“Such an arsehole”: the one person Phil Collins wanted to fight
There are plenty of obstinate individuals within the music industry who you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of for the fear they might knock a few of your teeth out, but Genesis drummer and songwriter Phil Collins isn’t one of them.
A diminutive figure, Collins doesn’t seem like the sort of man who would get himself embroiled in a brawl with someone he didn’t see eye to eye with, and even though those of us who are at a height disadvantage to the rest of the world often get accused of having ‘short person syndrome’, whereby we get wrongfully accused of using our stature as a reason to lash out at others, Collins is arguably far too mild-mannered to engage in fisticuffs over a disagreement.
That being said, there’s one individual who tested his patience to the absolute limit, and who, after working with him on a project, he expressly wanted to start a fight with due to his belligerent temperament and hard-to-please nature.
In 1982, Collins was asked to work as a producer on the third solo album by ABBA vocalist Anni-Frid Lyngstad, better known mononymously as Frida. While the Swedish pop powerhouse was far from being a tricky customer, and provided Collins with an exciting challenge for him to get involved in, he was less than impressed with the way she was being managed.
At the time, Frida’s very public separation from former ABBA bandmate and husband Benny Andersson was taking its toll on her general mental well-being, and because of the difficult nature of this, also severing one of her strongest professional ties, she had to reconsider her approach to creating music by surrounding herself with a new team to work alongside.
In his autobiography, Not Dead Yet, Collins reflected on having to help Frida restart her career and recalled how the album that they worked on together, Something’s Going On, was almost destined to spell the end of ABBA. “Frida is somewhat fragile, the divorce is still reverberating,” he recalled. “They’ve produced her all her adult career, and now, professionally speaking, she has a new man in her life. A man who’s producing, playing drums, singing with her and giving her a far rockier sound than ABBA ever had.”
After stating that the record meant that “the writing [was] on the wall” for her band, and that it had moved her career in a different direction than where she had previously been operating, Collins recalled how the album deeply upset the team she was working with on the business side of things.
“Maybe that’s why Stig Anderson, the band’s manager and owner of Polar Music, is such an arsehole,” Collins mused. “Once the album is finished, he invites us all to his house for dinner. When we arrive, he’s completely drunk. We listen to Something’s Going On, and at the end, he snorts, ‘Is that it?’ Frida bursts into tears, and we all want to thump him.”
To have your work dismissed with a curt three-word statement must be one of the most shattering things an artist can hear, but rather than Frida being the one to want to lash out at the mean-spirited comments of Anderson, it was Collins who seemingly took umbrage with his contemptuous tone, making him one of the only people the producer has come close to dishing out a beating to in his professional career.
