Transcription by Scott McMahan on January 6, 1991.
I always try and do something that I haven't done before. [the] Last album I tried to write some more dance-oriented music -- [with] some degrees of success, I suppose. I tried to do something a bit more serious and a little less what people would think of as being flippiant. I think coming from the Buster stuff, with "Two Hearts" and "Groovy Kind of Love," songs -- and I didn't write "Groovy Kind of Love" -- but that were done for a specific project. It wasn't me thinking 'Phil Collins solo, I'll cover this song' -- it was done because [it was] the right period for the film, and so this [i.e. But Seriously] is the first thing since then; so I just wanted to try and get people that thought I was going a bit soft with "Groovy Kind of Love" -- [just to say to them] this is me doing what I do now.
But Seriously is the title, and I found it very hard to come up with a title. It's [i.e. the title is] always something that this album is going to be _called_; this is going to be called this now, forever. So it's hard to sort of sit down and say 'this is the title!' and be happy with it. The song titles are the same -- very hard. We came up with -- originally the title was going to be Serious Business, but there's the business connotation, and people thought maybe it would look like a business, and it wasn't like that -- so we ended up with But Seriously. And I think we went along that direction because of the lyrics.
I just write about what comes, if you know what I mean. I write the music -- a song like "Just Another Day in Paradise," which actually the working title was called "Homeless," I wrote those lyrics at the same time as the music. I played the piano, wrote the music, and the words came out. When we were cutting the single in London, I crossed the road -- I'd just come out of the studio -- crossed the road, and this woman -- wouldn't've dreamed that she was goign to say anything -- this woman with two kids said to me 'give some money, love' and obviously didn't have anywhere to go. But it's not just that, it's everywhere, places you don't think -- I remember when we played in Washington, these people were asleep, or trying to sleep, on the grilles in the snow, Washington was almost at a standstill -- and these people were trying to sleep on the grilles where the hot air was coming up. And you could see it was in the shadow of Capitol Hill. I thought it was an extraordinary sort of contradiction. What it also deals with is people's awkwardness with it. When it happened to me, I just walked straight past. And I thought, 'I'm doing the same thing as everyone else is doing.' What do I do? I felt awkward. I didn't ignore her, but at the same time I didn't stop and give her some money. There's two arguements: do you give people money like that, or don't you? I don't know. I mean, if you give someone that's like an alchoholic money for a cup of coffee, he'll go buy some alcohol with it. But, it's just people's awkwardness with it. And that's what the song deals with: the people that just start to whistle and pretend it's not happening.
When I did my first album, I said to John Colodner [?], who was a very integral part of the first album, really, cos I didn't know any of these people. He said to me 'Well, who do you want on the album?' So I said, I gave a list of people. I wanted the Earth, Wind, & Fire horns, I saked Stephen Bishop -- cos by this time I knew -- I want David Crosby, and I want Arif Mardin, and blah blah blah, and Eric Clapton -- who, again, I knew by that point. Anyway, he [i.e. John C.] came back, but he said 'Crosby's out on his boat. [We] won't get him back. He's gone out there.' And I said 'ah, that's a shame' cos I wanted my heroes on my first record -- and didn't get him. I just love him so much. Even with the Byrds, all the bands I've been in have done covers of the Byrds' songs. And then Crosby, Stills, and Nash -- I think he's the key member of that group cos he's the one that, to me, picks the odd notes out of the air and sings them. I approached him at that 40th anniversary gig [Atlantic Records' 40th, 1988] and said 'would you sing [on it]' and he said 'Aw, man, I'd love to' and so that's where it went from there. And he did -- I sent him a tape of the songs -- when I got to LA I gave him a couple of he rough mixes of the two songs that he was going to sing on. And he came back and he did exactly what I expected him to do, which is great. He just picked a few notes out of the air that I never would have thought of, and sang them.
I write the chords and the drums and stuff -- I mean the drum machine -- do the demo, and I play it back to myself and I sing -- and whatever rubbish I sing is recorded. And I [??? Some word like filter, sift, shift] through the rubbish and see if I've sung anything worth keeping. And sometimes -- Sussudio was born like that -- and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But usually you get some lines which at least gives you somewhere to start. And Hang In Long Enough was one of those things and it was obviously going to be a key horn track. And I'm always fascinated by certain areas of black music which I try and get closer to every time I record but it still ends up sounding very different from R&B when it comes out; but it's just my attempt to try and do something in that field.
