The one Phil Collins album he never wanted to listen to: “Dodging bullets”
At the dawn of the 1980s, no one expected one of the most prominent artists of the modern age to suddenly be one of the biggest names in prog rock.
Punk seemed to firmly stomp out all of the pretentious strains of rock and roll, and yet once MTV kicked in, Phil Collins had no real problem becoming one of the darlings of the station. But even though Collins’s reign of terror could be seen as a gift or a curse, Collins even held his hand up to say that not everything that he did was absolutely golden.
But if you were to show me an artist who claimed that everything that they did was perfect, I’d be able to show you a bold-faced liar. There are many opportunities for people to make classics, but no one is that lucky or genius throughout their career, and everyone from Paul McCartney to Metallica to even Collins’s nemesis, Noel Gallagher, has acknowledged their faults from time to time.
Considering what Collins had to work with, though, it’s not like any part of his discography was ever going to be subpar. A lot of it may be unbelievably cringy to go back to, but it’s not like any of his classics from the 1980s suffer from being underproduced. It all sounds great at the end of the day, but the main problem with any major rock star is knowing whether a song is commercial or not.
Don’t think for a second that Collins wasn’t keeping that in mind, either. As much as people like to imagine that artists are making music only for themselves to hear, it’s rarely that simple. Collins knew what he had on his hands when tunes like ‘In the Air Tonight’ became huge, and if he wanted to keep that momentum going, he was going to have to let go of the kind of music he was making with Brand X.
Even though that is arguably one of the most interesting things he has done outside of Genesis. His flirtation with jazz fusion wasn’t the first thing that was going to light up the charts by any stretch, but when comparing it to bands like Weather Report, Collins could certainly hold his own when playing next to the greats. You could tell he was having fun, but even Collins admitted he had overstepped the mark on that one a little bit.
For all of the great playing on the record, Collins could tell when the songs started to take a back seat to everyone in the band wanting to play as fast and technically as they could, saying, “Brand X was great fun to play with, not so much fun to listen to. But Moroccan Roll was a good album, although there was still a lot of what I call ‘dodging bullets’ going on. The way we played was full of gunfire – bang, bang, bang!”
Given the pedigree of the artists here, though, why would you not want to show them off a little bit? Collins was clearly a capable pop star, but not hearing him embrace those prog chops again while playing off of people like Percy Jones would have felt like a missed opportunity had they not been able to come together for a few records.
Having this kind of album out in the world was going to do nothing for Collins’s hitmaking career, but it gave him the one thing that none of his other projects could have given him at the time: credibility. He was becoming the darling of MTV and could have easily been considered a sell-out by this point, but hearing him getting back to his roots and lighting up the kit all over again was the kind of move that kept things interesting.
