Episode 321 - Phil Collins

Welcome to Soda Jerker

0:00Hello and welcome to this very special edition of Soda Jerker on Songwriting. It's Brian and Simon here and joining us for episode 321 is a renowned English singer, drummer and songwriter. His recorded output, both under his own name and as a member of Genesis, has inspired

0:33generations of musicians, and you could say it struck a chord with the listening public too, shifting in the region of 150 million records to date. His list of collaborators includes the likes of Quincy Jones, Lamont Dozier, Robert Plant, John Martin, Paul McCartney, Tina Turner, Brian Eno and David Crosby. He's an Ivor, Grammy, Golden Globe and Oscar winner, and later this year will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. He was previously inducted as a member of Genesis in 2010, the same year he received a prestigious Johnny Mercer Award from the

1:05Songwriters Hall of Fame, of which he's also an inductee. So he's decorated basically is what we're saying. This autumn we'll see a 45th anniversary deluxe reissue of the record that launched his solo career, 1981's Face Value. We got to sit down with him in London recently to hear all about the creative process behind that record and other high points from his extraordinary life in music. We're honoured to welcome the one and only Phil Collins to the show. We've been lucky enough to meet a few legendary figures over the years. We certainly have. It's always thrilling, isn't it, Bri?

1:36Oh yeah. And meeting Phil was no exception. Such a buzz, yeah. And despite all the health challenges he's faced in recent years, he was looking very well and in great spirits. It was lovely to see. Our guest was born in London in 1951 and grew up in Hounslow. He received a toy drum kit for Christmas when he was 5, graduated to a proper one when he was 12 and wrote his first song of 15. Also a talented child actor, from the age of 14 he attended the Barbra Speaks Stage School, during which time he portrayed the Artful Dodger in a West End production of Oliver.

2:07Phil turned to music full-time in 1970 when he joined Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett in prog-rock outfit Genesis and later co-founded jazz fusion group Brand X. Following Gabriel's exit in 1975, our guest reluctantly replaced him as lead vocalist. When Hackett's departure in 77 reduced them to a trio, Collins, Banks and Rutherford pivoted to sophisticated, radio-friendly pop rock on albums like 1980's Duke, 1986's Invisible Touch and 1991's We Can't Dance. Phil parted ways with the band in 1996, but there have been

2:41occasional reunions, most recently for the 2021-22 Last Domino Tour. It was at the tail end of the 70s, during a period of great personal turmoil, that Phil began to gather the batch of songs that would eventually make up face value. Aided in no small part by the moody, instantly arresting hit single In The Air Tonight, complete with earth-shattering drum fill, the album shot straight to number one in the UK and reached the US top 10. The rest of the decade encompassed arena-filling tours, further number one albums like No Jacket Required and But Seriously, and an unbroken run of 13 top 10 singles. Among them, Against

3:15All Odds, Easy Lover with Philip Bailey, Susudio, One More Night, Two Hearts from his 1988 movie Buster, and Another Day in Paradise. Then there was the small matter of Phil performing on both sides of the Atlantic on the same day for Live Aid in 1985, appearing at Wembley Stadium in London before crossing the pond on Concord to perform in Philadelphia, a remarkable feat in anyone's book. Phil's tireless work rate continued throughout the 90s and beyond. In 1995, he was brought on board by Disney to write several songs for an animated version of Tarzan. Following the

3:48film's eventual release in 1999, he was awarded the Best Original Song Oscar for You'll Be In My Heart. He also composed the songs for the 2006 Broadway adaptation. We'll leave it there, I think, because we've got an interview to get to. If you want the whole story, you can't go wrong with Phil's very readable 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet. If you're just discovering Soda Jerker on songwriting and you like what you hear, we encourage you to follow, rate and review the podcast on your platform of choice, and explore our catalogue of well over 300 songwriter interviews spanning almost 15 years. You can support this fully

4:22independent ad-free show at sodajerker.com slash donate. Just before we move on, we are forever indebted to Ben for his help setting up the interview. Okay, that's more than enough from us. Here we are, down in the big smoke, talking face value and much more besides, with Mr. Phil Collins. So you finally came right out and said it, girl. Why took you so long? It was in your eyes.

4:54And looks to never fall too long.

5:00I'm waiting in line. Would you say if I was wasting my time?

5:09Did I miss again? I think I missed again. Oh, oh.

Making Face Value

5:16Phil, great to meet you. My pleasure. We've spent many years talking to songwriters about how they do what they do, but we never honestly dreamed we'd get a chance to do this. So thank you for being on the podcast. Oh, you're welcome. Yeah. I guess it's come up in conversation, obviously, over the years, but I've never really thought too much about it. You know, you just do it. So it's interesting to see if I can baffle you with something. Well, we're glad to see there's a new face value box set coming along. It's one of our

5:48favorites that actually, it was kind of a landmark album, wasn't it? A bit of a sort of wardshed moment creatively. Well, I mean, for me, certainly, I can only say that I didn't set out to make a solo album. You know, if we go back a little bit to that period, my first marriage was kind of in disarray, if you like. My wife took our two kids, Jolie and Simon, to Canada, and I

