Collins’ trawl through the Hitsville USA songbook is surprising and disarming.
Long installed in popular music’s multi-million-selling pariah pantheon, there are fewer easy targets for arrows of critical opprobrium than 59-year-old Philip David Charles Collins. Granted, Collins has sometimes been guilty of painting the bull’s-eye on his own forehead (that self-aggrandising Live Aid Concorde business, the cringe-worthy lyrics to Another Day in Paradise, Buster, etc), but nonetheless, the sometime Genesis frontman’s canon is so substantial and his hits so profuse that it feels myopic to dismiss him merely as a haughty purveyor of tortured, romantic ballads for the middle income world.
Certainly, hip hop artists can’t get enough of the near-iconic In the Air Tonight, and Collins, lest it be forgotten, once lent his nimble stick-work to leftfield albums by the likes of Brian Eno and John Cale. All of which is a very long way from Motown: the adolescent Collins’ musical tipple and the inspiration for Going Back, his first solo album since 2002’s underperforming Testify.
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Source: BBC Music