The Article
Phil Collins: The Man That Everyone Loves to Hate?
14th September 2016
- Title: Face Value
Label: Warner/Atlantic
He has amassed seven Grammys, two Golden Globes, an Oscar and 100 millions album sales but it seems that the fashion of hating Phil Collins has continued unabated. There’s been a lot of stories written about Collins, most of which are untrue. His naivety does get in the way, though: allowing himself to be jetted across the Atlantic onboard a first class Concorde seat to play both Live Aid concerts in one day, while Africa suffered, was not clever. That he has produced a host of cheesy music is also unmistakable and that he was at the helm when (for many prog fans) the glory that was Peter Gabriel-era Genesis slowly took a nose dive with Collins at the wheel is a sad fact. But he’s also contributed to many lauded projects from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, John Martyn and let’s not forget Brand X while he has been recently name-checked as influential by contemporary artists such as Lil Kim, Kelis and ODB.
Of all of the solo works that Collins has produced, it is Face Value, his first outing, that features his best work: possibly because it was derived from pure emotion. Collins divorced his then wife, Andrea Bertorelli, in 1980 after ‘bored-with-Phil-touring’ Andrea ran off with the couple’s decorator. As a bitter message to his ex, Phil sang his 1981 solo hit In the Air Tonight on Top of the Pops sitting at his piano with a pot of paint and a brush.
“My marriage broke up and I said that I was leaving to go and live in Vancouver and I told the guys (the other members of the band, Genesis) that I was leaving,” said Collins, looking back at the creation of the album, Face Value. “They said, ‘Hang on, don’t leave, let’s just put things on ice for a bit, we’ll do our solo albums.’ I had a lot more time an energy, because it was something for me to do.”
As for the bitter lyrics displayed in the album’s first hit single, In The Air Tonight, Collins is not in the least contrite, “I’ve never had any regrets. It was the first line of the first song that I thought of when the song started. Those lyrics were improvised. I never wrote them down. I was at home, practising, getting my machines working and then I started singing, ‘Well if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand’. After I finished singing it, I then wrote them down on some paper so I didn’t forget them. And who’d have thought, on the back side of the piece of paper, was the decorator’s name and address.”
Face Value was almost written like a jazz album, said Collins, “I would improvise like a jazz musician. All very organic. I would always start with a demo which I would then transfer to multi-track.”
The album itself eschews high concepts and prog complexities and relies more on passionate vocals and pop structures on tracks such as Thunder & Lightning and glossy ballads such as This Must Be Love and the Mark Knopfler-esque, The Roof Is Leaking all topped off by singles such as I Missed Again and the star track, In The Air Tonight, which starts in very Peter Gabriel fashion. Oh, and the last track, Tomorrow Never Knows? Despite what Rolling Stone says, this is not a bad rendition. This was ‘Beatles Goes Prog’ and Phil has cache to burn here.
Now Face Value has undergone a reissue that includes a bonus disc of rarities, live cuts and b-sides, “It’s basically an opportunity to rediscover and reassess my stuff,” said Collins. “You realise along the way that a lot of people think they know you. They think they know you by the songs that they are plied with on the radio: In the Air Tonight, I Missed Again and so on. That is what Phil Collins has become, over the years. Hence, this reissue sequence is an opportunity to let people hear what they may have missed. When you wrote an album, back in my day, you wrote eleven or twelve strong songs. CD meant that you cherry picked the best three or four and filled in the rest but one was as good as another, as far as I was concerned. Hence, one hopes that people will rediscover a whole bunch of material that they missed.”
People who hate Phil Collins always do it for the dumbest, most retarded reasons. Who the hell cares if Genesis “sold out” and went pop during the 80s? So did Peter Gabriel with his solo work after the first four albums, and it was still good music regardless of what genre he was giving a try at.
Why should Genesis still play prog when Duke was clearly meant to be their farewell letter to the genre? They knew that if they kept writing the same symphonic prog numbers they’ve been doing since 1970 it would eventually get old and Genesis would eventually become a parody of their own selves. They went pop, it was still good pop with some prog in it and tracks like Me and Sarah Jane, Mama, Dodo/Lurker, Home By The Sea, Second Home By The Sea, Land of Confusion, The Brazilian and Domino are some of the best pop and prog pop material of the 80s.
Get over it already, it’s been decades since Phil Collins “ruined” Genesis and prog fans are still butthurt over this.
A stirring, full blooded defence of the man, Collins. Nicely put and thank you for your comments. You make some valid points there. Personally, I wonder if Phil’s impatience and boredom with lyrics based upon fantasy subjects and otherworldly situations prompted the change too. I seem to recall Collins commenting on this during a candid moment. Actually, parts of Duke were very appealing to prog fans (Duke’s End comes to mind) while Abacab (1981) is a forgotten classic.
Your comment about Genesis “nose diving” after Peter Gabriel is not a “sad fact” it’s a sad opinion. There are many of us who enjoyed each era. This article is based on your opinion. Phil has done a lot of great work as a solo artist. For example “Hello I Must Be Going” is just as great, if not greater then “Face Value”. This article is just an opinion disguised as a fact. Sad, you should know the difference.
Hi Jon – I did qualify that statement by attributing the point of view to “many prog fans”. For those fans, the quality dive was a fact. Many early Gabriel-centric fans were not happy when he left and were not happy with the later change in creative direction. A change the Collins was all too happy to talk about in the media. I even remember Collins being interviewed on the children’s TV programme, Tiswas (of all things) when Duke was released, talking about his desperate need to move away from fictional stories of elves and wizards (I’m paraphrasing here, but it was an allusion the fantastical at any rate) towards more real life, down to earth, subjects. A change that brought tremendous commercial success, it has to be said. Maybe I should have reworded that part of the sentence to emphasise that assertion?
Actually it was Peter Gabriel that walked out on genesis so really he is the one that ruined them. Personally I think Phil Collins was a better frontman anyways and back in the days so did a lot of genesis fans but all of the sudden people are now saying Peter Gabriel but Phil was the one to take genesis to the top of charts. They became more successful with out Peter Gabriel how did come to that if Phil was so bad? I really don’t care but Phil Collins was a power force in the 80’s and nobody could hardly stop him and everything pretty much turned to gold for him and only thing I can say you go boy and enjoy hard earned career and being successful that a lot of musicians and they the haters are jealous because your career was so successful than there’s will ever be.