“It’s hideous”: The 1983 song Phil Collins is ashamed of
In early 2026, despite health issues and a career stretching back decades, Phil Collins revealed that he still has the urge to “fiddle about” in the studio. His musical curiosity has never waned.
Every artist is going to want to find those opportunities to work outside of their wheelhouse. Even if they’ve made great strides with their respective bands, there’s a wealth of genres out there to explore, and even if it ends up being a terrible mistake, it’s better to learn from them rather than getting stuck with one sound of the rest of your life. That’s a mantra that the former Genesis man has lived by throughout his career, and seemingly, even in retirement, too.
While any fan of Collins in his prog days may have needed a strong stomach for his potently poppy 1980s material, the drummer could admit when things were going a bit off. It wasn’t lost on him that he had ventured a fair distance from the Genesis sound for which he was known.
But it’s important to know that Collins was not the almighty destroyer of Genesis like so many people thought he was. He certainly had a hand in bringing their music to a broader audience, but when Peter Gabriel left, there was a more democratic approach to songwriting, meaning that Collins had an equal amount of input compared to Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford when making tunes like ‘Follow You Follow Me’ and ‘Invisible Touch’.
Granted, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t safe from some truly horrible stuff in his solo career. Even if ‘In the Air Tonight’ fills clubs to this day and No Jacket Required sold in droves, Collins’s constant presence on the charts and the handful of embarrassing tunes like ‘Sussudio’ is enough to convince anyone why people like Noel Gallagher considered him the “antichrist” when he first formed Oasis.
That’s an incredibly harsh quip that Collins rightfully bemoaned. He figured he had just become big enough for people to take a swipe at for their own sakes. “There’s a tendency for people to be cynical about popularity, like you’re appealing to the lowest common denominator, which is another term for trash. It’s an insulting attitude, he told David Sheff.
Continuing, ”Insulting to the audience. I mean, sometimes I feel it. Like, God, I wish I were David Byrne, with this small, tight group of fans. The critics would like me. Instead, I’ve been taken less seriously because I’ve been more popular – I’m cast aside as some sort of Barry Manilow. I find it frustrating.” Yet, there was one hit that he thought the critics were correct to criticise.
Phil Collins’ worst ever song?
While in his pop phase, though, Collins never stopped experimenting, and that meant working with people like Frida Lyngstad when asked to perform on her album. Despite ABBA being considered the kiss of death for any self-respecting rock and roll fan, it’s practically impossible to be a living, breathing human being and not enjoy at least one of their songs, whether that’s the beginning of ‘Take A Chance On Me’ or belting out every word of ‘Dancing Queen’.
When Collins stepped into the picture, though, his duet with her on the song ‘Here We’ll Stay’ is one of the biggest fumbles of his career. He did a fine job working with artists like Eric Clapton in the past, but the sugary nature of the song is well outside of his field of expertise, making him and Lyngstad sound like they’re putting together something too soft for Disney Channel.
Despite Collins having a great knack for pop hooks, he knew that he had made a mistake working on the record, saying, “That was a complete lapse of taste on my part – l think it’s hideous. This is the one thing I’m not going to try to get out of. When we chose the song, I was singing it to her to try and get her to loosen up, because it’s different if you’re foreign to sing English lyrics, and I didn’t think Frida sounded convincing on that track. So she said, ‘Maybe you could sing this with me’, and at the time, I didn’t think of it as a duet.”
It’s not like Collins can’t do great duets. Hearing him go back and forth with Philip Bailey on ‘Easy Lover’ is still breathtaking, and anyone should have musical superpowers to be able to make soft rock work with Bone Thugz-N-Harmony, but none of that magic showed up when this session started. In fact, it is almost as though Collins just wanted the whole thing done and dusted with, and he has clearly been very ashamed of that ever since.
But maybe it was a case of them getting mish-mashed in some way. The biggest names in pop music tend to come together through a stroke of luck, but if ‘Here We’ll Stay’ proves anything, it’s that not every musical legend is bound to make sparks fly with their contemporaries.
