“Would have been nice”: the two artists Phil Collins always wanted to work with
When you’ve had a career as filled with success and glory as Phil Collins has, when it comes to retirement or the later stages of life, you’d imagine you spend the majority of your time looking back at all of the great achievements in your life. There’s no use in rueing the missed opportunities when you’ve won eight Grammys, an Academy Award and four UK number one singles, and sitting back to bask in former glories is perhaps the better way to bow out.
However, Collins does have regrets about certain aspects of his career, and no, it’s not butchering a Diana Ross classic that causes him the most discomfort. He may well have had a wonderful career as the drummer and later vocalist for prog rock legends Genesis and worked with many of the biggest names in music during his time as a solo performer, but there are still a handful of things that he never got to cross off his bucket list still bothering him.
As though working with Brian Eno, Eric Clapton and Robert Fripp throughout his career wasn’t enough, there are a couple of artists that Collins wishes he had the chance to work alongside, and in all honesty, they’d have been pretty incredible artists to add to his already expansive collection of collaborators.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 2017, when asked about any regrets about his career, Collins revealed who his unrealised dream collaborations would have been and lamented what might have been if he had ever had the chance to play with them. “There’s a few people I’d love to have worked with,” he told the magazine. “Miles Davis would have been nice, Aretha Franklin would have been nice.”
While Davis wasn’t known for having worked with many artists outside of the world of jazz, a meeting between him and Collins would still have been an interesting prospect, with his rhythmic drumming potentially being a good fit for Davis’ exploratory trumpet playing. On the other hand, Collins’ love of soul would have worked a dream with Franklin, and having their voices combined on a track or album would have been a wonder to behold, even if the ‘Queen of Soul’ might have outshone him.
Both of these choices might seem like unusual ones considering his history as a prog rock and soft-pop performer, but Collins’ work is loved by many from other corners of the music world, having been sampled by hip-hop and R&B artists such as Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Kelis and Lil Kim at various points. There’s a clear universal quality to Collins’ work that may have meant that working with Davis and Franklin weren’t mere pipedreams and that they could have realistically existed had he pursued the opportunity.
Outside of musical regrets, Collins elaborated on other aspects of his life that he could have done differently, and while he jested about potentially trying harder in his marriages, he said that one piece of advice from his daughter was that “it was dangerous to stop working”.
“It’s part of what you are. You’re a writer,” she told him prior to his retirement. Collins’ response to this was touching: “I realised it was important. What’s nice is I now realise people miss me.”
