Original subtitles

This record definitely is autobiographical, but not just focusing

on a sadness.

That's the thing that is a misconception, I think.

It's triggered by an event.

It chronicles a life in motion.

I wasn't even intending on writing a song, you know, I'm going to sit down

and write a song. I just was fooling around.

And I got these chords that I liked and the sound. The chords went with the

sound. It was, you know, you couldn't have played faster or slower than the

sound allowed you to.

So it sort of created itself.

So I turned the microphone on and I saw the meter move.

That was a good sign. And then I started singing.

And the lyrics you hear were what I wrote.

spontaneously with the feeling of that music at that time.

This

frightens

me a bit because it's...

There's obviously something going on in there that I don't know about.

But I'm quite proud of the fact that I sang 99.9% of those lyrics

spontaneously. And when someone says, now tell me Phil, what is it really

about? I say, I don't know.

I've no idea, because I just made it up as I went along.

I lived outside Guildford in a village called Shelford Common.

I was a relatively well-known pop star.

You know, I mean, I had a wife and two children and two dogs. And then the next

day I didn't have anything.

So I actually had a lot of time on my hands, you know.

So, that sounds terrible. I don't want to make it sound like the carpet was

ripped out from underneath me. I played my part in this mistake too.

So a lot of these songs were written because at the time I was, you know,

going through all these emotional changes.

But to me it was just the sound of the words, you know.

I didn't know what I was singing about. I mean, obviously when you're going

through a divorce, all kinds of things run through your mind.

There's anger, there's bitterness, there's hurt, you know.

And all that stuff is in the air tonight.

Menace, you know.

Finally losing your temper at the end when the drums come in

I remember when I was at the demo stage, you'd hear clicks when the fridge was

going on and off, you know, and then the phone would ring and I wouldn't hear it.

And I'd listen back to it later, there'd be a phone ringing in the background.

And I didn't really mind. At the time, to be honest, I never knew there was

going to be an outlet for these tapes.

This was just me expressing myself and learning how to operate the equipment.

The whole thing was set up by this, really, the mood of this drum machine.

For me, when you hear that, you couldn't possibly replace that with real drums.

People say, why do you use drum machines when you're a drummer?

And it's just that sometimes drum machines give you things that... It's

the atmosphere.

It's relentless.

It doesn't move. A drummer would get bored playing anything like this. And it

would ruin the sort of...

The relentlessness of it.

And then, this would have been the first two things I put down.

Couple of nice chords, D minor.

The saddest chord of all.

C, B flat, back to C.

Piece of cake, really.

I hadn't really set out to be famous. I hadn't really set out to make a record

of any type.

I'd just done a few things in my room.

I'd painted a few pictures in my room and someone wanted to look at them.

The songs were just songs based on my emotion at the time.

I was cutting the album in America, and this legendary figure of Armin Ertegun,

who started the company in Atlantic music, came to the cutting session in

New York and he said, he literally, he's faced it up and said, this sounds

great.

I had a cut of that in the air tonight.

And whenever anybody brought me, people would come in and bring me, as they do

all the time.

you know uh demo records of a group and they would play me what they thought was

a hit i would say listen that sounds very good but listen to this and i put

that on and they would say my god what is that that is fantastic i said it's

got to be close to the you won't get as good as this but you've got to be close

to it if you want to have a hit record for my you know one of my heroes to say

that gave me a lot of confidence in what i'd been doing you know which i was

still needing

And we went from there, you know.

Hello, Phil Collins here. Who's there?

Phil Collins?

Well, I just wanted to know, we all know how you made your solo album and

everything. We want to know, like, what effect does that have on Genesis?

Before I started singing with Genesis, I really didn't care about the lyrics. It

was the sound of the voice and the... the melody it was singing and the groove

of the tune and then i started to sing and i realized that the voice is the

thing that actually communicates to people with

genesis

i felt like i was playing a part sometimes rather than being me You know,

even when I was singing my lyrics, I felt that it wasn't really me.

He was originally the drummer of the band.

That was what he originally was chosen for and everything.

But we always knew he had a nice voice. And then obviously he took over when

Peter Gabriel left, doing the lead vocals. And I think he developed as a

singer. And obviously I think the fact the first album came out so well...

makes you realize he always had in his mind an idea of how things should be and

for the first time he could do it exactly how he wanted to do it um and it

came out great so he's always had this sort of there's always a very good

arranger i think in in phil's head one day we'd finished the backing track of

behind the lines and we wanted to clean some tracks up stuff we didn't need

anymore so we could do some vocals and um we ran the tape at you know double

speed just to sort of You know, time was money.

