“I just moaned about it”: The Robert Plant incident that inspired a Phil Collins classic
Do you ever wonder where your favourite album gets its name from? Ever wondered what inspired The Beatles to come up with the wacky title and concept of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Do you ever ask why Fiona Apple loves turning her album titles into full sentences and then has to truncate them for people to actually remember them? There’s obviously always a story behind an album title, no matter how ridiculous it might be, and one of the more unusual ones is Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required.
Genesis were no strangers to an unusual or mysterious title, with Selling England By The Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway being some of the more cryptic names in their catalogue, and Collins also came out with Hello, I Must Be Going! early on into his solo ventures as well. While all of these examples surely mean something to the artists themselves or perhaps the most devoted fans of their output, No Jacket Required is still perhaps a more perplexing moniker to have dished out.
What sort of jacket, you may ask? Had Collins had a hearty lunch at home, and was therefore declining a baked potato, or was he coming up with a title on a warm spring day where he felt brave enough to leave the house in short sleeves? Neither are true, but the story does come from an unlikely source that one might not normally associate with Collins and his music.
Having gone on tour with former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant in the early 1980s, the two have plenty of stories to tell about one another and the time they spent in each other’s company. However, it was a clothing mishap that he made in Plant’s that incensed Collins so much that he chose to dub his next record with the unusual title that left many confused.
Speaking to interviewer David Sheff in 1986, he revealed that it was during a stay at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago that the duo attempted to go to dinner together in the establishment’s Pump Room restaurant, where they were apparently unaware of the strict dress code that they were enforcing. “We had maybe 30 rooms in the hotel and were paying these exorbitant prices,” Collins recalled. “The second night I was there, I went to the bar dressed fairly smart – proper trousers, not jeans, and a nice leather jacket – and I was told, ‘Sir, you can’t come in here without a jacket.’”
After Plant pushed the maître d’ aside to get into the restaurant, Collins kicked up a fuss about the fact that he was wearing a jacket that the staff deemed unworthy of their smart attire policy. “I thought of different things to do,” Collins continued. “Like maybe going down there wearing the right kind of jacket and ordering a drink and just pouring it onto the floor and saying, ‘Well, I’ve got a jacket on! You can’t do anything to me.’ Maybe I should smash a few photographs on the wall, a bit of the Robert Plant attitude. But I did nothing, of course. I just moaned about it.”
Collins clearly held his deep-seated emotions intact for a long time, and was clearly still livid about the incident that he chose to give his 1985 album the title, No Jacket Required. Whether or not he’s now learnt from his poor judgement of how to choose the right attire for a certain situation isn’t clear, but he’s probably averse to returning to that particular establishment.
