How Phil Collins secured his first US number one with a song he rejected
Phil Collins was a great addition to Genesis. When he joined the band, he helped an already established songwriting partnership find some form.
“The spirit of Genesis was Tony, Mike and Peter,” said Collins, discussing what it was like entering a band that already had designated songwriters.
“I didn’t regard myself as a songwriter then. But there were things in Genesis I was highly influential in. My strength was arranging,” he added, “I was very into the first line-up of Yes – the one with [guitarist] Peter Banks. I remember listening to them and loving the way they took other people’s song […] And did something different with them.”
Yes, Collins was great at arranging. A song isn’t just words and melody, there has to be some kind of story attached to it. That story doesn’t need to be literal, but every song should feel like it develops and goes somewhere, and that wouldn’t be the case were it not for someone being good at arranging the structure of a track.
Collins might have been good at this, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t also have a talent when it came to songwriting. Now, with the power of hindsight, we know that Collins wrote a great deal of outstanding songs, but he wasn’t to know that he would become a prolific songwriter when he first joined Genesis.
The only experience he really had with songwriting before joining the band was years prior, when he put together a song called ‘Lying, Crying, Dying’, which he called “A very naive but heartfelt ballad.” The track may not have ever been released, but it marked the first in a long line of great songs which Collins would eventually become famous for.
If you ever needed proof that Phil Collins was a prolific songwriter, all you need to do is look at the first US number one he ever had, as it came following a solo project rather than something he worked on with Genesis. In 1982, when Collins was going through a divorce, he was writing some more heartfelt songs which reflected the difficult period he found himself in. The majority of these wound up on the album Face Value, which was relatively well received; however, it didn’t quite top the charts. His number one would come a couple of years later, when a rejected song from the album was used in the film Against All Odds.
Collins’ song was also called ‘Against All Odds’, and it was initially left out of the record. “That song was written during my first divorce,” said Collins. “My first wife and the kids had gone, and I was left there. The song was written out of experience as opposed to a ‘what if’ song.
“If that personal stuff had not happened to me at the time, I probably would have never made an album, and if I was to have made an album eventually, it probably would have been a jazz-rock thing.”
When discussing why the song initially didn’t make it onto Face Value, given his divorce was such a dominating factor in his life, Collins admitted that he felt there were already too many songs like ‘Against All Odds’ on the record. “I wasn’t drawn to it initially,” he said. “I didn’t like it as much as ‘You Know What I Mean,’ and I thought there was only room for one of those on the album. I don’t know what would have happened to it if Taylor Hackford hadn’t got in touch.”