And suddenly this other song appeared, you know, and sometimes... It's like

with the Beatles records. You put them on double speed, sometimes something

else, you hear something else.

We

played

it back at a higher speed.

and it sounded very like sort of a Michael Jackson kind of funky track and

we all kind of got off on it.

Obviously that stayed in his mind and he sort of drew from that.

It sounds a little over hip now but it's actually at the time it was...

Basically, I wanted to do the track just for this.

Just for the horns, really.

I used to have that.

People didn't have black horn sections on their songs and things those days. It

sounds crazy to say that now.

But American radio wouldn't play some of Phil's songs to start with. Because a

white guy with a black horn section, that's not right.

That should be R&B music. Everybody should be black. Everybody should be

white. And it's amazing that only 20 years ago, attitudes like that still

existed.

We didn't know who Phil Collins was as far as the horn section was concerned at

all.

There was some inference that he played with a group called Genesis, which

didn't mean anything to us neither. We didn't know anything about him at that

particular time.

He wanted a certain sound.

He wanted that particular sound, and he would get those players.

And that's how we evolved around it. And so Phil would always give us some

challenging things to do.

And he would leave me the ability to write at my own discretion.

And there were certain things that he favored that he would like to hear.

So he has an ear also for what things should do.

Trumpets are cool on the high bit, right?

They turned it around, but it just sounded good.

As long as it's tight, it'll work.

You know what I'm saying?

50 want a gun?

Yes, that's fine.

Tom-Tom would just say, bar 49, bar 49, you know? And then he'd just go like

this. It was a very democratic society in the recording sessions, whether he

liked it or not.

And it was like you'd be living on glass, wouldn't you? Yeah.

Especially when you weren't quite ready to record. Yes.

What's happening is our punches are very tight.

The machine is not fast as me.

And neither is you.

And then you'd say something like, well, I'm not really ready yet. And he'd go

into this sort of long thing. Now you tell me why you were not able to record

it or something, you know, and then go off about buying sugar in the

supermarket or something. You know, it was like weird. You didn't know what was

his, you know.

Face Value is a record which has a lot of Black influence, and

that's also one of the things that made it an international hit.

His feelings and his soul are expressed in terms very much

influenced by Black American music.

For the first time, he was making the record that he wanted to make and no one

else had any influence on it.

For him, it was a very exciting experience.

Suddenly, he had all these toys to play with, you know, bringing the Phoenix

horns.

Suddenly, he could think in terms of, well, let's have a horn section, which

had always been an area that had been cut off to him before.

The most personal song of all from this whole batch of songs, really the most

personal song was a song called Please Don't Ask, which was literally all

about, you know, bar mentioning names, you know, it was about kids, it was

about what was happening, it was about my problems, my situation.

I mean, I've never really written anything like that since.

I can remember when it was easy to say

But things have changed since then. Now I really can't say if I still do.

Oh, but I can try.

Because I know that the kids are well.

Because you're a .

enough of me how will you you look good

oh you lost some way

you can see your hair looks nice you look good

maybe

we should try

don't say it i know

So on.

Actually, it's kind of a song you could do differently now.

You could do it as a ballad now, as opposed to something else.

But it's that stuff, Don't Say It, I Know Why.

Those lyrics, I forgot about that bit.

But maybe we should try.

Don't tell me, I know why.

It is a conversation, really.

But that's the way a lot of these songs were written. They were written...

because the communication was at a low, so they were written as letters,

messages, phone calls that, had the phone not gone down, might have

occurred, things like that, you know.

Ah!

Those are the days.

So you finally came right out and said it, girl.

Why took you so long?

It was in your eyes.

That looks never far too long.

I haven't got a band. See, I don't have a band.

And so we could do a video. OK, well, I'll play everything.

Well, I'll pretend to play everything.

so then you get into the air guitar saxophone thing i mean it was great fun

to do every character had a different look and you get kind of the mannerisms

of saxophone players and trumpet players the look you know the shades and the hat

of the trumpet player he just had fun with it you know i mean that's the most

important thing

Oh, yeah, OK.

So the working... This was, I miss you, babe, I really do.

So this was obviously early vocals, early lyrics.

It's funny seeing half your life go, you know, before your eyes.

But... Yeah, it obviously sort of changed from being...

Which you can sing. I miss you, babe.

better than it sounds. I miss you, babe.

Doesn't sound very nice when it's said.

But I mean, it went from that kind of quite sad lyric, I suppose, to sort of

much more ironic, which is, I missed again.

It's like I missed again, you know, which is funnier.

I felt more comfortable with that, obviously.

