The 1978 song that became Phil Collins’ greatest compliment: “Made us a bigger band”
Phil Collins didn’t need to go through life looking for praise from his peers whenever he made a song.
He knew that he could make tunes that people could relate to after a while, and even when he was working with Genesis, he always found time to focus his energy on what the song needed rather than throwing in a bunch of musical nonsense in between everything. A lot of what he was doing had a lot more to do with capturing the right feeling on every song, so when his friends were able to see what he was going for, he was practically on top of the world.
But not everyone was going to like what Collins was working on every step of the way. There were more than a few rock stars who absolutely hated what he stood for when they first heard him, and even when you look at the way that Collins moved throughout the 1980s, there are even a few times where he seemed to be completely over the idea of making pop tunes and being on MTV 24/7. He needed a place to stretch, and you can hear him stretching on a lot of his later material.
Make no mistake, he was still creating pop songs, but not all of them needed to be the surefire hits that ‘Sussudio’ was. Even in the Invisible Touch era of Genesis wasn’t meant to last that long, but when you look at the road that it took for them to get there, Collins was clearly inching his way into becoming a pop singer. The Peter Gabriel era had absolutely nothing to do with #1 hits or anything, but Collins felt that working on tunes like ‘Follow You Follow Me’ was a bold new direction for the band to work in.
Because you have to remember that prog rock bands weren’t destined to have hits. Even when Collins stepped out from behind the drum kit and “ruined” the band in some people’s minds, A Trick of the Tail isn’t really a pop record by any means. They were still testing themselves in terms of musical size and scope, but their breakout single from And Then There Were Three was the first time they could actually make a song with hooks that still held together as a prog rock tune.
Collins wasn’t going to be doing any of the crazy drum fills that he used to on this song or anything, but he did get a massive boost when he heard Weather Report doing a version of the tune. The world of fusion was never that far away from prog back in the day, and while Collins had his own fun working with Brand X back in the day, hearing the true legends interpreting his song was one of the greatest thrills of his life.
These were seasoned veterans, and he felt like he had arrived when they thought enough of his tune to actually cover it, saying, “It was another step on that ladder that made us a bigger band than we were before. I remember when Chester Thompson joined, he told me that in Weather Report, they always used to play that song, and I thought, ‘Alright’. We must have been doing something right if Weather Report said ‘there’s something there’.”
And you can definitely hear what the fusion veterans would have seen in a song like this. There isn’t too much going on in every single instrument by any stretch, but since every band member is playing their own hook whenever they perform the tune, everyone seems to have their chance to shine, especially for someone who was as adamant about the backbeat as Collins was whenever he made a song.
So while most rock stars aren’t in the business for the spectacle and the trophies, getting a pat on the back from one of the greatest bands of the time couldn’t have hurt Collins’s ego. If anything, this was the era where the band was still unsure of where to go, and this was the kind of confidence that they needed to become much bigger than anyone could have imagined.