We've actually made a conscious effort to keep effects off the voice on this album. I listen back to some of the old stuff and there's -- for me to sing in the old days -- I say 'the old days', everything up to this album, I mean, including the last Genesis album -- I would have a harmonizer on my voice, I'd have echo, and it'd be a vocal effect -- the vocal was a vocal effect. And I guess that really was to cover up my own feelings or inadequacies about my singing. This time I just thought, I felt I was singing better, but also 'let's just have it warts and all.' -- you know, let's have a bit of reverb just to put it in perspective, but no effects, really. There's very little effect. Occasionally there's a little bit of slap echo like the old rock and roll echo just to push it out of the track a bit. But I tried to keep it a little bit more honest & upfront.
[This is about Something Happened on the Way to Heaven, although the name is never mentioned.] This is one of the last songs I've wrote. I wrote it for the Four Tops [For Buster?!?]. It's been a lot of places, this song. I wrote it for the Four Tops, but I never gave it to them, because by the time I'd written it, I liked it! [laughs] I kept it and it was a bit of a bland chorus -- and we recorde dit -- because most of the album was done as usual -- me doing piano or keyboards first or drum machine, then going in and putting the drums on, and then getting people in to do this and that -- piecemeal. There was no tracks, I mean there's only, probably -- I can't think of any tracks on the last album that were done as a band. You know -- like more than one musician in the studio at the same time. So I thought 'let's have a couple of tracks we play as a band.' This is one of them. We had me, Leland [Sklar, on bass], and Daryl [Stuermer, guitar] playing and we just rehearsed it and went through it. Then daryl said 'I've got some different chords for the chorus to make it a bit more interesting,' so we changed that -- by which time Leland had gone back to America, so we got Nathan [East] in to play bass on it. And basically I had the chords written but Daryl just put some changes in which made it much more interesting, so hence his credit on that. He made the changes. To me the change is to me what makes the song come alive.
[This part is about Colours] I was gonna call it -- there's an English song called "Oh Mr. Porter What Can I Do?" -- and I was gonna call it "Oh. Mr. Bota What Can We Do?" because it's aimed at Africa -- I just handle all that. It is about South Africa. There's two songs there, really, that were spliced together. There's one thought. And the first one was called "hymn" for a while, H-Y-M-N, and it was just a look -- it was basically a song like the newsreels you were seeing at that time. Everyone has seen the footage of the live aid thing. And it's still happening; it's not gone away; it's still happening. Everyone thinks just cos we reaised $60 million it's all stopped, it hasn't.
Clapton [lurch in the interview like a bad splice] I said 'Okay, well, come down and play.' So he came down and played. He's like 'what's it about?' I don't know -- I try -- the chorus 'I wish it would rain down' and some of the verse were spontaneous -- as most of my stuff is -- and as I said before I try to write in [i.e. fill in] the holes to make sense of what -- occasionally there are sort of little gaps in there. Relating it to certain things - if you see your fist girlfriend you ever had, you suddenly -- if you come across her suddenly on the street you'll suddenly remember what it was all about, and then you wish that you'd never done it. 'I didn't mean to sort of open up this ca of worms again, I just called by just to say hi' or whatever. And you just end up regretting it.
[This picks up in mid sentence]...it's flattering, really, if people want to sound like you; it's okay by me. The idea if whether you can copyright a sound is nothing that -- I mean I've never gone in legally to it. To me it's the personality playing the thing that makes it what it is. So you've got people that have got my sound, but they haven't got my personality -- they've got their own personality. Abd t's like you can play a Stratocaster and get Clapton's sound, but you won't sound like Clapton because of what he is.
Sampling's okay. I sampled a whole bunch of James Brown stuff the other day. 'Ow!' 'Everybody aboard for the night train.' Just for fun. There's an art to using that properly. I don't find it -- I mean we actually put some sounds on this album, drum sounds, we disguised, put echoes. There's one song which isn't on the album [You've Been in Love (That Little Bit Too Long)] but it's got a very exposed drum fill on the front and we knew that people were going to sample it, so we put a backwards echo on the whole thing -- which led up tot he first downbeat of the song so people can't sample it.
We're starting at the end of February. Rehearsing through January/February and going out February -- March -- well, we're going out till September. To Japan, Australia, States. We're going to be playing certain places first, like LA, and New York, Chicago. Then coming back to do a lot of the other major cities.