But the tempo is obviously the main thing that changed. It became this

Motown, the classic Motown drum fill.

He's not so much hurt now as more anger in the lyrics.

Some people like Shankar, for

example, I didn't really know what kind of role he could have in the album.

liked what he did, but liked him as a person and just wanted him on the

record. I just wanted him to be part of this experience.

When he came up with his first solo record, people weren't sure what kind of

record it was going to be. At that time, they weren't sure. They thought maybe it

was going to be like a fusion record, jazz rock record, an instrumental kind

of record or something else.

In a way, it's kind of good because it gives him more freedom.

He's an Indian musician that obviously can play...

in that world is one of the finest violinists.

And here I was giving him a four-chord song to play.

It's like underplaying the guy, but he wanted to be part of this experience

too.

Sometimes you get people for specific jobs and other times you just say, I'd

like you to do something.

Can you find a hole for yourself?

Alphonso Johnson was one of my heroes from Weather Report.

It's almost like a little sentence, you know? It's like the beginning of the

sentence.

And it's kind of like the afterthought of the reply.

This track...

It had that real, just earth, wind, and fire quality to it, you know? It really

did. But yet, Phil somehow managed to kind of put his own, because of his

vocal sound, it definitely had his stamp on it, you know?

I used to wear these very outrageous earth, wind, and fire

type suits.

And considering I was pretty boring to watch, you know, I mean, I just stood

there and sung, I was still finding my feet, really, as a performer.

They added an amazing presence to the stage show, you know, because it gave

people something else to watch.

sort of proper album as i co-produced with somebody so i didn't have anything

to measure it by i just remember you know i was 26 or something and going to

la and you don't feel at any time that you're making you know incredible

records that would be remembered 20 years later or whatever but both phil

and i had this feeling of loving to listen to music that had space in it

We tried very hard to not put too many instruments onto the record.

It was always going to be a song about the South and

frontiersmen and guys that sort of out in the middle of nowhere, little shack,

when winter comes, you're there for months, you know.

And the wife gets pregnant and she has her own baby and you give a hand and

someone from next door 30 miles down the road comes and gives you a hand.

And stronger by the minute My wife's expecting But I hope she can wait

Cause this winter looks like It's gonna be another bad one

But spring is soon to here God,

I hope it's not late

It kind of stuck out a little bit on the album because it was a story song,

because the rest of them were about me.

But the sadness and maybe the solitary feeling of the thing was probably

something that seeped in from the other songs.

I guess I always figured that with Eric, Clapton was going to play slide guitar

on it, so we'd just do it as a live thing.

And in fact, we did try with Clapton.

You know, in those days, I mean, we all enjoyed a drink.

And we enjoyed a drink that night.

In fact, he enjoyed a drink before he came, and then he enjoyed a drink with

me.

But I put Eric through hell with this, and actually listening to it, he

probably got it closer than I thought at the time.

Yeah.

See,

what I was after...

with something kind of precise.

And just listening to this, it's the first time I've heard this since the

session like, you know, 21 years ago.

He actually was playing what should have been played, really. I mean, the sound

of the dobro, you know, the scratch.

And it's much more funkier.

It's much bluesier.

Here's what ended up on the record.

It was that kind of song I just felt that it should have been done in one go,

which is the kind of the spontaneity.

but because i didn't get it in one go i went for something else which ended up

being a little bit more a little bit too perfect but the roof is leaking and the

wind is howling oh the kids are crying cause the sheets are so cold

when i woke this morning found my hands were frozen i

tried to fix that fire but you know the damn things too old

When I listen to Phil's album again, what strikes me is that there's all

these different varieties of music on this one record. It has sounds similar

to Beatles and Weather Report, Motown music, a bit of Genesis style, which I

think is almost next to impossible to do today.

I think if you were to present to a record company this album, say, here,

I'm thinking about doing this. Could you sign me for this album? I think they

wouldn't. I think...

I think even if Phil was presenting this album today, they'd go, well, you know,

that's not really what we're looking for.

At the time we worked with Phil, we didn't care anything about record sales.

So when we got together, we always played the music which we enjoyed, and

we never thought that it was going to be as successful as it was.

The way the song starts, it's like a call-and-response village coming to

life, waking up, going to work.

And so that's... The way that song starts to me is kind of like that, and

we kind of used to exaggerate it more live.

As if people were waking up in the morning. It's like a Disney cartoon.

You can imagine the birds rustling their feathers and things.

The main track that I did at home is based on this.

After all those fills, Tom-Tom arranged the horns.

He had notated certain things with dots and dashes.

Looks sort of like the Morse code to me.

