The one 1980s singer Phil Collins never enjoyed watching: “Very arrogant”
Phil Collins didn’t always approach rock and roll in the way that everyone expected him to.
He was one of the giants of the genre and would have gladly made some of the best music that the charts had ever seen, but even when working with Led Zeppelin and asking to join The Who, he felt a little bit out of place compared to everyone else. There was a lot more that he had to offer the world, but even when looking at the greatest hits in his catalogue, he was more interested in R&B than anything remotely heavy.
That might sound insane coming from the same person who gave us that massive drum roll on ‘In the Air Tonight’, but the reason why Collins’s records sound so mellow is that he’s pulling from some of his favourite soul bands. He didn’t bother trying to sing like Robert Plant when he knew he couldn’t, but in the 1980s, it was a lot more acceptable for people to start making a few tributes to genres like Motown.
Hitsville may not have had a hit in a long time, but it was probably one of the best times to be an R&B singer when Collins first went solo. He had already been a fan of the horn section in Earth Wind and Fire songs when he made his debut album, but just look at the biggest solo artists out at the time. People like Michael Jackson and Prince had free rein over the charts half the time they played, and even Billy Joel was making his own odes to the music of his youth when making ‘Tell Her About It’, so Collins wanted to try his hand at doing it as well.
But the key difference that he saw was knowing the kind of artists that he didn’t want to turn into. Even though he saw his fair share of fantastic performers from around that time, he didn’t want to be the same kind of smooth singer that everyone expected out of the genre. That would have resulted in a lot of secondhand embarrassment from his Genesis bandmates, but it was always worth it to see him embracing some of the dorky aspects of his sound whenever he played ‘Sussudio’.
And if nothing else, Collins knew that he didn’t want to be compared to someone like Daryl Hall from around the same time. Hall and Oates definitely deserve a place in the rock and soul heavens for being the perfect blend of Temptations-style dramatics and pop-friendly rock and roll, but whenever Hall got behind the keyboard, Collins felt that he was looking at someone who seemed to take themselves way too seriously.
That was just his natural way of singing, but Collins felt that he was only making himself look worse whenever he played, saying, “Well, Daryl Hall and l have talked about–doing something–I went to see Hall And Oates at Hammersmith recently, and when I first saw him on stage, I didn’t like him, because he seemed very arrogant and very smarmy, for want of a better word.” Then again, Hall did take a few cues from what Collins was doing by playing up some of the goofy stuff.
Because as much as Hall and Oates were master singers, they weren’t cut out for every MTV video, and a lot of their videography does make for some unintentionally hilarious moments. The video for ‘You Make My Dreams’ is already one of the most hilarious things that they ever shot, and while he could come off as smarmy, there was no way that someone starring in that video was taking themselves too seriously.
So while Collins could have had a fantastic singing partner if he wanted one, the idea of Hall playing alongside him was forever going to be in the vault of musical what-ifs. It would have been great seeing them work off each other, but Hall and Collin both seem set when it comes to the greatest soul that any white person could have hoped to make during their prime.
