The hit song Phil Collins never thought was good enough: “I wasn’t drawn to it”
They say that artists have a sixth sense when it comes to sniffing out a hit record, but it seems that for Phil Collins, his inner detecting abilities were not all that strong. Though the Genesis frontman and drummer enjoyed pretty unfathomable success both in the band and in his own right as a solo artist, when it came to one of his greatest power ballad hits, he wasn’t initially convinced it was set for the stars.
Approaching the midpoint of the 1980s, Collins was at his undisputed cultural peak in the respect of his command over the charts. His debut solo effort Face Value had taken the world by storm, especially in its now seminal lead single ‘In the Air Tonight’, and to all intents and purposes on the outside, it looked as though Collins was the king surfer riding the dual waves of pop and rock stardom to the shore of music royalty.
But on the inside, Collins’ personal life was less in cruise control and more in a state of crash and burn. His first wife had filed for divorce in 1979, the catalyst for the fairly miserable depths of writing that would eventually become Face Value, and his pick of tunes that made the album very much reflected that feeling he couldn’t seem to shake. Of course, by a few years later, in 1984, the stab of that pain had slowly ebbed away, yet a song he had written during his down period was set to reappear in his life in the unlikeliest of ways.
That particular track was ‘Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)’, which Collins had initially penned during the Face Value era but never ultimately made the cut onto the finished record. Reminiscing on the song, he recalled: “‘Against All Odds’ was written in the same misery that the rest of Face Value came from, but I wasn’t drawn to it initially. I didn’t like it as much as ‘You Know What I Mean’, and I thought there was only room for one of those on the album. I don’t know what would have happened to it if Taylor Hackford hadn’t got in touch.”
This Hackford character he spoke of was the director of the 1984 thrilling romance film that shared a name with the song – except the Collins tune wasn’t called that at the time. Left to the graveyard of his debut album, the original version of the song had the title ‘How Can You Sit There’, but when the movie came calling, it prompted Collins to comb over his old unused back catalogue before he landed back at this gem. He then adapted it to fit the film, and thus, a cultural behemoth tune was born.
‘Against All Odds’ marked the beginning of Collins’ seven-time stint at the top of the US charts, all of which would unfold over the course of the rest of the 1980s, yet what was striking was the depth of pain it was borne out of. The singer remembered: “The song was written out of experience as opposed to a ‘what if’ song. If that personal stuff had not happened to me at the time, I probably would never have made an album, and if I was to have made an album eventually, it probably would have been a jazz/rock thing. Without that stuff, I wouldn’t have felt the stuff I felt sitting at a piano night after night, day after day writing stuff.”
Inevitably, life’s more challenging experiences will strike us all down at one time or another, and popstars are definitely no exception. What Phil Collins proved, however, is that if you can channel that angst into music and words – and make it sound good – you might just be on to a hit, which makes that pain ever so slightly sweeter.
