Drummer, singer, actor Phil Collins is all this and more. He has performed with the likes of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, The Who and Led Zeppelin. He has also produced albums for his friend Eric Clapton and has lent his drumming talents on albums by artists ranging from jazz man Al DiMeola to hard core rockers Thin Lizzy. He emerged as the lead singer of Genesis in 1976 and has since won seven Grammy awards for his solo albums, of which he has sold over 55 million worldwide. He has also been seen in films like Hook and the HBO docu-drama And The Band Played On and had starring roles in England's Buster and Australia's Frauds.
His latest album is a very introspective work titled Both Sides. After a rehearsal for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Phil took time to speak with me about the new album.
MP: The first single is "Both Sides of the Story." In what way was the song inspired by the film Grand Canyon?
PC:The last verse is from Grand Canyon. It's very early on in the film and I remember thinking that's a strong moment. The last verse is the one; it's four little vignettes. It could be a verse that maybe someone will relate to and understand what I'm talking about. It might be the second verse, third verse, or whatever. But it's just trying to view things occasionally from the other person's point of view, because otherwise, one tends to sort of build walls around your own beliefs. [The fact] that people are being killed still because they believe in a different god, I find quite extraordinary. It's kind of not live and let live, but obviously there are certain things that have to be dealt with. I'm not suggesting that I would have said to Hitler, "Well, you carry on, I just don't agree." [laughs] At the same time, there are certain instances that we have to stand back from and I think one of those is that last verse where the kid has a gun and the normal way of looking at it would be, well, take the gun off him. Throw him in fail and when he comes out, of course, he will go and get the gun again. But what we should do, really, is just try to stand back and understand why he's being driven to that. What the environment is that we've created for him to live in.
MP: Whose ideas go into the making of your videos?
PC: Mostly mine. Obviously, directorially, there's input from the director and producer, but usually the idea is mine and when I don't have an idea, Jim Lukich and Paul Flattery, who've done all my videos over the last ten years now, they'll come up with something. But this particular one is basically lyrics visualized.
MP: I really admired the fact that in the video for "Both Sides of the Story" you see that it's not just a black and white issue.
PC: We deliberately had a Hispanic, a white and a black kid. I actually chose all the extras. I chose them for sympathetic faces. There are some villians out there. We can't deny that. But the whole point that I'm trying to make with the song is that I think, the majority of time, kids are driven to this. Or young adults are driven to this through circustance and they don't really want to be doing it. I think it's everbody's problem. It reaches everybody, not just one particular group of people.
MP: It seems odd that the rest of the songs on the album sound much different than the first single.
PC: I wanted "Both Sides of the Story" out as the first single because I wanted people to think that this album was different. I think that is a very different sounding song for me. It's not representative of the album, so therefore you're sending out mixed signals. The next single is going to be "Everyday," so if people are curious about the album and they've only heard "Both Sides of the Story," "Everday" should put them straight.
MP: The album has been compared to Face Value due to the subject matter and because it was recorded mostly at home.
PC: Well, yes, it was recorded almost entirely at home, actually. Face Value was recorded at home except for the drums-actually, what was recorded at home on Face Value on eight-track was all the keyboards and drum machine stuff. Then I went into a studio and carried on overdubbing, doing the drums and vocals and horns and everything. I also did the same thing with Hello, I Must Be Going. That was demos too. Most of No Jacket Required was demos, apart from "Susudio," which was done in the studio with a programmer. But those first three albums, the bulk of them, were actually demos with overdubs and this one is much more demos and overdubs. All the lead vocals were done at home, no engineer, just me. I had to go in the studio 'cause I have twelve track now, and I kind of had run out of room. And I had to overdub the drums in the real Genesis studio ["real studio" ie he recorded in a professional studio and not at home --ed]
MP: Was the material spontaneously recorded or was it something that was thought out?
PC: No, it was all spontaneously recorded. I mean, "I've Forgotten Everything," that song is actually the demo. We didn't even remix it. It was written, recorded and the version that your hear, in about two hours [I think he means that it took him about two hours to write the song and record it]. So that was very spontaneous. Other songs took a little longer, but most of them were quite quick. And especially with me doing it all, the recording ended up being quite a short process too.
MP: It seems unique that some of the real hardhitting, personal, real life stuff on this album didn't take so long to record whereas people are now studiously working out how to make music as meaningless and sugar-coated as possible.
PC: And taking ages to do it [laughs]
MP: In "We're Sons of Our Fathers," you talk about family values being changed over the years.
PC: I think we are all like our parents were. That's the way we are. We grow up to be the kind of people our mums and dads, in a way, would have liked us to be. I think that in itself is a representation of how off the rails we got because a lot of mums and dads can't believe what their kids do because they don't get the guidance, really. I think that's because of things like television and the games that you play on your own now as opposed to group games when you were a kid. A lot of kids sit down and share the Gameboy and there's no communication at all. They all go out, or they go upstairs and watch TV in their own bedroom as opposed to watching it in the living room with everybody. In- evitably, not only is the television killing communication, but you're not even in the same room not communicating.
MP: Any regrets about not communicating to your parents?
