The one Phil Collins album Phil Collins hates: “Why did you have to bring me down?”
He may well be the most unconventional pop star the world has ever known, but trust us when we say that Phil Collins was a bona fide pop star in every sense of the phrase.
Yes, he looked like your dad, and wore your dad’s shoes, and jeans, and shirts, and in fact could well have been your dad, but Phil Collins was also a hit-making machine in the 1980s. And, for the most part, nobody truly thought he would get there.
Given that he scored more top 40 hits than anybody else during the 1980s, people were proven to be dead wrong. And, given such a plethora of bangers, you would be correct in assuming that Phil Collins would be more than satisfied with his output during those consequential years.
After all, throughout the decade, the Genesis man was incredibly productive, scoring success with the prog-rock legends, as a solo musician, and on collaborative efforts with other artists. Cementing his status as one of the great songwriters of his era, his hits during this febrile period include the likes of ‘In the Air Tonight’, ‘Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)’ and ‘Sussudio’.
In contrast, Collins also entered the 1980s as one of the most maligned men by the younger generation because Genesis were one of the most antithetical groups to punk. Collins wasn’t swayed, though, and continued his journey, reaching new, soaring heights. However, despite all of this, he made his significant reservations clear regarding some of his most famous efforts from this chapter.
Although No Jacket Required is one of his most successful albums to date, featuring hits such as ‘Sussudio’, ‘One More Night’ and ‘Don’t Lose My Number’, as well as boasting heavyweights of the era such as former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel, Sting and Helen Terry, it is an album that Phil Collins describes as one of his “least-favourite records”.
Collins said this is down to him not being himself on the album. He claims that only a small amount of his true self is imbued in the record as he enlisted people to collaborate on it who could do things he “wasn’t capable of doing.” Collaboration is no bad thing, but it certainly comes with a drawback or two. Firstly, the introduction of new ideas sounds all well and good, but the reality is that the singular vision is often diluted. Secondly, collaboration also has a habit of losing the main reason audiences by the record in the first place: to hear Phil Collins.
Collins reflected on No Jacket Required when speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016. He said: “Why do you have to bring me down by asking about this one? It’s from one of my least favourite records, No Jacket Required. 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.”
The truth is, no matter how deeply he was derided by those notoriously icy gatekeepers of ‘cool’, Collins was always unbashedly himself. This transferred into everything he did and surely endeared him to his fans. To remove that by adding in so many new voices, Collins lost the key drive for all his records: himself. Collins concluded: “At the time, I wasn’t being me. I’ve grown up a bit now and much prefer to play songs that are me. I only play a bit part in that one.”
Listen to No Jacket Required below.
