The music legend Phil Collins said “never” got enough credit
Phil Collins was always willing to give his influences their flowers.
As much as he was inescapable in the 1980s, part of the reason why he was either loved or hated was because all that he did to prop up his heroes, whether that was trying his best to do Led Zeppelin proud when performing with them at Live Aid or working with Eric Clapton to bring him back from the edge. But even Collins admitted that some of the biggest stars in the world aren’t nearly as celebrated as they should be.
Then again, that’s strange coming from potentially one of the most overexposed artists of the 1980s. As much as Collins was a fine performer for the time, there’s a good chance that songs like ‘Sussudio’ wouldn’t have been hated at the time if they hadn’t been jammed down people’s throats at every single opportunity. Though Collins has come to regret some of those shitty decisions, can you really blame him for wanting to reach the top of the musical mountain?
After all, every single one of his heroes had excelled in their craft, and since he had finally reached the point of being a pop star, he was going to ride that fucking train as long as he could. Because as much as he gravitated towards the sounds of Genesis or the more complex music that he was playing in Brand X, any rock and roller even slightly indebted to pop music was going to find themselves coming back to The Beatles.
The Fab Four had changed the entire landscape of pop music in the few years they were together, and while Collins got a firsthand account of that kind of hysteria when on the set of A Hard Day’s Night, he knew that it came back to the kind of records that they were putting out once the girls stopped screaming. He was more attuned to the sonics of everything, and all that came from George Martin.
If there were to be a definitive conversation around who the ‘Fifth Beatle’ actually was, Martin would win without question. His skills as a producer and knack for making beautiful arrangements for their tunes made him an emotional translator for their tracks half the time. Even when they came in with fragments, Martin knew how to whip them into shape, and Collins always took notice of what he was doing.
Although Martin has never been forgotten in The Beatles’ story, Collins said that he deserved the kind of exposure the rest of the Fabs had, saying, “I was very lucky to be interviewed by George Martin while he was re-mastering the original Beatles albums on CD. He has never gone without credit, but I don’t believe he’s ever got as much as he deserves. You know, they were a great group, but they were better once they’d gone through the Martin hands.”
And looking at the band’s cast catalogue, that’s not that far off from what Martin’s impact really was. When looking at the kind of musicality he brought to the group, some of the arrangements on everything from ‘Yesterday’ to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ feels as much a part of the cultural lexicon at this point as any of the classical pieces by Bach or Beethoven from hundreds of years ago.
Martin was never thinking about his musical legacy in that way, but that’s part of the beauty of his work and another reason why he should be so revered. He was only looking to do a serviceable job for the band, and in doing so, he created the unofficial soundtrack to what rock and roll experimentation could be.
