The 2002 Phil Collins song that came together completely by accident
The Billboard-smashing songbook Phil Collins sits atop is so fervently manicured and produced, it’s hard to imagine the old Genesis drummer ever stumbling upon a number with accidental happenstance as he did in 2002.
Sure, Collins must have jammed with the former prog giants when joining for 1971’s Nursery Cryme, the progressive terrain of the day’s compositional expanses necessitating a loose ironing out of the theatrical material into its eventual classical gravitas. Once frontman Peter Gabriel jumped ship to a solo career, Collins’ Genesis captaincy pulled the band toward soft rock accessibility, anticipating the 1980s’ taste for glossy pop excess and yielding the band upwards of 100 million record sales worldwide.
If longtime fans were left cold by Genesis’ pop trajectory, they’d be positively aghast at Collins solo hits. Saturated with the day’s studio trends, single-handedly defining the gated reverb percussion on ‘In the Air Tonight’ and helping pioneer the power ballad with ‘Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)’.
He became an unlikely star of the MTV age, offering nothing in the way of visual flair or aesthetic so in demand by the music video channel but standing as one of its eternal rotations.
For such a digital sound that critics would say reflects the artifice of that vapid decade, accidents could happen. ‘Sussudio’, his 1985 corporate funk number that surely enjoys keen repeats on Patrick Bateman’s Walkman, was discovered by playing around with a Roland TR-909 drum machine before stumbling on a loop he enjoyed, then lyrically running with the scratch title he toyed with during the demo sessions as a rhythmic placeholder.
Years later, such happenstance would deliver another single, albeit not touching the stratospheric heights of Collins’ commercial heyday. Toying with a 16-bar sketch in his bedroom studio, a thoughtless copy and paste on his computer of the instrumentations he was digitally working on resulted in the piece playing completely in the supposed ‘wrong place’. It was an error he enjoyed so much he kept the screw-up intact and worked it into his 2002 single ‘Wake Up Call’, the final number from that year’s Testify and a double A-side with ‘The Least You Can Do’.
“That’s the introduction,” Collins revealed to Canada AM at the time. “I thought, ‘well, I would never have arranged that, that’s fantastic.’ But the song was so much like a breath of fresh air to me because of the way I was working…”
Suddenly, the old songwriting spark kicked into gear, Collins jolted into action with his happy accident and improvised a lyrical vehicle to illustrate this newfound electricity in the creative air. The first song to realise itself from the sessions, it’s clear that the ‘Wake Up Call’ love song acted as ball-roller, much of the songs following suit in that number’s accidental eureka.
“To me, the [song is] the flagship of the record, which is why it’s the first track,” Collins stated, so enamoured with his artistic mishap he decided to shove the number up front and centre on his Testify comeback.
