The lost Phil Collins song he never officially released: “I’ve got a lot of unfinished bits”
There’s a good chance that everyone could go the rest of their lives without hearing some of the biggest Phil Collins songs.
The drummer was one of the biggest names in music for a damn good reason when he started his solo career, but after trying to juggle his solo years, his work with Genesis, and also trying to find time to work with his other musical heroes like Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton, there came a point where everyone just got sick of the guy every time they turned on MTV. But even if he’s retired from music now, Collins did feel that there were some pieces that never saw the light of day.
If you look at his back catalogue, though, there’s hardly any style that he didn’t seem to cover when he wasn’t riding high in the 1980s. The musical world was his oyster in many respects, and when looking through some of the biggest names on his roster, he wasn’t afraid to work with anyone and everyone. The thought of a prog musician eventually turning into an R&B star certainly wasn’t what everyone suspected, but you can hear him still trying to hash that out when working with Philip Bailey.
And what’s even more shocking is how well he pulled it off. Anyone else trying their hand at making a song like ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ all over again would have been laughed out of the room, but you could tell that Collins genuinely loved those old Motown songs every time he got up to the microphone. It’s one thing to pay tribute to his heroes, but he really internalised every piece of those songs when he started writing his own material.
Because as much as Face Value became larger than life, it wasn’t exactly what Collins had in mind. He didn’t think that he was going to become one of the biggest stars in the world, and if he had his way, his first official solo album would have sounded a lot closer to what he was doing in his jazz fusion side projects, but that didn’t stop ‘In the Air Tonight’ from becoming one of the greatest heights of his career.
But if there was one thing Collins excelled at more than anything, it was being able to write the perfect rock and roll ballad. He wasn’t exactly the greatest judge of what songs should come out since he left ‘Against All Odds’ on the cutting room floor on his first solo album, but even after years of making pitch-perfect pop music, he did say that there was one song that he never got to flesh out the way that he should have.
When promoting his book Not Dead Yet, Collins mentioned that there was one song that he never truly finished, saying, “I’ve got a lot of unfinished bits. You always have a lot of them. Well, I say a couple, there’s actually one. There’s one song, which I love, called ‘Maybe Tomorrow’. It’s something that at least I’ve got in my pocket. It’s good to have because I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been in flux.”
And to this day, Collins has never made the song available on any deluxe editions of his albums. Even when people get to hear numerous remixes of records like No Jacket Required, there’s probably no chance that Collins is eager to finish it at this stage, especially when he’s busy trying to maintain his health at this stage in his life.
But who knows? Although Collins might not be up for mixing the whole thing, maybe there’s a chance that his son, Nic, could manage to throw together a version of the song that does his old man justice just like Dhani Harrison did with his father on the album Brainwashed. That might only be fantasy, but perhaps Collins still has it in him to make one more song as a wave goodbye to his career in music.
