The “dream” band Phil Collins always wanted to work with: “It’s fantastic”
By the end of the 1990s, Phil Collins had pretty much done anything that he really wanted to do in the music industry.
Anyone else would have been proud to have accomplished a third of what he had done and still been happy, but after selling the most records of almost anybody in the music industry, he was more than happy to bow out gracefully and only make the odd song off and on for the rest of his days. And while he did have a few times where he popped in the odd children’s movie, there were a few pieces of unfinished business that he needed to take care of before fully retiring.
First off, Genesis deserved a much better ending than they did after Collins left. The idea of them continuing on without Peter Gabriel was already a gamble, but once Collins announced that he was leaving, bringing in Ray Wilson on Calling All Stations was never going to work, given how little people seemed to care. So during their 2000s reunion tour, it felt like everyone got to see the version of the band that had truly dominated the 1980s.
But Collins was already nursing his own problems behind the scenes. A lifetime of drumming to the best of his ability was bound to do a number on him when he got older, and while he did struggle to even hold a stick towards the start of the 2010s, he was determined to keep moving forward, however he could. He didn’t have time for traditional pop songs anymore, but why not make some covers of the tunes that he loved as a kid?
Cover albums are never a horrible idea, and with Going Back, Collins went back to his roots in soul music. The entire record was a love letter to the Motown songs that he had loved as a kid, and while Collins did a great job singing them, it’s not like he was trying to break new ground. He wanted to make the songs as faithful as possible, and that meant getting the best of the best to play on the tracks.
Then again, the idea of actually getting The Funk Brothers on the record almost seemed impossible. Collins had already spent years working with the biggest names in fusion and classic rock, but after a few phone calls, he was shocked to learn that every living member of the band was up for playing the tunes again. So when he showed up at the studio, he practically walked into a dream world.
Having that kind of foundation underneath songs like ‘Uptight’ was what he grew up listening to, and stepping into the shoes of all those singers he loved was beyond Collins’s wildest expectations, saying, “[Bassist] Bob Babbitt is [there] and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This is a dream right?’ This is a guy who I’ve been singing [his] riff all my life and now he’s playing it on my record. It’s fantastic.”
Anyone else would have melted into a puddle seeing those guys in the room, but the common language always came back around to the music. It wasn’t going to be easy for Collins to match the kind of takes that he did back in the day, but when you listen to how the entire record sounds, he was determined to make the kind of record that would act as a time capsule for those songs.
He had grown up listening to them when he was a kid, and the least he could do was make a record that reminded people what made them so great when he heard them. The whole point of music is to carry on songs to the next generation, and while Collins already had his fair share of classics, he wanted to make sure that some of the bands that he dreamed about weren’t going to get forgotten.