PC: There is a large element of regret with my dad that I did exactly what I just said. I was upstairs playing drums, thinking that he was always going to be there and then, of course, he goes and dies. And you end up thinking, in later life if not straight away, that you should have spent more time and got to know him, you know?
In this particular instance, I'm just saying how I feel and the fact is that I do sound like my dad when I say it. If you were to say it, you'd sound like your dad. I think we all are a product, you know, we're sons of our fathers and sometimes I feel like mine, as the lyric says. Ultimately, there is obviously a generation gap. I don't believe it's just down to generation gap. Whereas it used to be possibly, you know I played music and my dad might not have liked it. He might have preferred Gilbert and Sullivan, right? Or Rogers and Hart, whereas, I am a lot closer musically to my son than my dad was to me, and yet there is till a gap because he likes stuff that I don't quite get.
MP: I wasn't trying to get too personal.
PC: I'll tell you anything [laughs]. Anything you want to know.
MP: "We Fly So Close" is an indication of some of the things we do without even realizing how dangerous or potentially disastrous they are.
PC: Well, sometimes, it's the same as love can make you blind, make you act so strange, you know? It's that sometimes you can do things that you think or thought were the best things to do at the time, and for some reason it might not work out, might not happen, and you look back six months and say, "Thank God for that. Boy, that would be a very dangerous move." That's what I ment in the lyrics. Below the title and above the lyrics I've given a one liner, sentence, or couple of sentences, to point people in the right direction of what I mean by writing the song.
And it is, even on a literal level when you actually get on a plane. I've made maybe a thousand flights in my life, you know. I can't believe--there must have been 20 or 30 of them where, just by the law of averages, I just made it out alive, and I didn't even realize it. I was on a plane once, the Concorde, in fact, [and it] started to land. Just as it got near the runway, it took off again 'cause there was another plane on the runway. I knew about that, but I'm just wondering how many other times that's happened.
It's the same thing in love. You say you're going to do something, or you want to do something, and you try and make it happen, and it doesn't happen. You look back and think, "Oh, I'm glad that didn't happen because it would have been totally the wrong thing to do."
MP: With artists like Bruce Hornsby, and David Crosby volunteering to play on this album, what made you decide to do it all yourself?
PC: Because of the nature of the music, because the songs are so personal, I kind of figured that it was right for me to do it on my own. The songs were real introspective stuff, you know. Reflective material. Inasmuch Face Value was the same, kind of looking at a different situation and that was a divorce and this is, I guess, *not* a divorce [laughs]. I think it's probably entering the second half of the life, you know. Just a matter of the sort of time out period, look back at the first half and going for the second half, really. I suppose that happens when you get to 41, 42. They do say that when you hit 40, you start to go through some of those changes.
MP: I hear you'll be touring with a new band next year.
PC: There are some new faces, yeah. Nathan East is playing bass with us. Ricky Lawson from the Yellowjackets and Michael Jackson [sic] is playing drums. Daryl Stuermer is with us again, as is Brad Cole, the guy who did the keyboards last time. I got a new horn section and Arnold McCuller is going to be singing with us -he did the last tour- and a new girl singer, Amy Keyes. Oh, I got a percussionist, just got him today, Steve Foreman, who does a lot of movie soundtracks. He's going to be on board with us. Boy, we got a great set. I saw it this morning. A really good set. I mean, I haven't seen it, I saw a scale model this morning, but it'll be like an urban concrete jungle in the city, you know.
MP: You've said that you'd like to do more acting and more singing. What do you have in store for us in the acting department?
PC: Well, not right now. There's a couple of parts I finally actually *did* get accepted for--one Mel Gibson film and one Jeff Bridges film--but by the time they started shooting, I was in the middle of the album and was too far down that road to turn back. I'm still going around meeting people and educating them to the fact that I want to do more. The movie side of it is so slow that if you start talking about it now, maybe in a year you'll do something.
MP: With all the speculation surrounding this album, is there anything that you feel needs to be said about the album to counter it?
PC: The two things that we have to make perfectly clear. One is that none of these songs are about my first wife, because a lot of people *will* say that because even *I* had mentioned that it's very close to Face Value, which was about my first wife. The other conclusion that would be drawn, is that my marriage now is in trouble and that also is not true at all. It's going back to that big Four-Oh sort of syndrome where you start thinking about people you've met in the past and relationships you've had and what's happening in the future, and it's just nostalgia, really. Sentimentality.
MP: You've been called the nicest guy in rock and roll. How do you react to that statement?
PC: In some instances, it bothers me because the implication is that middle of the road; nice, meaning average. Some of the time--a fair percentage of the time, if not the majority of the time--it is actually meant in [a derogatory] way [laughs] by certain areas of the press, anyway. It just washes over you, unfortunately, into people's perception of the music. And it ends up being the nice guy that sings the sort of sloppy ballads--you know what I mean?--as opposed to if you have a slightly sort of harder edge, and you still sing the same song, the song is perceived differently. My mother says to me, "What the hell is wrong with being nice?" In the cold light of day, I think it really doesn't matter at all. I'd much rather be thought of as someone that's Mr. Nice Guy than an absolute bastard.