And as the music played, he would point to the dot or the dash, and I would look

at him and say, yeah, man, I didn't know what this meant, you know.

But he would point to this and say, mm, that, that, that, that, you know. And

whatever that meant, this is where it predated Max Headroom.

Now, what was so interesting about it, he was able to sing phonetically what he

meant by the dots and dashes.

If it's a ba-da, I have to write a line, bash, you know?

So I probably did that for him. It was a da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

By him being a drummer, maybe this was some kind of way he notated the best way

he could.

The first couple of times, I don't know whether he really noticed, I thought he

was crazy.

I said, I mean, whoever heard of this, you know?

But the money was so well paid, I said, man, this is great. Makes a lot of sense

to me.

I remember when the horn section all came in, and they were all laughing and

having a great time.

we were doing in the air tonight and songs like this and then these guys came

in laughing and louis satterfield was sitting there he says you know phil he

is he's amazing cat he says this guy you walk in you look at him you think he

looks like a farmer from england and then he sits down on a drum he's hip as

anybody else and i remember louis saying that and it was making me laugh because

it's sort of exactly what it looked like here is phil very casual And he looked

like he could be a guy coming in with some tea for you.

Now let them try to play that.

Hand in Hand is a combination of things, which he was good at. He used to do it

all the time. He would grab things from here and put it together like this. I

mean, it would be a couple of cultures working hand in hand.

I don't know if that was his idea for calling it something like that.

And this song, Hand in Hand, was one of the Huffy Puffy songs for the horns.

I don't know what was going on in his head but it didn't appear to me that he

was in any particular pain.

I think he was just happy to be there but he was also...

probably a little insecure about what he's doing here because he doesn't know

how this is going to turn out. This is very new to him. And when you are in a

band like, for instance, Genesis, if you were in Genesis, you will always have

the other two guys to feed off of and to run ideas by.

So you don't do anything without their approval also. Here, it's up to him.

So Phil has got all this responsibility laid on him. But I think he sort of

enjoyed that.

The tapes.

of the concert.

This Must Be Love

was entering the next phase of my life.

So it actually isn't the downer album or the sad album that a lot of people think

it is.

By the time it was actually being finished,

And certainly by the time it came out, I was in another relationship.

So this is kind of... This is kind of a very optimistic

song.

I had the chords, obviously, the song, but then Alfonso came up with this...

Which is a

great hook.

He wanted kind of something to thread through the actual motion of the song.

So he didn't want just a plain R&B bass line, and yet it couldn't be too

complicated. So just using bare instinct, I started playing the

notes of the chords and came up with that kind of loop, which was like a...

Which kind of complements his vocal melody a little bit, but not so much

that it distracts from it.

What is

good?

Does it reach you? Does it touch you? That's the most important thing.

I just get bored.

So I don't like working on things for a long time, you know, my attention span

is kind of limited in terms of, you know, let's do this and let's move on,

you know, as opposed to, you know, let's do this until we're really sick of it,

you know, but it'll be perfect.

It was a little experiment, you know.

It was just a nice idea.

It's a slightly esoteric sort of area of music, you know, some of it was weather

reports, some of it was even more spacey, but I just came up with this

sort of rhythm on the black notes.

Phil is amazing because he has all the structures he needs, but at the same

time, which a lot of people might think that's what he does only, but he's

equally... comfortable with all the improvisational stuff and immediately

also is able to change if something doesn't work.

He reminds me of Frank Zappa really.

Fastest tongue in the West.

Or the East.

And then there was... I was at the session, so I felt I had to do

something, so I played congas.

For some reason, everything has got jumbled and puzzled and mixed up over

the years, and I've become known as something that I'm really not.

You know, a lot of people think of me, I guess, it could be the Genesis

Connection. It could be side effects of the Mr Nice Guy.

It could be the fact that some of the songs that have been hits have been

ballads, and therefore people look down at sort of ballads as if they're kind of

middle of the road.

But I don't know why.

I mean...

I thrive on spontaneous music. I used to sit with Brand X and just play for days.

Just play for days and days. In Genesis, everything we write all comes out of

days of improvisation.

It's not music by numbers.

But more specifically, my own musical career, I kind of felt that I'd been

lumbered with that perfectionist, slightly highly polished, glossed.

BMW driver kind of image.

Nothing is laboured over.

Nothing is laboured over.

Especially on my records.

I included To One Who Never Knows because it's always been one of my

favourite Beatles songs. I mean, alongside the real melodic...

songs, you know, All My Lovin' and I Wanna Hold Your Hand and If I Fell.

Tomorrow Never Knows has always appealed to me.

The drums are great on it and I've always felt that there's inside that

song, the version of that song, there is a really strong melodic song trying to

get out.

