‘Against All Odds’: Why Phil Collins initially “discarded” his number one hit song
Phil Collins has often been slammed by the music world for not being something wholly unattainable. It seems unfair, but this is the paradigm of “coolness” that Collins has been beaten over the head with for years.
The former Genesis drummer has never been what the music world considered to be “cool”. His music has rarely found itself in fashion and has routinely been dropped and picked back up by generations who discover his work and find an ironic joy in the maker’s clear and awkward nerdiness. But while he might not have always had his finger on the pulse in terms of what made the glitterati of the music world tick, he certainly knew a hit when he had one. Usually.
Not every artist can claim to know the ins and outs of what constitutes a hit record. As much as a hit might be staring them in the face, some artists might decide to forego the typical hit record to take their sound in a direction that no one was prepared for. Although Phil Collins may be able to claim to have a knack for writing timeless melodies, he admitted that he almost let one of his biggest hits be thrown in the garbage.
When Collins began his career, he wasn’t expecting to be the kind of artist who got the most media attention. Since he was behind the drum stool for most of Genesis’s glory years, Collins was more than happy to bash away on the skins and keep his head to the ground, with Peter Gabriel working his magical stage presence whenever the group performed live.
By the time Gabriel left to look after his young child, Collins would valiantly step up from behind the drum kit to have a go at being the vocalist. Since he had done most of the background vocals on the previous albums, Collins fit like a glove when he eventually got behind the microphone, having a tonal similarity to Gabriel while still being able to create his unique sonic identity.
Once Collins started having his own marital troubles, though, he ended up putting his band on hold to work on his marriage while putting together the tunes that would make up his first solo album, Face Value. While many tracks resulted from Collins pouring his heart out about his broken marriage, like ‘In the Air Tonight’, he admitted that one of the standalone singles from around that time was an afterthought.
Coming up with different hymns of heartache, one of Collinss melodies resulted in ‘Against All Odds (Take a Look At Me Now)’, which was far more straightforward than anything he had done with Genesis. While many of the tracks on Face Value benefited from being emotionally primal, Collins didn’t see the merit in the song until he was convinced to use it for the Hollywood movie machine.
Collins put it on the shelf for years before the movie Against All Odds was released. The drummer and songwriter was asked to write a track for the movie but without time to produce it while on tour, he decided to offer the studio a sniff of the tune he had been leaving in the cupboard for years. Even though Collins felt the track needed a bit more tempo to be featured on his first solo project, he later admitted that the song was too perfect for the film.
Talking about its development to Rolling Stone, Collins remembered it being a no-brainer to get it on the soundtrack, saying, “It was written around the same time as ‘In the Air Tonight’, but I discarded it. A couple of years later, I was asked to write a song for the movie called Against All Odds. I said, ‘I’m not able to do it on the road, but I have a demo of this ballad’. It was basically like saying, ‘Here’s $10million. Would you want it?’”.
That would only be the beginning of Collins’ work with the silver screen, eventually turning in time to work on various soundtracks for Disney years later on films like Tarzan. While the idea of making a sweeping soundtrack song for a hit movie felt like the furthest thing from prog rock, Collins knew that he had something with this track that was far greater than any complex rock exercise could have given him.
