Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  The way I make the album that will become my first solo set establishes the tone of what I will do in the future. Record all my vocals at home. Sing in that improvised way. Play it back and write down what I sing—or what it seemed I was trying to sing. You’re jotting down a sketch of what you’ve just sung. Sometimes it’s almost fully formed, other times it’s useless. A song develops, slowly or quickly. You can feel it coming in the air tonight. But only sometimes.

  From here on I do that for every record I ever make.

  And yet this isn’t going to become an album until I have twelve or thirteen songs, put them on cassette and play these demos to someone else. Eventually I let Tony Smith hear them one day on my Mini’s car stereo, and I play them for Ahmet Ertegun, our American label boss at Atlantic Records. Truth be told, I revealed my homework to Ahmet before we went out on the Duke tour—but only because I drew the short straw and was given the Genesis job of driving up to London to the apartment he keeps while he’s in the U.K. and playing him Duke for the first time.

  We have a drink or ten, Ahmet asks how I am—he knows about the impending divorce—and I tell him I’m OK, and that actually I’ve been doing some writing…

  I hadn’t really anticipated playing anything of mine to Ahmet. But I always had a tape in my car, so I could listen to the demos and come up with new ideas to add. Anyway, Ahmet listens to these demos and declares with emphatic enthusiasm, “THIS IS A RECORD!” Suddenly he forgets the new Genesis album. “Phil, you’ve GOT to make this into a record. Anything I can help you with, I will. But this has to be a record.”

  Wow. It’s incredibly important to have this man, whom I respect so much, saying this. Ahmet discovered Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and now he’s telling me I’m a winner, too. He’s produced numerous records I’ve held close to my heart, and he likes what I’ve done. It doesn’t get much better than this.

  And I need it. I’ve been through the mincer with the marriage split, feeling like a fool…I’d told the guys I was off to Vancouver to patch things up, and I’d come back having done no such thing. Then Tony and Mike were off on new solo musical adventures, and there I was, just the singing drummer again.

  So, yeah, I’ve been feeling pretty bad about myself. Yet here’s one of the greatest record executives in history telling me that what I’ve been doing on my own is fucking great. Ahmet’s thumbs-up finally convinces me that, as soon as I’m done with Duke obligations, I will record my first solo album.

  Still, I’m not blind to one final irony: had I not been battered by the breakdown in my marriage, my debut collection of solo compositions would have taken on a very different hue. It probably would have been a Brand X–type, instrumental jazz thing along the lines of Weather Report. If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.

  Nonetheless, not all the songs I’ve written are doom and gloom. “This Must Be Love” (“Happiness is something I never thought I’d feel again / but now I know / it’s you that I’ve been looking for”) and “Thunder and Lightning” (“They say thunder / and they say lightning / it will never strike twice / but if that’s true / then why can’t you tell me / how come this feels so nice?”) are the songs that move the personal narrative onward. These are the Jill songs.

  I meet Jill Tavelman in mid-1980, in Los Angeles, after Genesis play the Greek Theatre on the Duke tour. Tony Smith is going through a divorce, too, so we’re both brand-new bachelors. Generally the management and I never hang out after the shows, but uncha​racteri​stically, he and I go out on the town together.

  This particular night we decide to do something different for both of us: we have the limo drop us at The Rainbow Room on the Sunset Strip. It’s an LA rock’n’roll institution: not so much a hang-out for bands but for their crew. It’s also a place to pick up girls. These facts could be related.

  We slide into a booth and sit there, quenching our post-gig thirsts. I stretch my arms above and behind my head. Suddenly there’s a pair of hands grabbing my hands. I look back and there’s this girl, short hair, very cute in a Tinkerbell sort of way. She’s very happy. And she’s with another girl. Before long we’re all sitting at the same table.

  Eventually, the four of us hop into the waiting limo and repair to L’Hermitage, the LA hotel of the moment. I still don’t quite know how this happens, but later that night I’m in bed with Jill and her girlfriend. That hasn’t happened before, or since. I should stress that there is no hanky-panky. My abiding feeling is: “What am I supposed to do with two?” For other people, this is the life. Not for me. I’m too embarrassed, I guess. For young(ish) Phil Collins, it’s stage-fright time.

