The song Phil Collins said made people hate him: “Not really my fault”
No musician gets to make the rules in terms of how they are treated in the music industry. Anyone can try their hardest to please their fanbase and make the music that they want to hear, but it’s anyone’s guess whether that will garner you a decent reputation or make you look like one of the goofiest artists to walk the Earth. Nickelback still sell out stadiums for a reason, and there’s a massive contingency of people flocking to Limp Bizkit shows, but in the late 1980s, there was no way anyone could escape Phil Collins if they wanted to.
Was Collins really ever that bad, though? Sure, some of his songs may have been a little saccharine in his solo career, but he definitely had the chops to pull off something amazing, and listening to some of those early Genesis record, he is flying off the handle in a way that could give someone like Neil Peart a run for his money in places.
In fact, are we sure that Genesis’s “pop albums” were entirely Collins’s fault? It’s easy to pick on him for being the balding superstar playing the frontman on some of their most milquetoast songs, but if you look at the writing credits on an album like Invisible Touch, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford are equally as responsible for the band getting more mainstream soundscapes in the mix as the drummer was.
There had to be something more than writing pop songs, and one look at the charts around the late 1980s will tell everyone what was wrong. When he wasn’t in Genesis, Collins was making waves as a solo artist, or contributing to albums by Peter Gabriel, or working on the comeback for Eric Clapton, or drumming for Led Zeppelin at Live Aid. Even if you’re the guy’s biggest fan, that’s a lot of Collins all at once, and no song got the brunt of the blame more than ‘Sussudio.’
“I wasn’t particularly happy about being the whipping boy for the ’80s. You may have heard ‘Sussudio’ a hundred thousand times, but I only wrote the song once.”
Phil Collins
But for all of the people who complain about the song being everything wrong with 1980s rock, Collins felt that it was hardly a good reason to hate on him, saying, “There was a time when I wasn’t particularly happy about being the whipping boy for the ’80s — which I didn’t think I necessarily deserved, because I always say, you may have heard ‘Sussudio’ a hundred thousand times, but I only wrote the song once, and I only recorded it once. The fact that people play it is not really my fault.”
However, he does make a fair point. No one can tell the radio stations what they can and can’t choose to play from any given artist, and ‘Sussudio’ is the victim of a song that was pretty toothless but still accepted for unknown reasons. Most people wouldn’t have batted an eye if it was tucked away at the end of No Jacket Required, but since those nonsense words were burrowed into people’s skulls, there was no way to avoid it.
The biggest crime, though, is that it gives people the exact wrong impression of what Collins’s music is like. Considering how many different avenues he went down with Genesis and solo, this would be like trying to get someone interested in Paul McCartney and playing them a song like ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ first. It’s not the worst song in the world, but it’s not doing Macca any favours, either.
There are plenty of more inexcusable moments in Collins’s career that should be left by the wayside like ‘Illegal Alien’, but ‘Sussudio’s refusal to go away is still one of the hardest bridges to cross for fans. He could have been a perfectly nice guy, but it was a lot easier for people to take one look at him in a suit in the video singing nonsense and automatically want to change the channel.
