The artist who disappointed Phil Collins on stage: “Very arrogant and very smarmy”
It’s hard to make a great first impression when it comes to the music industry. The whole point in anyone getting a record deal comes down to how they sounded, looked and behaved within the first few minutes of meeting with a label, and even then, it’s hard to maintain that kind of rapport for months or years at a time. While it’s a different kind of language when talking amongst musicians, Phil Collins did have his fair share of reservations when working with some of the biggest names of the time.
Granted, Collins was always the kind of person who seemed comfortable in his own skin rather than relying on backing musicians. No one gets to the point where they can play tracks like ‘Supper’s Ready’ in one sitting by using their band as a crutch, and even when he started going out on his own with bands like Brand X or making his own solo music, Collins seemed to have a clear vision for everything that he wanted to sound like.
But there was a lot more to the 1980s than the glossy sounds of prog-rock. The biggest names in the genre like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, were starting to fall behind, and even if Collins had never connected with those genre labels to begin with, he figured the next best thing would be for him to work with new textures, which explains why he made the kind of soulful tunes like ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ or ‘One More Night’.
While there’s a legion of rock fans whose stomachs wretch at the mere sight of Collins making such music, it’s not like there wasn’t a market for it. For years, there had been artists combining elements of soul and rock and roll together, and by the time the MTV generation kicked into high gear, no one could do better than Hall and Oates’s insane run of hits like ‘Maneater’ and ‘Private Eyes.’
And given how Collins was working on covering his favourite Motown hits, making a record with the duo almost made too much sense. Granted, all bands come down to personalities, and when the drummer first laid eyes on the group, he knew that he might be in for a bumpy ride if he worked with Daryl Hall.
Despite having an angelic voice and fantastic keyboard skills, Collins remembered that his demeanour onstage was enough for him to question working with him altogether, 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, but I was pleased when I met him because he’s not like that at all.”
Even though the long-awaited Hall, Oates and Collins album never came to fruition, it’s easy to see some of their influence rubbing off on Collins’s later years. This was a few years before Invisible Touch transformed the group, but listening to some of the deep cuts on that record, tunes like ‘Anything She Does’ are like Hall and Oates if they were kicked up a few notches and sounded even happier.
As much as fans would have devoured any album that Collins worked on with Hall, it also would have been a double-edged sword. By the time the 1980s ended, the drummer had become one of the most overexposed artists of his generation, so did we really need another record of him showing how soulful he could be?
