The 1996 album Phil Collins thought his fans hated: “It’s not really me”
It’s always a bit of a gamble whenever a seasoned artist tries to switch up their sound.
There are certainly different avenues that anyone can explore when making a record, but when things start going too far in the wrong direction, it’s hard not to see any artist as trying to capitalise on a trend rather than make something that’s from the heart. Although Phil Collins had to deal with people calling him inauthentic from the moment his solo career started, he felt that he strayed too far from his usual path when making this lower light in his catalogue.
At the same time, it’s not like Collins was easy to escape once everything kicked into high gear. The idea of making a solo album may not have appealed to him when he was still in Genesis, but once ‘In the Air Tonight’ became one of the biggest hits of his solo career, it probably didn’t take too much thought for him to follow his audience and make some lighter fare for the pop market.
Even when making some of his more lighthearted romps, though, there was never a moment where he seemed like he wasn’t enjoying himself. His version of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ felt genuine despite sounding like a soundtrack to a gloriously cheesy 1980s sitcom, and when the songs didn’t manage to make any sense like on ‘Sussudio’, it’s hard to deny that he managed to sell it pretty well.
But when the 1980s came to a close, Collins suddenly began looking like one of the most uncool presences on the charts. He could still make hits if he wanted to, but if he was considered lame even for the 1980s, the guy became a glorified punching bag the minute that people like Kurt Cobain started storming the charts.
While Collins was never going to willingly make something heavy or anything, Dance into the Light was at least an attempt to shake things up. Some guitar-focused melodies were used at this point, but even by the standards of career shakeups, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Collins was not the right person to make this record.
Part of the problem was that Collins had spent so much of the previous decade defining adult pop music that audiences struggled to accept him in any other form. His greatest strengths had always come from emotional directness and melody, usually built around keyboards and soulful arrangements that played naturally to his voice. Trying to reframe himself around guitar-driven material felt less like a reinvention and more like an artist second-guessing the instincts that made him successful in the first place.
Even so, the record still reflected Collins’ willingness to keep moving creatively rather than simply recycling old formulas. Plenty of artists from his era spent the 1990s trying to recreate their 1980s glory years, but Collins at least attempted to evolve with changing musical tastes, even if the experiment didn’t fully land. Looking back, Dance into the Light feels less like a disaster and more like the sound of a songwriter temporarily losing sight of what made his music connect so universally.
Coming off of his most personal album on Both Sides, Collins remembered many insiders telling him that this was far from the version of him that they wanted, saying, “On Dance Into The Light, I was trying to write from a guitar player’s perspective. I thought they would make me write different songs. Although I love some of those songs – ‘It’s In Your Eyes’, ‘Love Police’, ‘That’s What You Said’ – it’s not really me. Other people whose opinions I respect have said, ‘It’s not really you, is it? Go back to the piano, Phil.’”
Despite taking ample time to wait out the grunge revolution, though, seeing him look like a buffoon waving around a guitar was going to do nothing to endear him to the Britpop crowd. Even when running into Britpop legend and professional Collins hater Noel Gallagher at the time, the Genesis frontman remembered getting reprimanded for daring to strap on a guitar and pretend to play it in one of his videos.
Every artist is free to do what they please, but listening back to what Collins was doing here, it’s not that hard to see why he didn’t want to revisit this one. Dance into the Light is still a fine record by his usual standards, but there was never a chance that it would be greeted with the same type of praise that ‘One More Night’ did or anything.