  Jill is a well-educated Beverly Hills girl, twenty-four years old, with her own distinct musical tastes (Iggy Pop is one of her favorites). I recognize that she’s special, and deserving of more than casual sex. It seems like the feeling is mutual. We have a couple of dates and, before I leave LA, Jill comes by the hotel to say goodbye. She gives me a Steve Martin book, Cruel Shoes. She knows I’m a big fan. I find out that her godfather is Groucho Marx. I have a funny feeling about this girl.

  I invite Jill to join me on tour and, five days later, she flies into Atlanta. Unfortunately, there is another Collins staying at the Hyatt Regency, and Jill is given the key to his room. He’s a proper musician—a Scottish bagpipe player, in town with his clan to play in full Highland regalia—and when she arrives in his room, he’s in the shower. On hearing a female voice, he perks up, thinking it’s in the small print of his contract. By a whisker reasonable modesty is preserved, although Jill is cruelly robbed of solving the mystery that vexes most Americans: namely, what a Scotsman wears under his kilt.

  All of a sudden it looks like we’re an item. I respond in the way that is fast becoming second nature to me: I write about her, with “This Must Be Love” and “Thunder and Lightning” emerging with loved-up ease. We talk on the phone regularly and then, a few months later, when I’m back in LA to record horn parts for my work-in-progress solo album, Jill comes to the studio. She brings along her mum and introduces us. Afterward, her dear mum Jane will say, “Well, darling, love is blind.” That stings a bit, but I turn my pain to gain: the line will reappear in the lyric of a song, “Only You Know and I Know,” on 1985’s No Jacket Required.

  I make a list of who I want to help out on this still-abstract, non-jazz solo album: Eric Clapton, David Crosby, the horn section from Earth, Wind & Fire, Stephen Bishop (who will later return the favor by giving me “Separate Lives”), string arranger Arif Mardin, jazz bassist Alphonso Johnson. All my heroes, basically.

  Working with Eric is easy. He and Pattie’s Ewhurst home is only fifteen minutes away from Shalford, so I often sleep over. Pattie takes a real shine to me, and I’ve always had a soft spot for her, ever since first clapping eyes on her as a schoolgirl in A Hard Day’s Night. So much so that one time Eric jokingly tells Mick Fleetwood at a New Year’s Eve party that I’m fucking Pattie while he’s away on the road—and I’m fucking Mick’s ex-wife Jenny (Pattie’s sister) in the bargain. Mick gets the joke, but of course I’m embarrassed by the crack, especially as Joely and Simon are standing beside me.

  So I’m round there all the time. We drink, and Eric sometimes has to be put to bed, but it never gets out of hand. That’s the kind of person—the kind of drinker—he is. He goes to the edge. I’m too sensible. I leave the edge to others.

  Eric plays on two tracks I’ve earmarked for this still-as-yet-untitled solo album, “If Leaving Me Is Easy” and “The Roof Is Leaking,” but only I know he’s on the former. He comes over to my place one night and I play him the demo. The lights are down and we’ve had a few too many drinks—he’s a committed brandy-and-ginger guy, and we’ve already been out to the pub. That’s the way we are most of the time.

  I play him “If Leaving Me Is Easy,” and the thing with Eric is, he only plays when he’s got something to offer. He plays a guitar part, but ol’ Slowhand takes it slow. I was hoping he’d play more, but he says, “I di
dn’t want to play, I didn’t want to mess it up.”

  Even though I intend to make a virtue of my inexperience and produce these songs myself, I know I’ll need an assistant producer and an engineer. So I meet with Hugh Padgham. Hugh is a bass player but he loves drums, and we’d developed that groundbreaking sound on Peter’s track “Intruder.” With hindsight, I now know that that day or two we’d spent working on Peter’s third album in Townhouse in 1979 was life-changing.

  I tell Hugh, “I can’t face recording all this stuff again. A lot of emotion has gone into it, and I like the way it sounds. So I want to use my demos.” So we copy my eight-tracks onto sixteen-track, state of the art for the time, and throughout winter 1980/1981 we carry on overdubbing at Townhouse.

  We fool around with “In the Air Tonight,” but at the moment there’s no big drum fill, so none of that gated drum sound, just me coming in on the drums for the last choruses. That’s the way I assume it will stay.