6:18was going to follow to sort things out. That didn't quite work out as planned. So I came back to England, by which time Tony and Mike were on their first solo albums, because I said I was leaving the band, basically, to go and make things work in Canada. So when I came back a couple of months later, no, a few months later, there was nothing for me to do. They were in the middle of their records, so there was no Genesis project. And we had

6:50just come back previously from a tour in Japan. So we all, at the same time, got these home studios, which were Allen and Heath, which was a make that was affordable, and it was kind of you as friendly. So I started to learn how to operate that in between visits to the pub, you know, come back after the closing time, you know, and fool around on piano. I had a

7:21room in the family house that I'd given over to be in a studio, and the equipment was set up in that. It wasn't soundproofed, and I think it had wallpaper on the walls. It had a drum kit, small drum kit, in case I wanted to play or record the drums. I had a grand piano that my aunt had left me in a will. I had a Fender Rhodes, and I had a Profit 5. And in Japan, we'd been given these drum machines, CR78 by Roland. I had that as one of my tools, and I started

7:57to just play around, and that's really all it was, you know, mucking about. It was really literally just making it up as I went along, trying to get things onto tape. It was an eight-track tape, and I started to riff around and play around with different chord sounds, different chord sequences, different approaches to, you know, the drum machine. And slowly, over a period of weeks, and then months, I kind of gathered together a lot of ideas, which some of them

8:31were kind of complete-ish. Some of them were just kind of fragments, and they developed into what was to become face value. Somewhere in amongst all that, Genesis started to get back together again to write and rehearse

9:11what was to become Duke. And we came in each with a couple of ideas. I played them my stuff. They chose a couple of songs to go on Duke that otherwise would have been on face value, like Please Don't Ask and Misunderstanding. So I was given the job of taking Duke up to London to play it to Amit Ertigan, who was Atlantic Records' boss. I played him Duke, and he liked it, and said, We're looking forward to releasing it. And what have you been doing? So I said, Well, I've been

9:46writing, mucking about. He said, Well, let me hear it. So I played him my cassette that I had of all my rough ideas. And he got very excited, and he said, This is a record. You know, you've got a record here. I want to help you with this record. I kind of couldn't face, I think, getting the demos better. I just liked what I heard on my demos, you know, and that to me was the essence of the material. I'd met Hugh Padgett with Peter Gabriel, recording for Peter Gabriel 3. I'd really got on with Hugh

10:21and thought, Well, if I'm going to need an engineer, which I am, I'm going to do it with Hugh. So I asked him, and I said, I'd like to take my demos in and use them as the template for the record. He was up for that. And so we copied my 8-track tape onto 24-track, tried to get it as hiss-free and as click-free as possible. And then we carried on overdubbing onto that, onto 24-track. And that became the record. So it kind of made itself without me noticing, you know?

10:53Yeah. You must have been really happy with your original performances just in the room to be able to build on them. I was happy, yeah. I mean, they weren't without the faults, you know, hand-in-hand, which ended up being a huge stage song. There's odd bar lengths in that song, because I literally didn't know where I was going to put my hands next. Then I'd play the chord, and so it ended up being a bar 5 instead of a bar 4, you know? So some of them were happy accidents. Some of them were just because I liked

11:24this particular sound. Like on In the Air, I liked that pad sound that I had from the Prophet. I'd set up a drum machine pattern, which was kind of interesting on the Roland machine, and that became the bassist for In the Air Tonight, you know? It was just like one happy accident after another. And I think it was this belief that I couldn't probably replicate that, that that became the way I made my records. Yeah, I was going to say that. It set a template, didn't it, for the rest of your solo albums?

11:57On some albums, like No Jacket, Choir, I gave a couple of songs to a programmer, David Frank, who was in a New York group called The System. And I kind of liked a couple of things I'd heard from The System, and I just invited him to come over and work on a couple of things that I was doing. Didn't know him, but he came over and he did Studio, and he did Who Said I Would, using computers, which was a world unknown to me. Autocorrect didn't exist, you know?

12:29So it wasn't carefully thought out. Yeah. There was no design for the whole thing. With that album, No Jacket, I was a little tired, I guess, of being thought of as a guy that does the ballads, the big ballads, you know? There was only a couple of them by that point. I mean, One More Night was on No Jacket. That became a big ballad. But I'd had Against All Odds, and everybody wanted Against All Odds Mark II, you know? And that was something that I wasn't interested in doing. So I set out

13:02on No Jacket to make a dance record, which is something that I'd never done, couldn't do really in theory, but just got a few of the tools together to make it a little bit more in a different area, I guess. I, if she called me, I'd be there. I'd come running, anywhere. She's all I need, all of my life. I feel so good if I just say the word. It seems like rhythm seems to underpin almost everything. So is that where you started, pretty

Rhythm and Drum Machines

13:52much in the writing process? Would you maybe turn on the Roland and just begin with that atmosphere before you got anything else? Yeah, it's either a sound or usually I will set up some kind of rhythm. Normally, it's not a snare drum, bass drum, hi-hat, you know? Right. It's normally percussive sounds or sounds like you get on the 808, the Roland 808, you know? I found that I'd kind of outgrew the CR78 quite quickly, you know, because it's quite limited. And we used it on stage for a couple of tunes. We used it a couple of tunes on Duke. The 808 was next,

