“I was hoping to get a call”: The one singer Phil Collins always wanted to join
We didn’t really need another Phil Collins side project, given all that he had done for rock and roll.
He was one of the greatest prog drummers of all time and moonlighted as one of the greatest breakout pop stars of the 1980s, but given the fact that he was constantly in the public eye, any more attention he was getting was going to cross that bridge from endearing to annoying really quickly, especially with songs like ‘Sussudio’ becoming more prevalent on the charts. But Collins did understand a little bit of self-restraint, even if it meant not getting the call from some musical legends.
If Collins had his way, though, he would have been jamming with every one of his heroes as much as he could every single time he performed. He wasn’t going to let his time in the spotlight go to waste, and even if he was making some of the greatest albums of all time on his own, it wasn’t that big a deal for him to provide the backbeat to the ill-fated Led Zeppelin reunion or help Eric Clapton get his groove back when he straightened himself in the 1980s on records like Behind the Sun.
But Collins’s time away from Genesis tended to be a double-edged sword. A lot of people would have expected him to phase out his old band, but Collins’s deft balancing act of both of his outfits is something that bands should have done more of. He could put his ego to the side if it meant making a record with his mates, but there was a lot more going on on the pop charts that demanded a follow-up to songs like ‘In the Air Tonight’.
Looking behind the scenes, though, Collins had a much more hands-on approach to creating the sound of the 1980s. The work he did with Brian Eno and especially with Peter Gabriel on his solo records helped pioneer the drum sound that defined the decade, but given all of the progressive bands that he was working with, he wanted a chance to break into the sphere of progressive pop as well.
He had already worked on an album that had Kate Bush on it, but if he had the chance to work with Eno, the next step would have been for him to work with David Bowie. ‘The Starman’ had already been turning pop in the 1980s, and Collins felt that he would be able to make some fantastic songs had Bowie asked him to join the party when working on records like Let’s Dance with Nile Rodgers.
Collins knew his way around a slick groove, but he remembered waiting for the phone to ring instead of going down to the studio with Bowie, saying, “I was hoping to get a call from Bowie because he had then got Eno to do his album. What Bowie does is like respectable disco, and it’s a good area. It’s disco without the (pounds first in hand, several times) bass drum. Bowie I’ve got great respect for the way he handles himself.”
But while Bowie was certainly aware of Collins, it might not have been for the right reasons, either. He had described his pop era as his ‘Phil Collins years’ more than a few times, and since he had a need to move on to something different by the early 1990s and had some disparaging things to say about Never Let Me Down, the jury’s out on whether or not he viewed Collins as a worthy collaborator.
Even if Collins never drummed on a single Bowie record, though, his legacy was already secure as one of the greatest pop stars of the time. He was looking to give the audience more than their money’s worth whenever he made a record, and hearing his drums on ‘In the Air Tonight’ is enough to make anyone wish that one of Bowie’s dance records had that same sense of power behind it.
