“I lost the plot”: why Phil Collins regretted his work with Eric Clapton
Although he is certainly in the twilight of his career, Phil Collins must be delighted with all he’s achieved. Not only has he scored numerous pop hits, with him leaning heavily into the 1980s’ penchant for blue-eyed soul and the yuppie aesthetic, but he’s also considered one of the founding fathers of prog rock and, perhaps more importantly of all, deemed one of the best drummers of all time. To have had such an extensive career and tapped into different areas with such success were the lofty heights that Collins dreamed of when watching his heroes, The Beatles, do it in the 1960s.
Despite the level of his success, Collins still has a list of regrets that he can’t escape. While the most famous is being snidely omitted from former Beatle George Harrison’s solo classic, All Things Must Pass, there are numerous other things he has expressed his grievance at.
Undoubtedly, the most uncomfortable was being made to feel like a dunce by another ex-member of the Fab Four, Paul McCartney, at Buckingham Palace, of all places, where the ‘Yesterday’ songwriter let his nice guy mask slip and mocked Collins for asking him to sign a copy of Hunter Davies’s The Beatles. As you can imagine, being so brutally ridiculed by a lifelong hero in public, at the bastion of British high society, left Collins with a bitter taste in his mouth that has never reduced, despite McCartney later reaching out to the former Genesis man after he went public with his story.
Although being bullied by musical heroes is the kind of thing that ruins lives, there are other moments in the studio that Collins also laments. One of the ones that gives him the most discomfort, just so happens to also feature another musical legend. The figure in question is the fellow Surrey native, Eric Clapton, who Collins hired to perform the guitar on two tracks of his hit 1981 album, Face Value, the record that produced ‘In the Air Tonight’. It’s an often overlooked point, but old ‘Slowhand’ supplied his storied six-string skill on ‘The Roof is Leaking’ and ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy’.
When speaking to Digital Trends in 2016, Collins recalled working with Clapton and playing with him and his band ‘In the Air Tonight’. They could not believe what they were hearing with the gigantic drum sound and were in disbelief that the rhythm instrument was so loud and commanding. It was nothing like anything anyone had ever heard, and lo and behold, it would shoot to the higher climes on the global charts after it was released as the album’s lead single.
While Clapton was a big fan of the record’s sound, Collins holds regret because of the final mix of the track ‘The Roof is Leaking’. He admitted to ‘losing the plot’ as the final mix paled in comparison to that on the demo track heard on Extra Values. Collins says that he tried to get Clapton to record the same thing every take, which is just not what the blues-rock maestro is about; he’s an in-the-moment player.
Collins explained: “I had Eric come down to the studio to re-record the [Face Value] song, The Roof Is Leaking. And I missed the plot there — I lost the plot, really. What he does on that song’s demo — you can hear it on the [Extra Values] bonus disc, mastered from a cassette — is what it should be, and also what he did in the studio is what it should be. I had wanted him to do the same thing each time.”
Collins admits that managing Clapton in such a way was a mistake on his behalf and does not know what he was thinking at the time, trying to box in such an expressive player. Eventually, he got slide guitarist Joe Partridge to replicate the same take every time on ‘The Roof is Leaking’ and maintained that he did possess the special “thing” the former Cream man does, so it wasn’t quite the same. No wonder he rues that missed opportunity.
