The 1960s singer Phil Collins never got to work with: “I realised it was important”
When someone’s been in the public eye as long as Phil Collins has, there are bound to be a few musicians that end up slipping through the cracks.
Even though many people try to get everything crossed off their musical bucket list, there’s a good chance that none of them is going to be able to say that they’ve worked with anyone and everyone who has ever been inspired when they first started writing music. But even if Collins has a few regrets about not working with people, he did at least give it a fair shot when looking through his body of work.
Because going through every one of his albums, you’d be hard pressed to find someone that he didn’t manage to work with in the 1980s. Aside from his work with Genesis, Collins was almost omnipresent every time he released a new record, even managing to pop up on records by Eric Clapton and Peter Gabriel when balancing his own songs. There was no real escape from the guy, but that might have been the biggest problem after a while.
It’s one thing for the audience to have an intense demand for a certain artist, but when they start to be on everyone’s screens one too many times, there comes a point where people are going to want to listen to literally anyone else. That wasn’t Collins’s fault, but he did at least have a few missed opportunities when it came to working alongside someone as legendary as Aretha Franklin behind the scenes.
You have to remember that Collins’s first love was soul music when he got started, and even if he was playing the most complex music imaginable in Genesis, he did think that there was some room for him to be an R&B star as well. ‘Sussudio’ was already him trying to make a Prince pastiche, and since his last-ever album was all about going back to those old records, it wasn’t out of the question to put a little bit more respect on Franklin’s name by working with her.
But even if he isn’t in the proper physical state to perform anymore, he did at least have an inkling of what he wanted to do if he was still able, saying, “There’s a few people I’d love to have worked with – Aretha Franklin would have been nice. My daughter told me it was dangerous to stop working – ‘It’s part of what you are, you’re a writer/ – and I realised it was important. What’s nice is I now realise people miss me.” And given his status in music today, Collins’s is still giving people reason to miss him.
As much as Franklin is treated like one of the true legends of vocal prowess, Collins should be commended for taking pop music to a new level. He was the one who helped come up with the drum sound that defined the 1980s, and even if he made some of the soppiest songs of all time, you could tell that everyone was grasping onto tunes like ‘Against All Odds’ because they genuinely loved his way of crafting melodies.
And let’s not forget the impact that he’s had on the hip-hop community. It shouldn’t make sense given the fact that he looked like the average businessman every single time he clocked in for a show, but his work with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Pharrell Williams putting some shine on his name was enough to put him in the good graces of up-and-coming artists who only knew him from watching Tarzan.
But if you look at his collection of classics, there isn’t anything that Collins ever made that Franklin wasn’t there to lay the groundwork for. She was the vision that everyone had to follow if they wanted to sing R&B right, and no matter how much soul credentials Collins had, it was going to be difficult even being in the same room with someone who could belt like that.