Is that trying to be John Lennon again, see?

John Lennon was brought

to the emergency room at the Roosevelt site, St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital,

this evening, shortly before 11 p.m.

He was dead on arrival.

It was an opportunity to pay tribute to sort of, for me anyway, I mean to pay

tribute to that kind of pioneering stuff that they did.

Oh, so we got everything in here, guitars, horns.

What's this?

Oh, that's backwards violin.

Oh, it is actually two different.

That's hand in hand backwards.

It's slowed down, I think, and backwards.

And

I

want to assure you that no drugs were taken at this session whatsoever.

I did make it quite clear that I wanted to be involved at every level because

this is a very personal record, it was my life and it was my

music and I wanted to do all the cover writing, the label, the bits around the

outside, all the legal stuff.

I wrote, which normally is just printed and no one ever reads it, but I just

thought, it's there, I'm going to do it. This is my thing.

And I chose the photographs, chose the press release, everything had to go by

me, and it still does.

Everything still does with every record.

Because I believe that someone is going to buy that record and think, this is my

idea.

The fact that some people think all my records have my face on them is an

egotistical thing.

I mean, you wouldn't put a face like this on the cover, really, if you wanted

to sell a record, would you? I mean, the idea of putting it on the cover was to

try and get as close as you could to almost see inside the person's head,

because this is what was going on inside my head.

1980 was a time when we really were having to come of age, really, and

signing Phil was, you know, in a way, an attempt by me to turn Virgin into a more

mainstream record company.

but in fact it turned out to be something else altogether and broke

completely new ground and was enormously important for us in terms of, you know,

we had a major crossover record and it helped to change Virgin altogether.

I think this song is on the record.

Probably my favourite.

And that's probably including In The Air Tonight. I've just played In The Air

Tonight so many times since I wrote it. Whereas this...

kind of captured an atmosphere, which was there all the time.

Actually, we did it on the tour, the first tour we did.

But I got tired of people talking through it, so I dropped it.

Phil would be playing this delicate song, and it would just be going along.

And there was somebody who would whistle really loud.

i actually remember him getting angry at one point he goes shut up you know

because you're trying to do this delicate song and you just it was an

american audience of course when i came out on stage here tonight i said this

dallas audience wants to listen to the quiet songs am i right

i hope so

Just these two chords here, they're so evocative to me of Isaac

Hayes or You Know I Love You, babe.

I didn't mean to say those things about your mother.

Every moment on this, all the gung-gung, we're

choreographed. I did it on the drums.

I just basically did the drum track and then we added the bass doing what I did

and then the strings highlighted it.

The string part that Arif Madin arranged was wonderful.

It was one of the highlights of the record for me.

Having him stand there conducting this real orchestra, you know, I'm so used to

synthesised strings at that point, it was lovely.

The ending of this song is so beautiful and serene, and in

his track he had stabs, almost like you don't expect

where it's going to come from. You have an incredible, like a wake-up call, you

know.

It's very, very beautiful.

And then continues again.

So we had that in a few places.

And Phil Collins built an incredible mood there. And I went along with the

mood. And I went along with the mood-shattering stabs, too.

This record crept up behind everybody.

It crept up behind me when I was writing it. It crept up behind us when we were

making it.

And suddenly, bang, you know, it went to number one in England and suddenly I had

another thing to do apart from Genesis, you know.

But you never ever think of it being remembered.

That you sent to me And though it's

past now And your words

Start to fade

All the memories

I had

still remaining.

Ooh, I've kept those pictures, but I

hide my feelings so no...

who show my friends all come round

I'm in a crowd but I'm on my

own it's cause you've gone now

but your heart

your heart still

But I did not believe it, not you.

No, you would not let me go.

Seems I was.

And that's the one thing that you, you can't take

away.

No, no.

So just remember.

And leaving me is easy And

then you know Coming

back is harder and harder

And leaving

me is easy

It's harder, harder, harder

You believe in me, it's

really that easy

Is it?

You'll never come back.

So if leaving me is really that easy.

To me it's an album of songs that I really like and songs that I don't

like as much, put it that way.

I'm my own hardest critic really.

So there's stuff on there, little moments like Tomorrow Never Knows This,

I Guess In The Air.

There's things there I'm very proud of that capture those little moments in

time.

I mean, it's a surprise that you get an album like this from a drummer.

And I think people overcompensated and went out and bought it.

Because it was a surprise that I could actually do something else other than

play the drums.

Keep your silence up.

No, you don't fool me.

Because the hurt doesn't shout.

But the pain still grows.

So stranger to you.