  But then I’m sitting in the Townhouse live room. You can control how much “liveness” you want in the recording by closing heavy curtains to deaden the sound. And if you put the microphones in the top corners of the room, you can make the drums sound much more live. But for “In the Air Tonight” we say, “Let’s try that sound we had with Pete…” What we actually end up with is nowhere as extreme as “Intruder.” Even if you place the mics in the same place, and try for the same sound, you’ll always end up with a different animal. Different day, different result.

  As for that drum fill: people ask about it all the time. A landmark in percussion, in production, in ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom, doom-doom. Imagine seals barking it next time you’re at a zoo. It’s pretty cool, as that gorilla in the 2007 Cadbury’s advert would agree.

  But back in Townhouse, at the dawn of the eighties, I know for sure that I never say, “I know what’s going to work…” I just play it. Hear it. Love it. That’s it. What do I know? Remember, I think “Against All Odds” is a B-side.

  But I soon realize that nobody has heard drums like this, as loud as this, and with that kind of sound. Beyond that, lyrically too, the song has that something about it that nobody really understands. Not even me. Maybe because I’m not a songwriter—not yet, not really—it’s outside the box of traditional songwriting.

  It’s simple, it’s ghostly, it’s full of space, it’s a cri de cœur. It should definitely not be a single.

  I have to come up with a title for the album. It’s obvious that most of the songs are autobiographical. So I have an idea to call it Exposure. Or Interiors. They sound appropriate. But I then remember that not only is Exposure a Robert Fripp album, but it’s a Fripp album that I played on. And Interiors is a Woody Allen film. I still liked that for the title, though. But then, might calling it Interiors make the painter and decorator think it’s all about him?

  For the cover, I have the idea of seeing inside my head, right through the eye sockets. What is going on inside this person’s mind? That, and not any egotistical reason, is why it’s a close-up. And, of course, it’s black and white. That cover image in turn underlines an idea I’ve now had for the title: Face Value.

  Because this is such a personal record, I’m committed to every aspect of it, fully responsible for all the nuts and bolts. For one thing, there’s the choice of label that’s going to release it—and that’s not going to be a label that has anything to do with Genesis. Even if that means letting down our Charisma label boss and my old pal Tony Stratton-Smith, the man who, a hectic decade earlier, pointed me in the direction of the Genesis gig in the first place.

  I have a sad liquid meeting with him in his room at L’Hermitage to break the bad news. He’s in LA because the Monty Python crew are performing at the Hollywood Bowl, and John Cleese stops by to say hello to Strat. It’s a very Fawlty scene, with him dressed in a Pittsburgh Penguins hockey shirt. “Sorry…sorry…didn’t know you were busy…not to worry, come back later,” splutters Cleese. The whiskey of our meeting does not mix well with the tequila of our Mexican lunch. A Strat cigar finishes me off. I’m as sick as a Norwegian parrot on the pavement. Maybe it’s appropriate penance for ditching my old benefactor.

  Anyway, onward. Tony Smith shops Face Value around in the U.K. and Virgin are desperately keen. I sign on the dotted line with Richard Branson’s label, the home of Tubular Bells and Never Mind the Bollocks. I can fit somewhere in between those. To the casual observer, this is a new Phil Collins.

  I go to the cutting and the mastering. I write by hand everything that has to be written—the track listing, the sleeve credits, even all the legal stuff that goes on the disc label. I get the record company to give me some blank labels that go on the middle of the vinyl and I write around the edges. If I run out of space, I start again. If I have too much space, I start again. Attention to detail. It’s my first solo album. It might be my last solo album. I’m going to give it everything, and it’s going to be all me.

  Still, I have low-to-no expectations. People close to me have heard Face Value and they all say what Ahmet said: “Wow.” But they’re biased. And really, I know none of them expects anything, critically or commercially. In America the label doesn’t even want to release “In the Air Tonight” as the first single. They plump for “I Missed Again.”

  I go to New York and meet with Ahmet to discuss how to promote this hard-to-pin-down album. I’ve stayed with Atlantic for the U.S. release, largely because of Ahmet. He loves me and my music, and maintains that enthusiasm for as long as he lives. He gives me a lot of courage and reassurance over the years when I’m getting stick left, right and center. Whenever he has new artists in his office, Ahmet will play “In the Air Tonight” and say, “Now this is what I would like from you.”

