The producer who refused to work with Phil Collins because he didn’t want to ruin his work: “He likes it the way it is”
Working with a legend like Phil Collins is bound to be daunting for any producer.
It’s one thing to work with someone that you’re on equal footing with, but when there’s a legend among your ranks, it’s hard to get a word in about where you think a song should go. And while Collins was one to check his ego at the door, that wasn’t enough for some of the heavy hitters from the next generation.
Then again, Collins doesn’t really seem to get enough credit as a producer in his own right. Sure, a handful of his songs can sound incredibly saccharine next to the more complex prog-rock acts that came before him, but when working with Eric Clapton, he did help give the guitar legend a second wind in many respects. And that’s before even getting into his work with Peter Gabriel as well.
While Collins’s greatest gift to the world in the 1980s was that fantastic drum fill in the middle of ‘In the Air Tonight’, that all came from working on Gabriel’s solo records. After not liking the idea of having any cymbals on his record, Gabriel started utilising different techniques with Collins until they finally landed on the massive snare sound that would become commonplace in the ’80s.
Although the sound of a decent snare was already a must in any rock and roll production, it would become even more essential once the hip-hop scene started. The first major samples always came from using a great drum break, and everything from James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ to Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ felt like the perfect drum samples to use when people like the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy first started.
A young Pharrell Williams may have only just begun trying out his own beats by the time that Collins was a superstar, but when Collins reached his later years and began working on remixing his old catalogue, Williams was the first person he called. He knew that he knew a way around the beat by working with NERD and Jay-Z, but Williams knew that the opportunity to act as Collins’s ears on his remasters was bound to be a mistake.
Face Value was already one of the essential albums of the 1980s, and despite Collins’s insistence that it needed touching up, Williams said there was no way that would change a thing about it, saying, “At one point in the beginning of this process, my manager and I asked Pharrell Williams, who’s a bit of a fan, to remix all of Face Value. I thought maybe that’d be interesting to do. And Pharrell came back, apparently, and said, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ Because he likes it the way it is.”
At the same time, the idea of remixing old albums for the modern age is always going to be a gamble. It’s nice to hear different artists’ interpretations of how a classic record should sound, but it’s not like every Collins fan would have been happy with someone throwing in the biggest names in modern music on the track, either. Even in the case of music guru Rick Rubin, he readily admitted that his twist on ‘We Will Rock You’ ruined the song, so there’s a good chance Williams wanted to avoid that kind of attention.
It’s nice to know that one of the biggest names in pop music would have had complete confidence in you making an updated version of their album, but the pressure that goes along with that is the kind no one would wish on their worst enemy. Because if any artist takes on that challenge and strikes out, they’re not going to want to lose sleep knowing they could have done a better job.
