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(Credits: Far Out \/ Phil Collins \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n
Sat 17 January 2026 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
When Phil Collins<\/a> first began his solo career, he didn\u2019t want to put it into the same category as everything he did in Genesis. <\/p>\n He probably wouldn\u2019t have thought that he would become the darling of pop radio when Face Value came out, but if he had the choice of making millions of dollars or making a few fusion records for the real music nerds, there\u2019s no contest about what everyone else would have done. And it\u2019s not like Collins wasn\u2019t happy to oblige whenever people started asking him for the next heartbreaking ballad.<\/p>\n You have to remember that what Collins was doing wasn\u2019t exactly new for him. He may have had a lot of chops from going on long progressive exercises in his old band, but he wasn\u2019t selling out in the traditional sense. He genuinely loved the music that he was playing, and while many people may have been looking at Genesis differently after songs like \u2018Misunderstanding\u2019 and \u2018Follow You Follow Me<\/a>\u2019 started gaining traction, it was the obvious next step for him when he started to flex his muscles.<\/p>\n No songwriter can stay in one genre forever, but the last thing that most people were expecting was seeing Collins go the way of Motown. Here is a guy who feels like one of the most rigid drummers in the world, thanks to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but the sense of swing that he brought to his version of \u2018You Can\u2019t Hurry Love\u2019 made a lot more sense if you were willing to pay a little bit more attention.<\/p>\n Collins was always a fan of classic Motown hits, and the horn parts on a song like \u2018No Reply At All\u2019 does have a few shades of what had been coming out of Hitsville when he was a kid. He may not have been the only one to try his hand at singing Motown tunes, but when listening to how the rest of the rock and roll tackled the classics, not all of them managed to knock it out of the park every single time.<\/p>\n The Beatles did have a firm grasp on how people like Smokey Robinson arranged those gorgeous harmony parts for The Miracles, but there were clearly people who didn\u2019t do their homework. Collins at least got to work with the original session players on those recordings when making Going Back, but compared to the tunes he loved as a kid, he felt that The Rolling Stones didn\u2019t need to show their love of R&B that much.<\/p>\n