14:28and that was much more user-friendly. And the sounds were kind of, at the time, new. Yeah. I mean, they're down to death now. But when I started using it, it was still a novelty. And from there, I went to the 909, the Roland one, which kind of formed the basis for some of the songs on No Jacket, like Take Me Home and things like that. That started with the rhythm. It's literally painting, but without the numbers, actually. It's not painting my numbers, but it's just, what do I want to hear? You know, I want to hear this. And that's really how I started

15:04writing. I mean, I sometimes think I'm not really a writer. I'm just lucky, I guess, because some of the ideas work. But it's not like I feel like I'm a songwriter. I still struggle to come up with something that I like or I haven't done before. You know, so it's been a learning process and still is a learning process. I wonder if you feel that way because it's so intuitive. It doesn't feel like you learned some formal thing that you apply. You just kind of follow your instincts.

15:38Yeah, yeah, exactly. It sort of seems to be too grown up to actually call it songwriting. You know, when you're getting away with murder, you know, it's actually just having a bit of fun and getting some noises and putting them together and seeing if they sound okay. With the reissue

The Influence of Brian Eno

15:54of face value, for example, I've been reminded of working with Eno, Brian Eno, because way back in 74, when we were doing The Lamb with Genesis, he was upstairs doing his first solo album. And Peter asked him if he'd come down and put one of the vocals through his synthesizer. And, you know, I can remember, you know, just fiddling around with the VS3, I think it was, and getting some funny squeaky noises out of it. And we all thought, oh, this is good.

16:27And as payment for that, I got sent upstairs to play on his album. You know, instead of writing a check, you know, session fee, he just said, oh, you know, I need a drummer for a couple of songs. So they said, oh, Phil, go up. So anyway, so I went up and played on the track and we became good friends. And so I got a call to play on what was to become another green world and before and after science and music for films. And it was the way Eno worked that kind of inspired me and certainly

17:03gave me the confidence to use these home demos because he would come in with a tape that he'd made the night before at home, come in with a quarter inch Reeboks tape and play something. And we had a pool of musicians. There was me, Robert Fripp. There was Percy Jones from Brand X. It was John Giblin sometimes, Paul Rudolph from Hawkwind. You know, it was all different bunch of people that he knew or had met. But anyway, it was just a different environment. Didn't matter if it had a little bit of his on it. It was what you did with it. It was what the idea was. And that

17:39really gave me the confidence to use my demos as opposed to going in the traditional way and re-recording the demos with proper musicians. Yeah. And it's a way of avoiding demo-itis as well, which is a condition that afflicts many songwriters. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They can't recapture the magic. Yeah. I mean, uh, home studios opened the eyes of every musician that aspired to do anything. And it's not just the financial aspect. It's not just a question of looking at the clock and thinking, Oh God, I've only got two hours. I've got to come out of today with something.

18:12You know, you don't do that. You just go in when you feel like it. And you know, if you're involved in something, you feel like it all the time. So you could go in there and spend endless hours without costing anything and just really do it until you got it the way you like it. And once you've got it, it's only music. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's not brain surgery. It's only music. And if it makes you feel good and you like it, it's good enough. And me, I'm getting stronger by the minute

18:45My wife's expecting, but I hope she can wait Cause this winter looks like it's gonna be another bad one But spring will soon be here The basic structure like it is in a building is the foundation of the thing. And if the building is built well, you can throw anything at it and it'll always have that feeling, you know,

19:21it'll always have that spirit.

Improvising Lyrics

19:23So was that why on, in the air tonight, you sort of spontaneously just came out with those words. They weren't pre-written because you had that firm kind of instrumental foundation going that you just felt free to improvise the words. Yeah. I could encourage that kind of thing, that kind of way of writing, but it takes a while. You know, it takes a while to not be embarrassed by your own company. You certainly have to have big balls to go in and do it in front of other people. When I was working with Genesis,

19:54our music was always pretty much. I mean, obviously there were certain songs that people brought in that were almost finished, but we'd all improvise and make mistakes. And eventually those mistakes would be fewer and fewer. And eventually it would come together and you have something that was born out of nothing. And certainly with the later Genesis albums, when I was singing, I would set up a drum machine pattern, just something interesting. Again, not snare drum, hi-hat bass drum, but something

20:28interesting. And the guys would spark off that. And then I'd sing along. And sometimes the lyrics were rubbish because you're just improvising. Sometimes you'd come up with a whole idea. I mean, Home by the Sea, which is kind of a classic Genesis song. The idea for that came from me singing Home by the Sea. Home by the Sea. I just kept singing it. And Tony took that and wrote the story

21:01that was, you know, Home by the Sea, Haunted House, blah, blah, blah. He picked it up and ran with it. But the thing started with me just singing that phrase, you know. Invisible Touch, was that another one where you came up with that chorus line just on the spot? Yeah. And I mean, I wrote the lyrics to that. So once I'd sung, She Seems to Have an Invisible Touch. I mean, once you got that, oh, I know what the song's about. This song's about this. So it really was very easy. And if you don't have anything, then of course, it's a little difficult.

