When Phil Collins turned Elvis Costello’s songs down: “I didn’t think they were any good”
How many impressive scales one can run through does not dictate whether or not you will be a great pop musician. The rules of any artist are defined by how they use the tools at their disposal, and even if punk bands spent their entire careers knowing only one chord shape, some of the greatest in that field still managed to make some of the best music of their generation. However, for progressive rock, most people needed to know their way around their instrument a bit more, and Phil Collins knew it when he saw some of his contemporaries slipping.
It’s not like Collins couldn’t walk the walk when it came to something more extravagant. The running joke might have been that he watered down Genesis, but from the minute that he started working in the group, he had enough stamina to put any other drummer to shame, especially when keeping his place throughout the drastic changes throughout a song like ‘Supper’s Ready’.
Even when he started making pop tunes, his work was a lot more sophisticated than anything else going on in the early 1980s. He had already worked with Peter Gabriel to develop that distinct ’80s drum sound, and when people heard Face Value, there wasn’t one drummer listening who didn’t want to figure out how to make their kit sound as massive as he did on ‘In The Air Tonight’.
But the beauty behind a lot of his pop stuff was how simple it could be. You have to remember that Collins still held The Beatles in high regard, so he understood that one of the hardest things in the world was being able to make a song that was fairly simple but also managed to give the listener something they had never heard before. Then again, he wasn’t the only resident Beatles nerd on the charts.
Around the same time Collins was breaking through on his own, Elvis Costello had been writing the book on how to make punk rock a bit more sentimental, especially after going through strange detours like Imperial Bedroom. While Costello’s brand of writing was enough to catch the ear of Paul McCartney when working on albums like Flowers in the Dirt, Collins remembered rejecting a handful of Costello’s songs when working as a producer.
Despite liking a lot of what he heard from the pub rocker in the past, Collins felt that what he was given was far below his usual standard, saying, “But there really weren’t that many good ones, and we had Costello submitting songs – I only heard two of the three he sent, but I didn’t think they were very good! Now, I like Elvis; some of the songs he writes, I think are fantastic, especially his earlier stuff. He’s a guy who I believe what he’s doing is good because he’s not an idiot, he’s a very astute bloke, but the songs I heard, I didn’t think they were any good.”
Then again, it’s important to take into consideration who Collins was working with at the time. He had taken a break from his solo career to put together tunes for ABBA singer Frida Lyngstad, and considering Costello was still in art-rock mode, it was going to be a tough sell trying to get the voice behind songs like ‘Take A Chance On Me’ to embrace their inner David Byrne.
Even if Collins rejected working with Costello the first time around, it hardly seemed to bother him all that much. Costello always approached his music like it was a full-time job, and even if someone didn’t see the beauty in a song that he did, it wasn’t going to take him long to either tweak it or come back with something even better.
