The 1981 song Phil Collins said pissed off Eric Clapton: “Everyone said they couldn’t hear him”
Throughout the mid-1980s, it felt like Phil Collins practically got a free pass to do anything and everything he wanted to do.
He never looked like the kind of person cut out to be the same showstopping star that Prince or Madonna was around that time, but the fact that he fit perfectly with the rest of the stars on MTV whenever he made a solo record or worked with Genesis says a lot about his charm. People simply loved hearing his voice on the radio, but being in the spotlight did mean upsetting a few people along the way.
But it’s not like Collins hasn’t taken some of his drawbacks in stride from time to time. Live Aid is still looked at as one of the most disastrous gigs he ever played when he got onstage with Led Zeppelin, about the fact that he kept making new records and seemingly get bigger with every one of them was the kind of success that not even Jimmy Page could have taken away from him back in the day.
When Collins made his first solo record, he wasn’t banking on becoming one of the biggest solo stars in the world. Face Value was only meant to be a collection of songs ripped straight from his broken heart, and a lot of the tracks were about him trying to make sense of how to move on without being too bitter. He could leave a lot of his anger behind on ‘In the Air Tonight’, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t call on a few friends to help him out.
Despite him working with everyone from The Funk Brothers to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, getting Eric Clapton on his debut record would at least give him a shred of street cred with his audience. ‘Slowhand’ had been going through one of the darker periods of his career throughout the late 1970s, but when he turned up for ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy’, he was still ready to throw down just like he did back in his days of working with Cream.
That is, until he actually heard the record. While Collins would become mates with Clapton for years, the whole point of getting him on a record like But Seriously was because of righting the wrongs that he had done to him by burying his guitar solo in the mix, saying, “Clapton played on Face Value, but he played very, very quietly on ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy,’ and everyone said they couldn’t hear him, and he complained that I never asked him to play on any other albums. So I asked him to play on his one, and he plays great.”
Granted, not every Collins song is exactly screaming for a guitar solo every time it comes on. In fact, a lot of Collins’s best songs really come from the whole band playing off each other, and if it does focus on one instrument, it’s usually centred around the piano, so it’s not like it made sense for Clapton to make the kind of massive guitar extravaganzas that he was used to doing throughout his glory days.
If his guitar wasn’t going to work on one of Collins’s albums, though, the drummer knew how to get the best out of Clapton when producing some of his records. Behind the Sun is still fairly contentious in Clapton circles because of the massive 1980s production behind the songs, but there’s no chance that a record that has a song like ‘Forever Man’ on it was being produced by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.
Collins’s taste may have been a lot more mellow than what Clapton expected, but he did at least learn a lesson about what to do when a guitar god walks behind the booth. Not every guitar part is made to be a showstopping crowdpleaser, but no one should make the mistake of putting one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time in the background.