21:33There was a song, Driving the Last Spike, which was on the We Can't Dance album. I wrote the words to that. There was nothing to hang on, nothing that would suggest what that song could be about. And it went through a lot of mood changes. I wasn't used to writing songs like that. But I happened to have been sent a book just out of the blue from a friend of mine about the railway navvies. And I was reading it. And it just seemed that what I was reading, you know, guys going off, leaving the

22:05family behind and going off and digging the tunnels and laying the tracks, you know, interesting idea for a song. So that became Driving the Last Spike. For me, that was something I'd never done before, writing a story song. No Son of Mine, you know, there are plenty of Genesis songs that just came out of a phrase that's sung. And so if you take that to its logical conclusion, you're sitting in front of a microphone at home. No one's there to sort of say, oh, you silly thing. You just, you know,

22:38no one's judging you. You just sort of spitball. So in the air tonight, yeah, chorus just totally came. But the first verse was spontaneous. Second verse, if I remember rightly, I wrote just because I'd written the first verse. And I kind of knew by that point, the game was up, you know, you knew what it was going to be about. But it's something that takes a lot of time to get into that mentality of being able to do

23:09it. Of course, yeah. Because a lot of people are probably reluctant to have a go, you know. I can feel it coming in the air tonight. All I want. And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life. Oh, Lord. Can you feel it coming in the air tonight? Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.

Humor and Televangelism

23:49We also really like the place of humor in your lyric writing as well. Like the Genesis stuff you mentioned, we grew up in that era with, you know, I Can't Dance and Jesus, He Knows Me, songs like that, which really had a humorous element to them. You remember that video where you were the kind of televangelist with Twitch? Oh, he's fantastic. I mean, the guy that I modeled it on was a TV evangelist that I used to always come across on Sundays in hotel rooms. I'd flip through the channels. It was wall-to-wall evangelism on a Sunday. And he had this

24:23leisure suit on and he had a very dodgy wig, Ernest Ainsley in his Ainsley ministries. And I'm sending your $100 for your personal prayer, you know. And I'm thinking, oh, this is fantastic. People actually like this. And so during the sessions, you know, before we'd made the video, of course, I was singing along to us jamming on this tempo. I'd set up a drum tempo and Tony and Mike were playing along. And I was singing, Jesus, He Knows Me and He Knows

24:56I'm Right. Just kept going around this idea, you know. And it's strange to think that that's the first thing that you'd sing. Probably wasn't the first thing, but it was certainly after a few hours, you know, just think that's what it's about. So, you know, I wrote the lyrics because of Ernest Ainsley. Once you've got the song, you've got the video, you know, you don't have to think too hard about that. He was actually shown the video, Ernest Ainsley. He must be dead by now. But he was flattered. He didn't think it was a Mickey take at all.

25:30He thought he converted these Englishmen, you know. But it was a good fun video to make. I wondered about when you have the basic song in place, like the arrangement touches, you know,

Arranging Brass Parts

26:04like on face value, you've got things like I Missed Again and Thunder and Lightning with those fantastic brass parts. Are you coming up with those yourself and singing them to the players or is there sort of a collaborative process there as well with the musicians? I don't think you can actually sing to a horn player what you want. I mean, section anyway, because you've got to voice them the right way. And you can't get this note out of a saxophone. You've got to have that note out of a trumpet, you know. You've got to hand it over to an arranger.

26:36Once I've done my demos and it was going to be a record, I then wrote a wishlist of who I wanted on the record. One of the things I wanted on the record was the Earth, Wind and Fire, Horns, because I'd seen them a few times in concert and they really just blew me away. So I said, I want some of that. I want some of that on my record. They used to do a thing called Magic Mind, which was a tune. It wasn't a hit tune or nothing, but in the middle of the tune, everybody dropped out except for the horn section. And they just played this incredible rhythm

27:08between the four horns. It was like a Rubik's Cube of horn riffs. And I said, wow, my God, what is that? And I ended up doing something like that. But seriously, going back to face value, I sat with their arranger, a guy called Thomas Washington, who went by the name of TomTom84. Before I knew it was a person, I thought it was a computer. The parts were so staccato and so rhythmic, I thought it's probably a sequencer or something, you know. But it turned out it was

27:41this guy, a little guy from Chicago. And he came over and I sang along with a tape the kind of ideas I wanted. And he made sense of it all and arranged it for four people, you know. And that was what ended up on the album. This other thing I like on, but seriously, was Saturday night and Sunday morning, which is just me and the horns and the bass. I had a head microphone, you know, one of those the headset things. And I was playing and as I was playing, I was just, you know, and I just sang

28:20into it and gave it to the arranger. And I said, you know, pick the bones out of that. And so he wrote to what I sung. I mean, it's not as complicated as the thing I just sang, but he just transcribed what I'd sung. And suddenly you've got a horn section playing it. And it sort of sounds like you really hit them together. But in fact, it's just mucking about.

29:05One time I remember I heard a horn riff on a Michael Jackson record. I think it was Speed something. Speed Demon. Speed Demon. Some bad, I think, that one. Yeah. And I said to Tom, I said, I want something like this to start the record. And so he wrote the beginning of Hanging Long Enough. You know, and it was like music to my ears. I mean, I just thought, wow, that's fantastic.

