The one artist Phil Collins could “never write like”
There has never been a figure whose legacy has been more skewed than Phil Collins.
There are many songs that may have earned him the nickname of ‘The Antichrist’ by Noel Gallagher in the 1990s, but it’s hard to deny the impact that he’s made on the world of rock ever since he first joined Genesis. He was able to do a lot of great things for the genre, and yet when listening to his tunes in the 1980s, Collins knew to steer clear of at least a few musicians that came across his path.
At the same time, it didn’t seem like Collins said ‘no’ to a lot of things in his prime. Right when Genesis and his solo career were taking off at the same time, he was working with anyone and everyone that he could. It’s nice to know that he revolutionised the sound of recorded drums that decade, but as it turns out, listening to his solo career on one station, Genesis on another, and one of his production jobs for Eric Clapton on another is enough to make any listener want to turn to literally anything else.
The overexposure was definitely a problem at the time, but that’s hardly Collins’s fault. He could do a lot of styles extremely well, and even if tunes like ‘Sussudio’ were far from the greatest pieces of music in the world, no one could deny they were catchy as hell whenever the video debuted on MTV.
But when you think of the starlets of MTV, many people don’t automatically think of the 30-something rock drummer who was starting to lose his hair. This was the blockbuster decade of people like Michael Jackson and Madonna, but even if the pop idols reigned supreme at the time, there was no one who was going to give the public the thrills that Prince could that decade.
As much as the rock audiences loathed him for questionable reasons when opening for The Rolling Stones back in the day, Prince was going to do everything in his power to become a superstar. He had already done most of the music on his first records all on his own, but by the time that he got The Revolution behind him, his production schedule kicked into overdrive when he began working on records like Purple Rain and Around the World in a Day.
And even for someone that never seemed to sleep like Collins, he admitted that what Prince did was beyond his capabilities when working on his own hits, saying, “‘Sussudio’ was changed once because it was starting to sound a bit too much like Prince. I could never write a song like Prince, because I’m not from that environment.” But if we ignore the distance of genre, Prince and Collins did at least have the same work ethic.
If anything, Prince managed to go even further than anything Collins was doing when making a lot of his best records. It’s one thing to make a double record where everything is great, like 1999 or Sign o’ the Times, but if we’re comparing productivity, Prince was putting up more records than anyone could have imagined, even finding time to work with Morris Day and the Time in between making his own hits back in the day.
So even if Collins was inescapable on the charts, most Prince fans didn’t have to worry about him lacking any new music at any point during his lifetime. Not everything got the same exposure as the other massive stars, but there has never been another artist who seemed to have music dripping off of them in the same way ‘The Purple One’ did.
