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(Credits: Far Out / Warner Music)
Phil Collins wasn’t always striving for perfection every single time he made a record.
He could spin virtually anything into gold when he entered the 1980s, but he didn’t feel like putting out albums that were completely spotless. There was a bit of magic in between the notes half the time he played them, and when working alongside his fellow giants, he knew that his friends had talent that went far beyond anything he could sing.
Then again, Collins didn’t begin life trying to be a singer in the truest sense of the word. He could certainly carry a tune and had done a fine job supporting Peter Gabriel in Genesis with the occasional backing vocal, but even after Gabriel left the fold, it took a lot of convincing before Collins even entertained the idea of singing. But when Face Value came out, he had the kind of freedom most artists could only dream of. He could go anywhere, but Collins wanted the chance to give a boost to his favourite groups.
There was the occasional production job for members of ABBA, but going through his recording history, a lot of the best music he ever made came from him working off of people that he respected. It wasn’t always going to work, but for every lacklustre performance that he gave like at Live Aid with Led Zeppelin, there was always a chance for him to bring it back around when working with people like Philip Bailey.
Although soul music helped him get his foot in the door many times, Collins knew that the harmonies were what really resonated with him. The Beatles had shown him a world of musical harmony that no one could have fathomed at the time, but when Collins reached the latter half of the 1960s, he was far more interested in what people like David Crosby were doing.
For all that had been said about Crosby’s drug problems during his prime in Crosby, Stills, and Nash, his genius always came from being a brilliant vocal arranger. He knew the mechanics of what the human voice sounded so beautiful, and when he wasn’t planting the seeds for people like Joni Mitchell to become one of the biggest stars in the world, hearing him arrange things like ‘Marrakesh Express’ were what caught Collins’s ear when he first decided to work with him.
And it’s not like Crosby didn’t live up to the hype when working on the tune ‘Another Day in Paradise’, either, with Collins saying, “I sent him a tape of the two songs, and he loved them, came in, and he was wonderful. We sat down at the piano … he showed me his ideas, and he did exactly what I thought he’d do. He came up with these ideas that nobody else would think of.”
But perhaps the common link came from both of them liking music that was a bit off the beaten path as well. Their love for music like fusion gave them a greater musical vocabulary to work with half the time, and even if not every song had four or five different complicated sections, the magic that they both had was the ability to bring a slight bit of musical sophistication within the context of a pop song.
This may have been the exact kind of thing that made people like Oasis furious at Collins, but having musical superheroes like Crosby was hardly a drawback of their sound. If anything, it was the clearest indication that an artist passed the point of being a standard songwriter. They had now reached the point where they could start getting a little bit weird with it.
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