The Beatles track Phil Collins called “one of the best songs ever written”
With perhaps the exception of veritable Beatlemaniac Jeff Lynne, Phil Collins is the most successful musician to follow his dream of being one of the Fab Four. Of course, the Genesis drummer never joined The Beatles, but as a young aspiring artist in the 1960s, he came as close as one could hope to get on two occasions.
At the age of 13, Collins was cast as the Artful Dodger for two West End runs of the musical Oliver. He enjoyed a wage of £15 a week and, in a 1986 interview with Playboy, reflected on the early role as “the best part for a kid in all London”. Just before he landed this pivotal role, Collins appeared as an extra in The Beatles’ first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. In the classic musical comedy, Collins joined a swarm of screaming teenagers for the TV concert sequence, though his part was edited out of the final cut.
After he grew out of his role as Artful Dodger, Collins began to embrace rock ‘n’ roll in earnest and took up the drums. Before joining Genesis in 1970, he played with a couple of formative groups, including Flaming Youth. In May 1970, he also joined George Harrison in the studio to contribute conga tracks to the All Things Must Pass song ‘Art of Dying’. Again, his contributions were omitted from the final cut.
Collins’ failure to make the cut with his favourite band fortunately didn’t deter him from his dream. After rising to prominence with Genesis, firstly as a drummer and later taking singing and songwriting responsibilities, Collins soared to still higher peaks as a solo artist. With the release of albums like Face Value and Hello, I Must Be Going!, he became one of the most successful pop stars of the 1980s.
Despite reports of an acrid clash with Paul McCartney in 2002, Collins has never missed a chance to praise The Beatles for their vital role in his own success. He first fell under the band’s spell in the early 1960s but resonated particularly well with the psychedelic era releases Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The latter is often deemed ground zero for prog-rock, the movement to which Genesis was a party.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2002, Collins revealed that Revolver just about takes the gold medal as far as he’s concerned. “Rubber Soul sounds a little clean to me, and this is a more incredible collection of songs than Sgt. Pepper,” he explained.
Continuing his passionate appraisal, Collins picked out ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ as a highlight on Revolver and quite possibly his favourite Beatles track. “‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ is one of the best songs ever written, and it’s only a minute and a half long,” he said, adding that there is an impressive degree of “consistency throughout the record”.
Like ‘A Day in the Life’, the crown jewels of Sgt. Pepper, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ was a joint songwriting venture between McCartney and John Lennon. “I suspect that I helped with the verses because the songs were nearly always written without second and third verses,” McCartney remembered in Many Years From Now. “I seem to remember working on that middle eight with him, but it’s John’s song, 80-20 to John.”
If you ask me, The Beatles bettered ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ with compositional marvels like ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. However, as Collins noted, it’s difficult to fault ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ as a punchy song with an attractive lyrical display. I certainly wouldn’t concur with Lennon’s deprecating appraisal: speaking to David Sheff in one of his final interviews, Lennon dismissed the song as “another of my throwaways … fancy paper around an empty box.”
