Down and Out’ is, I mean, I haven’t heard it for ages. But I mean, it’s a period piece.”
It’s not like ‘Down and Out’ is one of the worst songs of all time, but it has more to do with how Collins saw his role in the band. The biggest names in prog rock were used to showing off their musicianship on every one of their albums, and while Genesis was no stranger to elongated songs every time they made a record, this was the first time that Collins crossed that line into pretentiousness whenever they played.
The number-one rule of any great band is to serve the song before anything else, and while Collins did have that kind of sixth sense, he did end up sacrificing the song for the sake of his playing one too many times. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but when looking at what the band would end up doing in their pop career, this was the kind of cardinal sin that no one ever wanted to make.
