The best arena song Phil Collins ever made: “It’s perfect”
Phil Collins really feels like the last guy most people would expect to draw a stadium’s worth of people.
As much as people like to listen to some of those classic songs whenever they come on the radio or show up in movies, it’s strange to think that someone who looks like someone who would typically do your taxes would have that much swagger when they step out onstage. But even if Collins loves the idea of giving the people what they want, not every one of his songs typically translates into being one of the greatest arena rock songs of all time.
Granted, there’s a special place for him in rock and roll heaven because of ‘In the Air Tonight’. That song was made to have that build-up, but if you take away one of the most epic drum fills of all time, the whole thing would almost seem a little too moody to put into a stadium full of people. They want to sing along to the hits for the most part, and while Collins wasn’t exactly that kind of artist, he did end up leaning into it a little more when Genesis started turning towards pop more and more often.
The hardcore prog fans might have been pissed, but it paid to have millions of people singing back the hook on a song like ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight.’ And when you look at a lot of his greatest solo songs, all of them sound that much more fun when being played on a grand stage. ‘Against All Odds’ is one of the best ballads that he ever made, but when looking through his own catalogue, Collins felt that ‘Can’t Turn Back the Years’ was the kind of tune that needed to be played on a grand stage.
But when Collins was playing it towards the tail end of his performing days, he was more than happy to let his son, Nic, play most of the tune while he belted things out, saying, “That’s one of my favorite songs I’ve written. In fact, we didn’t do that either in South America, but we will be bringing it back to America. I think it’s perfect for an arena. Again, it shows what Nic is capable of because that’s a drum machine part that really doesn’t change. He has the kind of discipline to play that as if it was a human machine.”
Then again, Collins’s definition of an arena song is often very different from what the rest of the audience wants to hear. Those prog epics would have sounded great back in the day, but since they didn’t have the foresight to tone things down, there’s a good chance that even some of the most epic songs that Genesis ever made would turn to sludge in a live environment if they weren’t mic’d up properly.
And it’s not like ‘Can’t Turn Back the Years’ is the kind of singalong that Queen would have been proud of by any means. In fact, it’s one of the moodier tracks on Both Sides, but even if Collins was coming from a more private place when writing a lot of those songs, what really matters is how every single piece of the band plays off each other when you get into those massive arenas around the world.
The music itself isn’t doing all that much, but when you have those chords reverberating across that kind of landscape, it just brings so much drama to every single second. And given how great the background vocals sound, this is the kind of tune that would have made for a decent soul song if the whole thing managed to get brought up in tempo ever so slightly.
Is it going to replace a song like ‘Invisible Touch’ if Collins were to go out on the road one more time? Probably not, but the fact that Nic could lay down a groove was Collins’s way of showing his son the kind of power that music can have when you’re dealing with a crowd that big. There are plenty of artists who try their best to impress their listeners, but if you want to get into those arenas, you need to leave space in there to get everyone’s attention.