29:40You know, and sometimes these ideas will come off out of the blue, you know. Yeah. Susudio is another example, isn't it? Where the brass just lends so much to the song. Yeah. That track was one of the two tracks I gave David Frank. And he did the whole thing in a room at the townhouse. He worked with his sequences, which was a new world to me. But he came up with that rhythm track of Susudio. And I must have sat down with Tom and said, I want some horns here. But he came up with the riffs, you know. All that stuff. Again, it was the magic mind

30:14idea of like horns echoing each other. Yeah. And you mentioned about how there were a couple of songs that went on the Genesis album

The Story of Against All Odds

30:30when you were writing Face Value. And then I think a couple of the songs you wrote also ended up on Hello, I Must Be Going as well. I think it was Why Can't I Wait Till Morning was one of them and Don't Let Him Steal Your Heart Away. I mean, first of all, you were on a hell of a streak at that point. And then I think Against All Odds, you said that was one that you had from those writing sessions? Against All Odds would have been on Face Value. Right. Which is why there's a demo. I mean, the demo has been out before, but it's on the Face Value

31:02package, I think. Yeah, that was written at the same time as all the other Face Value stuff. And bizarrely, I didn't think it was kind of good enough. Yeah, that's incredible to me because you hear that instrumental demo on the box. And even in that form, it sounds kind of inevitable, but obviously at that point, you just hadn't heard the full picture. Yeah. I guess, you know, when you're writing it or when you're doing it, there are certain things about certain songs that you like and can't have too many ballads. Well, I think

31:34I prefer You Know What I Mean to Against All Odds because that was a little bit more on the money emotionally for me. So it was just left an extra song. And it was only when I was on my first tour, having had the first two records, Hello and Face Value, they were out and I did my first tour and I was in America and Taylor Hackford wanted a song for a film he'd done and he rang me. I guess I was kind of flavor of the month in the air tonight. And so he

32:08came to visit me in Chicago and told me about the film. And I said, well, I can't write on the road. I need my comfort blanket. I need my stuff. But I have got a song that I didn't use. If you want to listen to that and I'll send it to you. And if you think that's good, then I could write some lyrics to it. I did have some lyrics. I mean, most of them actually were the same lyric, but I had to change a third of it maybe if he liked it. First of all,

32:38it was called Against The Odds. And he said, oh, it's got to be called Against All Odds because that's the name of the film. So I said, okay, it's Against All Odds, which felt clumsy at first. But yeah, he loved it. And he said, well, we'll have it. So I was still on tour. I was in New York and Arif Mardin, he'd arranged the strings for Face Value and we'd become very good friends. And I sent him the demo. I said, this is the song. Can you produce this? Because

33:09I'm on the road. And so he said, yeah, sure. It's a lovely song. So we went into RCA Studios in New York and piano player, Robbie Buchanan, who's a very well-known piano player. He'd played the piano on that because I couldn't, you know, I messed it up at live age. I mean, I just, once I'd written it, I never played it again. So I didn't want to do that in front of an orchestra. So, you know, Robbie Buchanan, he played the piano. The orchestra was done, as I say, in New York. And then by the time

33:43I got to LA, I put the drums on in LA and did the vocal in LA. And having a producer like Arif, especially, he pulls things out of you that you wouldn't do yourself, you know. And he took me out of my comfort zone. And some of that high stuff at the end was really because I was scared shitless, you know. I mean, I'm working with Arif, you know. I mean, Aretha Franklin, you name it, he used to produce them. And suddenly I'm singing for him and I'm really giving it everything. So he

34:14pulled out performances from me. And I think maybe that's why he was the first number one I had. You know, I mean, nominated for an Oscar. It was like one of those things I feel like I had nothing to do with, really, apart from writing it originally. But it's had a life of its own, that song. So take a look at me now. There's just an empty space. And there's nothing left here to remind me,

34:48just the memory of your face. Oh, take a look at me now. There's just an empty space. It's great how a song can just finally find its home like that as well. You know, it can just sit on a shelf and then all of a sudden an opportunity like that comes along for it.

35:20Yeah. I mean, I think if there'd been CDs then, maybe it would have been on the album. Right. But because, you know, you've got 23 minutes aside, max, I mean, we found this with Genesis. You know, I mean, we had to sort of, after the fact, edit sometimes because we normally ramble. And we can't ramble on an album, you know. CD, you can afford to ramble nowadays. But nowadays, good.

Working with Lamont Dozier

35:46One person we got to meet and interview doing this podcast is Lamont Dozier. And we wondered if, like Arif, if he was someone who brought something out of you, working on Two Hearts and Loco in a full cup. Yeah. Man, I loved that guy. Whenever I was in Los Angeles, I always used to go around there for dinner, sit with him, listen to the stories. He gave me one of his gold records. You can't hurry, love. He had it for the Supremes, you know. And he said, you deserve this. So he gave it to me and

36:18it was hanging on my wall. I met him backstage at a concert. I was playing in Los Angeles. He came backstage and it was like meeting one of the Beatles, Holland Dozier Holland, you know. That's the soundtrack of my life. And we got on so great. He's such a warm guy. And I did Buster, the movie. And of course, they wanted me to do the music. And I said, no, no, no, no, I'm acting. You know, I don't want people to remember that I'm a singer. It's hard enough anyway, but I'll fix you up with somebody. They said, okay, this is the producers,

36:53you know. First of all, I thought of Pete Townsend because of the 60s, the train robbery, you know, the who. But Pete, he didn't want to do it because he'd done McVicar. And then I thought George Martin, perfect. But George Martin wasn't a big enough name for them. But, you know, I found it hard to believe. But anyway, they were trying to sell the soundtrack, I guess. So I said, well, I did meet Lamont Dozier, Holland Dozier Holland, Motown. I mean, that's the 60s. So I called Lamont and he said, sure. It was an opportunity to work together.

