The 2010 album Phil Collins wouldn’t have missed for the world: “The most enjoyable record I made”
There was only so much time Phil Collins could devote to making pop songs before he had enough.
He was one of the biggest stars of the 1980s for a good reason, but when you look at how many times people were playing his videos or Genesis songs or one of the dozen bands that he was producing, there was a point where almost everyone seemed to turn on him for some reason. So after having his say for more than a few years, he was only going to be making music for himself after a while.
Then again, that’s not to say that he still couldn’t find time to make the odd classic on the big screen. Elton John had already made a mint out of creating all the music for The Lion King, but Collins is one of the few people who could have given the ‘British Piano Man’ a run for his money. Tarzan is still one of the finest Disney soundtracks that anyone has ever made, and even if Collins was effectively retired from making new music after Testify, hearing him score a movie like Brother Bear was far better than it had any right to be, considering how long he’d been in the business.
But after the first official farewell tour from Genesis, Collins still had the bug to make one more record. Or at least he would have been if he was up for it. His hands had taken a heavy toll after drumming for so long, but after being floated the idea of working on an album of the greatest Motown songs that he had grown up with, Collins knew that it was too good an opportunity for him to pass up.
He was born and raised listening to some of the greatest soul songs of all time, and it’s not like you couldn’t hear it in his own music. Earth Wind and Fire had enough respect for Collins when Philip Bailey collaborated with him on ‘Easy Lover’, and even looking at his back catalogue, people like Pharrell Williams still held Face Value as one of the gold standards for production, so hearing him dip his toes into R&B wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
And once he got The Funk Brothers to say yes to being the backing band, Collins was going to do everything he could to make the record work. These were the musicians who had helped put together all of those classic Stevie Wonder songs back in the day, and if he was to try his hand at singing tunes like ‘Uptight’ and ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’, he was going to need to come correct whenever he turned up for work.
The whole album was a challenge, and Collins even needed to tape his drumsticks to his hands a few too many times, but he felt that nothing was going to get in the way of him doing justice to these tunes, saying, “It’s full circle for me. I’ve made a record with the people who’ve made the [original] records. It’s the knot at the end of the rope that ties the beginning to the end”.
“It’s the most enjoyable record that I’ve ever made. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
But half of that does come from the songs that he’s playing. A lot of the critics did say their piece about how Collins wasn’t exactly breaking any new ground or making some bold new renditions to the Motown classics, but that wasn’t the point, either. The album is practically a love letter to his youth in a way, and he had some of the greatest musicians from back then to work on the record; he wanted the tunes to sound as pitch-perfect as they did when he heard them for the first time.
And since this is looking like the last album that Collins will ever make during his lifetime, seeing him go all the way back to his youth is like placing bookends on his career. He had grown up as a kid from England who loved soul music just as much as rock and roll, and after spending his days becoming one of the biggest pop artists in the world throughout the 1980s, this was his way of going back to the beginning and making music just for fun all over again.
