The one song Phil Collins said he could never get away with: “You’re accused of being middle-aged”
By the late 1980s, there didn’t seem to be any kind of music that Phil Collins couldn’t make his own.
While that could have been both a good and bad thing considering your personal taste for his voice, you couldn’t deny that he had his fingerprints on some of the greatest artists that the decade ever spat out, whether that was jamming with Led Zeppelin, performing with Genesis, or working with fellow legends like Philip Bailey and Eric Clapton. For all of the people he worked with, though, Collins did at least know when to be sensible about his track record every now and again.
Then again, there are a few moments in his solo career that will have people scratching their heads for years as to what the hell he was thinking. A song like ‘Sussudio’ might be nothing more than a silly pop song, but even by the brainless standards that most people were used to, even Collins had to admit that there were more than a few moments in that tune that he probably wouldn’t have made if he worked on the tune today.
After all, the prog wheelhouse that he had worked in for years wasn’t exactly pointing to him making those kinds of songs, anyway. Collins was the kind of artist who was far more comfortable bringing something new to pop songs, and while he did have his moments of covering Motown songs virtually note-for-note, it’s easy to see his love for the medium when working on tunes like ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’.
But the 1980s were about much more than his flavour of pop music. While his work with Clapton did give him some hits and made him the darling of adult contemporary, that’s not what was going on on the street. Most people were interested in seeing what the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna were putting out around that time, but Boy George was a whole different medium than what Collins was ready for.
Granted, it’s not all that strange if you listen to the music. Boy George was far from the first artist to become one of the biggest names in music wearing makeup, but looking at his approach to glamour compared to the likes of David Bowie or Marc Bolan back in the day, Collins admitted that he was dumbfounded by what he was doing with the rest of Culture Club when making their classics.
Although Collins did enjoy a few of their tunes, he felt that he could never manage to tap into the same kind of sound that Culture Club could at his age, saying, “I mean, I write love songs, really. Very unfashionable thing to do. If you look like Boy George, you can sing a love song like ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’. If you’re me and you sing a song like that, you’re accused of being middle-aged. It’s a peculiar set of affairs.”
It might not be the most fair metric in the world for Collins to work with, but it was about much more than the age difference. The prog fans had already had their fill of Collins making tunes like ‘Invisible Touch’ after coming from the Peter Gabriel of the band, but judging by the way that Collins adopted soul music into his sound, it would have been a step too far for some fans to see him make a full-on soul record.
A handful of heterosexual rock and roll fans may have had their guards up against anyone who looked like Boy George back in the day, but the fact that Collins wanted to be able to sing songs like him is really a testament to the talent that they had. They weren’t to become the new faces of rock and roll or anything, but there are still singers who wish they could deliver a song like ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ on their best days.