37:27Yeah. So I told him what the film was about. We were filming still in Acapulco, the last bit of the story. And he flew over to Acapulco and had this demo. And when I heard the demo, it was like listening to Heat Wave or something. It was just like, oh, the sun came out. You know, it was really Motown. And I thought, wow, this is just what they're going to want. This is lovely. He said, well, you know, you're writing lyrics for it, right? So I said, yeah, sure. I'll write

38:00lyrics. So I went back to the hotel, literally that night, wrote the lyrics, came back in next morning on the way to the set. But I stopped by his room and I played him it, played the tape and I sang along to it. And he said, well, you're going to have to sing it now. I said, no, I can't because I'm acting. He said, no, you're going to have to sing it. It's your record now, man. So I was kind of roped in. And there's another song which we wrote together. And there's another song which we wrote together.

38:54They were Loco and Acapulco, which I asked the back four tops. I haven't played with them. I wouldn't mind working with them. Which fulfillment? Yes. Ticking off your wish list. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, they said yes. They flew to England and worked in the Genesis studio and we did it. We spoke to Mick Hocknell a few years ago and he wrote with Slamont around a similar time. Yeah, he was working with him. Yeah. And he said, he was just so fast. Like he was just like thrown out so many ideas that Mick had to kind of stop him because he was like, I'm losing track of how many good

39:26ideas you have. And we want to settle on at least one of these things, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, he used to sort of sit and play the piano when we were talking.

39:35This is how it started, you know? He said, Like a big kind of Russian symphony. They said, well, maybe we sped it up and it became reach out. I'll be there, you know? Wow. And it's just the background story for some of these things. Incredible. Yeah. When I did going back, I worked with three Motown musicians and they would come up with endless stories. I didn't know how they were going to work, you know, but all the stuff that they

40:07did, they would insist on playing together. So it was bass and two guitars at the same time. And if one of them made a mistake, they'd drop in and fix it. But they didn't want to do things separately. They wanted to play together so they could feed off each other in the way they did in the old days. And it was just brilliant to have those kind of guys around. Yeah. It's really in your DNA, that Motown stuff, isn't it? Yeah. Like behind the lines and all that. It's all in there, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. In the old days, you used to be a Beatles fan or a Stones fan. I mean, I liked both, but I was more of a Beatles fan. I was a good boy, you know, but Motown

40:43was right up there with it. And here I am working with these guys and I'm just pinching myself constantly. You know, I was listening to that when I was 13. My God. And now I'm writing a song with him. It's just kid in a toy store, you know? Yeah. I wondered if, um, when you're in a kind of a, uh, a writing phase, if you have any sorts of techniques for getting over stumbling blocks, we were talking about an old Genesis documentary we saw where you were recording somewhere in the countryside and you were doing a vocal and you couldn't quite get it right. So you went on a bike ride.

41:17Oh yeah. And then you, you nailed it. I wondered, is that something you do maybe with writing as well? Like just step away from it, don't force it and then let it kind of ferment in your mind and then come back to it. Yeah. I mean, I think that was more true with Genesis than, than my stuff because I'm writing. Well, I'm not writing, I'm making it up. Same thing. Yeah. There's a difference in terms of, you know, now what shall I write about today? You know, as opposed to, oh, I better play and record because I'm going to sing it. You know,

41:51I don't mean I'm like struck by magic every now and again, but it's just, that's the way I work. You know, I kind of open my mouth and improvise. And sometimes if you're lucky stuff comes out, it's usable or it points you in a direction, you know, and sometimes that's all you need. But I remember that. I mean, me and Tony used to go for a big bike ride just to get out of the studio because it's our own studio. Didn't matter if we took break for an hour, we'd go cycle around this sort of this big course that we

42:22had around the villages and come back. And some songs would be difficult, less so on We Can't Dance. But certainly sometimes on Invisible Touch, which we did at the farm, sometimes I would be seeing these lyrics for the first time. If they were written by Tony and Mike, I maybe had an idea what they'd be. But normally with their songs, I wouldn't. Maybe my home by the sea was what started it. But Tony's written this whole story, you know, over three or four

42:56verses. And it's sometimes maybe out of my range vocally, which means that not only are you trying to sing it in tune and reach things that you normally wouldn't go for, but you're also saying words that you wouldn't normally write. And Tony was naughty with that, which I've said before many times, but All in a Mouse is Night. I mean, it's a song about a bread bin, you know, with a mouse. And I'm supposed to sing the word bread bin in the song. Well, Sheets of Double Glazing,

