The best song Phil Collins said he ever played on: “One of my favourite pieces of music”
It’s easy to forget how many musical chops Phil Collins has outside of being a pop singer.
Although many people can take one look at some of his soppy ballads and roll their eyes, there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface whenever he gets behind the drum kit or behind the microphone. He was a true visionary whenever he played, but he knew that he could get pushed further if he had the right people working around him.
Then again, Collins didn’t really need to get any more complex after Peter Gabriel left Genesis. Although there were many great moments throughout their career where the band could pump out hooks, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the kind of album where they seemed to reach a peak in terms of complexity, especially with Collins shuffling through every single percussion lesson that he ever had.
But for all of the accolades they had as prog rock giants, Collins never thought about it that way. They were the definition of a prog act, but it’s not like he ever went out of his way to listen to Emerson Lake and Palmer or Yes in his spare time. He was more focused on making tunes that he wanted to hear, but there was always one foot that was slipping a little bit further back into complex territory.
It wasn’t an accident that he was in Brand X, and when listening to some of their music, it even manages to outshine a lot of what he did in Genesis. He was going for complexity, but when he met someone like Robert Fripp, it was no longer about trying to make exercises set to music. It was about trying to think about one’s instrument in an unconventional way, and Fripp was willing to move the Earth if it meant getting the results he wanted.
And listening to the song ‘North Star’, Collins was certainly up to the challenge. Fripp had already been toying with what could be done in the world of pop music with David Bowie, but this took all of the ingenuity that King Crimson had started with and made it into a perfect pop package, complete with Daryl Hall giving one of the most overlooked vocal performances of his career.
Collins might not be doing anything all that flashy on the record, but looking back, he felt that nothing else in his career managed to sound quite as good as this, saying, “Robert doesn’t work like anyone else. He’s very professorial and very focused – there’s no messing around. That’s not to say he’s not a warm person, because he is, but he knows what he wants from himself, and from you. And listening back to ‘North Star’, I think it’s one of my favourite pieces of music that I’ve ever played on.”
Granted, it’s not easy to see why Collins would like this kind of approach. Here was one of the greatest progressive minds in the world, and since he already had a love of classic soul and Motown, getting to work with someone like Hall behind the microphone took all of his musical loves and put them under one roof, even if the song wasn’t nearly as complex as anything off of Selling England by the Pound.
A handful of prog fans may have been disappointed to hear a record that was this slow from Collins, but he was never focused on playing a mile a minute every time he sat behind the kit. He could hit like John Bonham, but he also knew that serving the song was much more important than any massive run that he ever played.
