The five Phil Collins songs that even Phil Collins can’t stand
Phil Collins first started writing songs in his bedroom, penning tracks about heartbreak that the public would never hear.
He wrote using the key of D minor, saying that it was the “saddest of chords,” which helped him create what he called “a very naive but heartfelt ballad”. While this track might be long lost to the confines of Collins’ childhood bedroom, that moment represented what would become a major part of the musician’s life: writing songs.
Throughout his career, whether it was working for Genesis or putting music out as a solo artist, Phil Collins was always willing to work on a variety of tracks in the interest of pushing himself creatively. The result? Well, some tracks are the greatest to ever be laid on wax, and others are best left forgotten. The musician himself will admit that a lot of the music he’s put out in his career has fallen short of the mark, as there are plenty of songs scattered around his discography that he simply can’t stand.
So, let’s have a look at what these are. After all, a song has to be a particular kind of bad for the person who originally wrote it to turn their nose up at it.
The songs that even Phil Collins hates:
‘Burning Rope’
Phil Collins was happy to work with Genesis, and wound up making a great deal of music while there; however, there were some songs that rubbed him the wrong way. One of these was ‘Burning Rope’, a track which has a sound that turned Collins away from the band. While it was a song he had to put his name on as a member of Genesis, it’s not one he ever revisited upon leaving.
“To me, this song is a period piece. It doesn’t make it in the twentieth century. I know there are people who like this music, but I just couldn’t get up on stage and play or sing this kind of material anymore,” he said. “I had a lot of tom-toms back then. The fill just keeps going down and down and down. I think I played this kind of thing back then because I didn’t like some of the material. I was trying to come up with ways to make it interesting.”
‘Living Forever’
Collins has admitted that when he looks back on Genesis, he tends to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the band. This is understandable, given he was in the group for such an elongated period and managed to put out both good and bad songs during his time there. There are some songs he looks back at fondly, and others less so. One of the tracks he wishes wasn’t in his discography was ‘Living Forever’.
With this song, it’s less than he thinks it is a poor piece of music; rather, he believes the band could have done better with the large instrumental section in the middle of it. “’Living Forever’, for example, on We Can’t Dance, I think it is, that flashes into my brain,” he said when discussing songs he regrets, “It’s one of those songs with an instrumental sequence in the middle of it. And in those days, we just did it once or twice […] There’s plenty of things that listening back I’m probably a bit embarrassed about.”
‘Illegal Alien’
This is just one of those songs that you listen back to and cringe at. Every band is allowed to put out some tracks here or there that can reflect on and be embarrassed about, and in the case of Genesis, this song comes in the form of ‘Illegal Alien’. It was supposed to be a politically relevant song about the hardships a lot of immigrants face, but it was instead done in poor taste and seemed to mock those trying to come to America.
The vocals in the song are pretty offensive, as they seem to assume the point of parody. One of the worst lines comes when the central character offers up his sister for passage into the country, which isn’t just a line that has aged poorly, it’s one that was never appropriate to begin with. “I’ve got a sister who’d be willing to oblige,” Collins sings, “She will do anything now to help me get to the outside.”
‘No Reply At All’
You have to give credit where it’s due. Phil Collins and Genesis have always been the kind of artists who are willing to push themselves creatively, both in their approach to songwriting and how they put different tracks together. They did this by putting horns and different jazz elements on their songs, some of which worked, but that completely failed in other instances. During a period of reinvention, Phil Collins decided to put horns on the song ‘No Reply At All’, and the end result was a track that people hated and Collins regrets.
“I thought, if we’re going to reinvent ourselves, why not have horns on it?” he recalled, “This is a song here that sounds like a funky, R&B thing, so let’s put horns on it. So we did it, and people hated it.”
‘No Jacket Required’
This one isn’t even just a song, but an entire album. A lot of people love listening to Collins’ solo offering on No Jacket Required, but Collins himself wasn’t a huge fan of it. Once again, those pesky horns, as well as a desire to work with a range of different artists, led to the creation of a piece of music that Collins was deeply unhappy with.
“It’s one of my least favourite records, No Jacket Required,“ he said, “I wanted to work with different people at the time, people that could do things I wasn’t capable of doing. So I got ahold of Dave Frank [from the New York synth-pop duo the System], and I said, ‘Do you fancy having a go at this?’ And he programmed the whole song. There’s a killer horn section.”