43:31you know, is the classic. How do you sing Sheets of Double Glazing? I've got through it now. I used to have big problems with it. Now, when we did the last tour, I just sing it. It's like a piece of poetry. You say it. Do I feel it? Not so much so, you know. I mean, I feel the melodies because sometimes I had a hand in writing them. But normally, if it's a Genesis song with a Tony Banks lyric, it's going to be a little bit of a struggle at first. That's not to say it's any

44:04less worthy than anything else. It's just, it's more of a struggle. Right, yeah. That's when you take the break. There was a point on one of those documentaries where I was having a hard time singing Never a Time, which was a Mike Rutherford lyric. And I was just not singing well for some reason. And they were filming it, you know. And so there's this turn a fucking camera. You know, pull a Moody for a minute. But there's something about singing

44:36where you're kind of very vulnerable. I've thought about this because I feel sorry for comedians, you know. If you see a film and you don't like it, you say, no, that wasn't for me. Or if you see a television show, you say, no, I didn't like that. But if you say to a comedian, no, I don't think that's funny. You're saying you're not funny. And that's very personal, you know. And it's like when you're singing, it's good or it's not. Either it reaches you or it doesn't. And when you're struggling with it, it can be an uphill struggle.

45:08Does it help to have some extra constraints, maybe something to work against? Thinking about your work for film, like You'll Be In My Heart for Tarzan or something like that. There's going to be a brief there and a story and everything laid out. Is that useful to you to spare you on?

Writing Music for Disney

45:22Oh, no, it's essential. I found this discipline working with Disney. And I look upon my work with Disney with the highest regard. I know what it takes to please them and to do the right thing for what they want. And a lot of my fans say, oh, it's all kid stuff, you know. Well, actual fact. I mean, I grew up with Disney music, whether it's Pinocchio, whether it's Sleeping Beauty. I grew up with all that. My brother was a cartoonist. He's an artist. He grew up with the animators, you know.

45:59So to me, it's very serious business. And you have to move the story along whilst making it memorable. And usually, the characters would sing it. But in Tarzan, I sang it. The characters don't sing. I mean, Rosie O'Donnell sang Trash in the Camp, like, jibidoo, jibidoo. But other than that, I'm the voice of the movie. I'm the storyteller. So you need to react from a script. I mean,

46:30once I got Tarzan, apart from being over the moon, I was suddenly involved in a thing that I'd grown up with. And my sister used to skate to Disney on ice. And, you know, this is my history, part of my history. And I went to every meeting, every script meeting. And you'd come and say, here we have a song. And in that song, we go from this point to that point. So you've got to tell a story. So you're doing a job, really. Yeah. But I still approached it in the same way that I would write my stuff, because it had to sound

47:03like my stuff. Right. Yeah. Okay. So I'm still improvising. You'll be my heart was hung on a couple of lines. I mean, Lily, who's now 37. When she was five, I used to sing her to sleep because she was in the back of a car going from airport to a show, you know. So she calls that song, you'll be my heart. She calls it her song, because that's the kind of song I used to sing as a lullaby. Don't you cry, cause you'll be in my heart. Yes, you'll be in my heart. From the stay on, now and for

47:47you'll be in my heart. You'll be in my heart. No matter what they say. You'll be here in my heart. Always. There's a guy who still runs Disney, theatrical, Tom Schumacher, who's brilliant. He will sit

48:20down around a conference table and go through the script. We'll all be there. The script writer, the music producer, me, all the heads of department. And he'll go through this. Now, what we need here is a song that's going to keep everybody in their seats at 10 o'clock. They call it the 10 o'clock song. Because at 10 o'clock, everybody starts looking at their watch and wondering about getting the train on, right? So you've got to write a song that's going to keep them in the seats. A big ballad. And it's also a moment when Tarzan first takes

48:54off his loincloth and puts on his father's clothes because he becomes a man. And I wrote this song called A Need to Decide, which was because he didn't know what to do, stay with Jane. Or, you know, I know this is nuts and bolts stuff, but as a writer, I had to come up with this and it was a challenge. So, you know, you come up with the goods and at the end of the tape, when you've made a demo of it and everybody around the table goes, bravo, bravo. You think, oh, well, that's, thank God that's over with. You know, it's a learning experience. And I loved

49:28every minute of it. Yeah. And I guess it's healthy, isn't it? If you're going to make music over a long period to sort of disrupt your own habits and challenge yourself from time to time. Put tripwise in front of yourself, you know, because I don't think anybody really, if you're asking me, they're not really interested in doing what they've done. They're interested in what they're going to do, you know. And McCartney is the same. Apparently on stage, he said, you know, I know you only want to hear Beatles songs, but I'm going to play the songs I want to play. You want to push that envelope to do something you haven't done before. You try to keep it fresh for you because that's the only reason

50:02of doing it. Are there things that you haven't said yet musically? Maybe some things hanging around that you still feel like you want to... Oh, I've got some things that are finished. Right. Well, a couple of things that are finished. Yeah, I've got lots of ideas. I know what they are, but I haven't approached them since the health issues. But I've got a little studio in my downstairs in my basement. I'm now not taking the long way around to avoid going in it. I'm actually quite happy to address the studio and look at it and think, if I can get back into it so that I'm doing

