(Credits: Far Out / Phil Collins / YouTube Still)
Sat 17 January 2026 22:00, UK
When Phil Collins first began his solo career, he didn’t want to put it into the same category as everything he did in Genesis.
He probably wouldn’t 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’s no contest about what everyone else would have done. And it’s not like Collins wasn’t happy to oblige whenever people started asking him for the next heartbreaking ballad.
You have to remember that what Collins was doing wasn’t 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’t 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 ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘Follow You Follow Me’ started gaining traction, it was the obvious next step for him when he started to flex his muscles.
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 ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ made a lot more sense if you were willing to pay a little bit more attention.
Collins was always a fan of classic Motown hits, and the horn parts on a song like ‘No Reply At All’ 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.
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’t 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’t need to show their love of R&B that much.
While Mick Jagger and Keith Richards practically rewrote rock and roll history, Collins felt that it was best for them to stay away from Motown, saying, “The Stones’ ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,’ the Stones’ ‘Going to a Go-Go’ – they’re pretty awful. … But they weren’t out to recreate it. It’s the Rolling Stones doing those songs.” But if you look at the records as an authentic R&B song, The Stones’ versions kind of fall apart.
They were much more into the bluesy side of rhythm and blues, and while the Temptations’ take on ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ is among the greatest soul songs of all time, but even if It’s Only Rock and Roll was an album of them resting on their laurels as rock legends, Jagger’s version of the tune sounds a lot more like the band running through a version in their rehearsal space rather than putting the final take down.
Everyone is more than welcome to experiment with any cover tune they decide to do, but whereas Collins soaked in every single lesson they he learned, The Stones were always going to bring a sense of danger to what they played. That was usually a good thing on the blues classics, but when it came to heartwrenching ballads, some tunes simply weren’t going to work coming from them.
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