  My question for Ahmet and his team: how can I open doors that are closed to Genesis? After all, the initial radio reaction sheets from American disc jockeys to “I Missed Again” are promising, along the lines of: “Hey, this is a mover!”

  I think, “There’s no reason this album couldn’t appeal to R&B fans. It’s got the Earth, Wind & Fire horns on it!”

  So I organize a meeting with Henry Allen, the label’s head of black music. “Listen, I would like this record to go to R&B stations.”

  “Yeah…but they’re not gonna play you. ’Cause you’re white.”

  “Yeah, but they won’t know that if you don’t put me on the cover. Bill it as ‘Phil Collins and the EWF horns.’ Or even ‘The EWF Horns with Phil Collins.’ I don’t care how, but I feel this can cross over.”

  “No. They’ll know.”

  This racial delineation is a shock to me. This is not the fifties or the sixties, it’s the eighties. But I soon learn that old prejudices linger. When Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey is preparing to come over and make his album Chinese Wall with me in the producer’s seat in 1984, he has meetings with Frankie Crocker, the famous black disc jockey, and with Larkin Arnold, the head of CBS’s R&B division. They both tell Philip, “You’re going to London to work with this Phil Collins? Well, don’t come back with a white album.”

  At the end of October 1980 I invite Jill to move over to England, and as 1981 comes round we’re ensconced in Old Croft. She’s sacrificed her last year of college, where she was studying to be a high school teacher, to come and live with me.

  Face Value comes out on February 9, 1981, shortly after my thirtieth birthday. I don’t go out on a solo tour. Too soon for any of that, and I want to have more music in my repertoire. Besides, it’s a little daunting to think of a solo tour.

  Meanwhile, Genesis have decided to bite the bullet and get our own studio-cum-headquarters. We buy a lovely Tudor house in Chiddingfold, our minds made up in no small part by the large, multi-car garage in the garden. This we can convert into the recording space of the complex we will call The Farm. While the building conversion takes place we settle into the house’s low-ceilinged living room and begin writing what will become Genesis’ eleventh studio album, Abacab.

&nb
sp; During the writing of Abacab news slowly filters through of Face Value’s unexpected success. This makes things a little awkward. I’ll come in all bubbly, and genuinely gobsmacked: “My God, ‘In the Air Tonight’ has reached number 1 in Holland!” Not only that, it’s becoming a smash all over the world. Face Value keeps selling and selling. As Tony Banks pithily says in the 2014 BBC documentary Genesis: Together and Apart: “We wanted Phil to do well. Just not that well.”

  Here at the start of the eighties I can glimpse, already, how things might change in the band. I guess maybe the guys are thinking, “Well, that’s it—Phil’s going to leave.” Not that anyone says as much, although Tony Smith pointedly tells me, “I think Genesis is really good for you.” Another singer leaves Genesis? To lose one frontman is careless; to lose two…Certainly Genesis wouldn’t survive another schism like that.

  Smith, being a great manager, is right. And he’ll stay right for a long time after. Each career—solo and band—reinforces the other.

  Plus, of course, I’m enjoying this unforeseen solo success. Before now I labored under that ongoing sense of being the junior partner in Genesis. I realize years later that I underestimated the guys’ opinion of me, which I find out when reading Mike’s book: “If Phil had an idea, we listened.” This is a revelation to Mr. Insecure. We’d never had that kind of discussion. Emotional candor was not something we displayed in front of each other.

  For a long time, though, I will still feel sheepish with Genesis when it comes to writing—“I’ve got this tune, is it good enough?” But with my songs, coming thick and fast as the eighties kick into gear, I’m starting to prove myself. “Misunderstanding,” the first full song I wrote for the band, is released as the third single from Duke. It becomes our biggest international hit.

  Face Value continues to sell. It’s a number 1 in the U.K., something which impresses us all. We’ve always wanted a number 1 for Genesis.

  Are Tony and Mike jealous? Not that I’m aware. And that sense of humor—“We wanted Phil to do well. Just not that well”—is how we are with each other. Nobody is allowed to get above themselves.