50:35everything technically, then you can start playing and mucking about. Yeah. But for the moment, I think I'm going to have to learn how to plug this into that. Right. Because we were going to ask, would the writing process fundamentally be the same as it always was with just, you know, basic keyboard, drum pattern, that kind of thing? It's still the same tools, yeah. Yeah. Most times, not all the time, but most times it starts with piano from a keyboard point of view, but it normally will start from a rhythm. You know, I'll set something up that will kind of make me do something. And some of the

51:08tools that I've got are either this year's model or last year's model or I keep everything. So I've still got the CR-78 in there. Have you? You know, that doesn't see the light of day too much, but you keep those things, you know, just in case, because they've each got their own personality. Yeah. Well, you mentioned McCartney, didn't you? And he still has the Mellotron from Strawberry Fields and all that kind of stuff in the studio, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. My stuff doesn't go back as old as that, as Mellotrons. Tony's still

51:39got all his keyboards. They've all got their own unique thing. It's not as if the new one is better because they all don't have a character. Right. They've all got their own personality. And that's what triggers you going back to songwriting. It sparks the imagination a bit. And you write something that goes with the sound. I heard Marilyn Manson do In the Air Tonight the other day because someone told me he'd recorded it and I've never heard it. I know of Marilyn Manson. I can't say that I know much about what he does, but he took away a lot of the magic

52:12of the chords, but it became a lot darker than mine. So it's interesting to hear what other people do with your stuff. Sometimes I sort of think, I wish I'd have done that. I think that's a nice idea. I wish I'd have seen it that way, but you don't, you know. Well, Phil, we could do this all day, but our hour has gone in a flash, hasn't it? Yeah. And as we said at the start, we've been doing the show a long time and this is a major highlight for us, so we can't thank you enough for doing it. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is our wishlist moment. That's lovely. I enjoyed it too, so that's a win-win.

52:46Well, what can you say? That was Phil Collins talking to us in London about his songwriting

Reflecting on a Career

53:13and his creative process. What a joy that was. Literally one of the best to ever do it. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing to me that he doesn't really think of himself as a songwriter per se, you know, particularly in the formal sense of crafting songs. Yeah. He sees himself as a more intuitive creator, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. And you could hear that from the way he described the writing process for face value. Just him in a room with a stripped down setup. It was a really fantastic period for the development of his writing skills, wasn't it? Absolutely.

53:43And from there, he just basically played around and ad-libbed until he found things that he liked. And that was once he learned not to be embarrassed by his own company, as he put it. I thought that was a good life. Yeah. And the demos were critical to it, weren't they? Yeah. He was basically making those demos while he was writing the songs and they became the foundation of the record. Yeah. And as we said, that was the template for all of his future records right up to Testify. And I love that he embraced electronic drum machines the way he did too, you know, especially as a drummer who could have said, no, this thing is, you

54:15know, taking jobs away from real drummers. But instead he saw the benefits of it and used it as a tool. Yeah. I mean, drum machines do after all have a kind of distinctive locked in monotonous quality, don't they? And it creates a specific atmosphere for a track. Yeah. I mean, you only have to listen to Prince's records of the same era to get that same sort of vibe. Yeah. I love the range of drum sounds on his records anyway. You know, for example, on Easy Lover, it's such an incredibly raw, live drum sound, isn't it?

54:45Yeah. And then you compare that with some of the more rigidly programmed songs where he brought other people in like Susudio and he still manages to bring this incredible forward motion, this sort of propulsion to the uptempo material. Yeah. Yeah. But that atmosphere that we talked about, it engulfs the ballads in particular, doesn't he? Yeah. And there's no better example of that really than In the Air Tonight, which has that sort of seductive, but also slightly sinister atmosphere. Yeah. But still demonstrates like this incredible amount of restraint up until, you know, he lets loose at the end.

55:17Yeah. It's an amazing song and an incredibly brave song to put out, I think, so early in his solo career. Yeah. Especially in terms of the lyrics, you know, it's quite stark and brutal lyrically. And you would think it was endlessly crafted, wouldn't you? Not some sort of improvised stream of consciousness. Yeah. And there's a restraint there as well. You know, he doesn't spell out the meaning of everything, does he? He just sort of creates those scenarios like the drowning scene and just leaves it hanging there for you to interpret. Yeah. And you can feel that kind of restraint elsewhere on face value on something like If

55:49Leaving Me Is Easy, for example, you know, that's a masterclass in restraint and The Roof Is Leaking is another one. He's a less is more kind of guy, isn't he? Totally. Yeah. And, you know, great to hear about his work with Genesis and how different that collaborative situation was with Mike and Tony. Yeah, definitely. And for us, this was just a fantastic excuse to revisit all those great songs in his catalogue, wasn't it? Mm-hmm. You know, you go back to Against All Odds and you think, oh my God, this is just an unbelievable ballad. Yeah. Which almost never saw the light of day.

56:20Yeah. He really deserves whatever kind of reappraisal has been happening with his work in recent years because the scope and the quality of the material over such a long period just defies belief, doesn't it? It does. And, you know, that's not even getting into all the records he lent his drumming talents to or produced for other people. What a career. What a life. So thanks to Phil for a fantastic wide-ranging conversation. The new face value box set will be out in September. Our thanks again to Ben for having the vision to make this moment happen. And we'll be back

56:50soon with more of the world's best songwriters. Bye for now.

56:55Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye. Bye for now.