There are more than a few pop stars that would have killed to have the same opportunities that Phil Collins did back in the 1980s.
Not everyone gets the chance to live as one of the single most popular human beings on the planet for a few years, but it seemed like everywhere from MTV to the recording studio to the live stage couldn’t get enough of the guy whenever he had a new song in his head. But even if he was dangerously close to being overexposed, he still had songs that he felt passed him by.
Granted, there’s hardly any tunes that Collins has put out that haven’t covered at least a good portion of what he wanted to do. The biggest names in music like Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and Brian Eno had already spent time working with him, and even if you don’t look at his solo career, the amount of hits that he spawned with Genesis helped everyone forget about the era of the flowery costumes and strange prosthetics that Peter Gabriel would wear whenever he took to the stage.
But that’s not to say that his solo career was any slouch, either. While there might have been a little bit of a rub when it came to which songs became hits for Genesis and which were hits on their own, it’s not like Collins was being greedy by any stretch. He was the one who had ‘In the Air Tonight’ rejected by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, and even though the band would have loved to have had his kind of success, they probably weren’t going to make something as goofy as ‘Sussudio’.
At the same time, it’s not like Collins was going to stop being experimental, either. His work with Eno on Music for Airports helped knock down doors for the ambient genre, and since he didn’t have any bad blood with Gabriel after he left the fold, it made a lot more sense for him to throw some ideas into the mix when playing drums on some of his records. But as Genesis slowly climbed up the charts, Gabriel wasn’t too far behind, either.
Anyone else would have guessed that Gabriel would have stayed the more arthouse musician making obscure solo records, and while that might have been true for his first handful of albums, the mainstream started to come to him after a while. ‘Shock the Monkey’ was the first shot he had at having a massive MTV hit, but when So came out, Collins remembered being jealous when Gabriel overtook Genesis on the charts with tunes like ‘Don’t Give Up’.
They were already working on their own ballads like ‘In Too Deep’ and ‘Throwing It All Away’, but Collins remembered feeling jealous when he first heard Gabriel’s duet with Kate Bush, saying, “Hands up: I do envy Pete. There are some songs he’s written that I wish I’d written–for one thing ‘Don’t Give Up’, his gorgeous duet with Kate Bush. But even here at the height of my success it seems, for every achievement of great opportunity that comes my way, I’m starting to accrue bad press as a matter of course.”
That’s just the nature of the beast when you’re as omnipresent as Collins was, but ‘Don’t Give Up’ almost exists outside of the realm of most pop songs. Anyone can try writing a ballad, but hitting on the emotion that Gabriel and Bush did is near impossible. Bush’s voice is one of the most comforting sounds in the world on this song, and if you’ve ever gone through a rough spot in your life, those words are practically medicine for you.
But that’s just the strong suit that Gabriel had over Collins during those times. Not everyone is fortunate enough to hit the nail on the head like that every time they make a song, but just because Gabriel has one of the best songs of the 1980s to his name doesn’t diminish the value of a song like ‘Against All Odds’.
