Phil Collins, ‘One More Night’, and a personal feud with a music critic
Rock stars have reputations for living life on the edge; look at someone like Axl Rose, for example.
This is a man who didn’t just have an aggressive demeanour, both in his voice and on the stage, he carried it around with him like a bundle of belongings. Read about his life in the early years of Guns N’ Roses, and you’ll be met with a plethora of references to fighting frenzy, when the rock star was pushed a touch too far and ended up taking it out on whoever did the prodding.
This is a pretty common attribute for a lot of rock stars. It’s one thing to be a good musician, sure, but you should also have a bit of edge, a bit of something which separates you from the crowd. That being said, there are some artists who didn’t subscribe to such an attitude, and one of them was Phil Collins.
Once dubbed the nicest man in rock ‘n’ roll, Phil Collins isn’t one to entangle himself in scandal if he can avoid it. He’s been writing songs ever since he was little; he’s always been deeply passionate about it, and if you listen to his music, whether it’s solo stuff or that which he made with Genesis, said passion bleeds through. Who has time for being an arsehole when you’re too busy living the dream?
“Well, it’s true that I always end up apologizing for being a nice guy,” said Collins, “I don’t understand why I have to. I do interviews and then the writers come back and say, ‘My editor doesn’t believe you’re like this and he wants more to make the story better’. Like what? Sex? Drugs? Sorry. This is me.”
He continued, “A writer in England went up to my mom and asked her what my faults were. She said, ‘I can’t think of any of his faults’. So the headline was: ‘Faultless Phil. Mr. Perfect, by his Mom’. She read it and went berserk. She doesn’t need that at 73.”
While he prided himself on being nicer than your run-of-the-mill rock star, Collins also admitted that he wasn’t a soft touch either. He liked to avoid controversy, focus on the music; however, there was a line, and people were capable of crossing it.
“I’m nice until I have a reason not to be,” he said, “I work hard, and people sense that.”
One critic who seemingly crossed that line was a man called Robert Hilburn, who wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Hilburn had had some choice words to say about Collins’s music, and they rubbed the singer, drummer extraordinaire, the wrong way. Collins went so far as to mention Hilburn by name in an interview, claiming that the critic straight up didn’t like him and that his judgement was clouded as a result. The song he mentioned in particular was ‘One More Night’, which Hilburn hated, but Collins thought his reason lacked substance.
“I don’t have to accept the critics who obviously just don’t like me,” said Collins, “Robert Hilburn [of the Los Angeles Times] just doesn’t like me. He wrote a review of ‘One More Night’, complaining about how many times I use the line ‘One more night’ in the song. How many times does Bruce Springsteen say ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ in ‘Born in the U.S.A.’? Well, Hilburn is a huge Springsteen fan. And the point is irrelevant.”
