The 1982 hit song Phil Collins will always regret: “It was a record of its time”
Phil Collins didn’t need to focus on being the biggest star in the world when he was in Genesis.
Most drummers tend to get used to hanging out in the background and not worrying about what the lead singer is doing or whether or not they will get one of their songs on the record, but Collins was one of the few who seemed to transcend everything that his role was supposed to be. He was more than willing to become a pop star once his solo career took off, but he always felt that there were more than a few records where he came up a bit short compared to some of his greatest hits.
But it’s hard to be that clinical about a career that was started by accident. The entire concept of Collins becoming a solo superstar wasn’t his idea, but when Face Value started to generate a little bit of buzz in the industry, he wasn’t going to spoil his chance. ‘In the Air Tonight’ was his calling card for a while, but if he was making his own music, he wanted to cover the kind of territory that he could have never done with Genesis.
No matter how much Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford claim that they were never shown ‘In the Air Tonight’, Collins figured that the tune gave him a chance to have some fun with music again. And while Brand X already gave him an outlet for more complicated drum fills and jazzy sections every now and again, why couldn’t he go in the exact opposite direction and try his hand at singing some soul music?
That might sound a bit off-the-wall, but there was no rule that said that Collins needed to stay a pop star. He already had his issues with traditional rock and roll before Genesis even started, and if he was going to make his own records, he wanted songs that would reflect where he was at the time. He was still a massive fan of bands like Earth, Wind and Fire, and given how his favourite band, The Action, was a soul band when he was a kid, going into the Motown vaults wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
And it’s not like he’s that far off the mark when he’s singing The Supremes’ ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. For any other band, this would have been the kind of cynical cash grab that made everyone a bit leery of Collins, but you can tell from his performance in the music video and the way that he locks into the groove that he genuinely loves this music and wanted to make a version that he could be happy with.
When he started working with the real Funk Brothers on Going Back, though, he started to realise that there were many pieces of his cover that were well off the mark, saying, “We didn’t spend quite as much time on ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ as we should have done, I don’t think, in terms of trying to get the right Motown sound. We got what we thought we could, but we went far deeper on [Going Back] with the way we recorded it. Certainly though, it was a record of its time, and people, hopefully, have discovered where it came from.”
Then again, it’s hard to really compare anything with what the Funk Brothers were able to do on all of those classic records. Bob Babbitt is still one of the finest bass players to ever walk the Earth, and even when he’s working on some of the greatest lines he ever played, no one was ever going to have that swinging style, especially if they were trying to emulate a god like James Jamerson.
But Collins did at least have the wherewithal to realise that he needed the right people if he was going to work on this kind of music. It may have opened new doors for Genesis when they included horns on ‘No Reply At All’, but by that point, it was no longer one of Collins’s passion projects. They were all soul fans, and no amount of labelling them as a prog band was going to stop them from making their own brand of music.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.