Stepping off the train the other day, I caught a glimpse of a teenage male of hip-hop persuasion in front of me and accidentally took the text at the back of his hooded sweater to be the title of a Phil Collins solo album from the 80’s. Of course it wasn’t so, on a second glance, but for a moment the similarity of the font used was enough to convince me this here youth thought the height of cool is sporting a Phil Collins hoodie, with “Hello, I Must Be Going” printed at the back with the kind of hastily scribbled longhand Phil was so keen on using on his album covers, coupled with those painfully intimate too-close-for-comfort shots of his mug from different positions.

This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be a very bold declaration of individuality if a young person, seeking for a convenient wall to nail his personal thesis on and looking for a soapbox of adequate height to climb and hurl his viewpoints and statements at the world, to take to liking an artist as far removed from the artists most commonly favoured by his or her coevals? “This mainstream stuff everyone is so hot about pisses me off extremely so in order to feel superior I will from now on only listen to Phil Collins albums”? No?

No. Actually, “yes” to most of the points, about searching for your own voice and a place to stand and needing to feel superior and needing to despise the mindless masses, we’ve all done that in a certain age and there’s nothing wrong with that. The “no”-part is the Phil Collins part. If you replace his name with almost any other name of an elderly artist who released his most relevant albums decades ago you’d still get a lot of young people liking the music. The new Alice Cooper album is playing on the radio as I write this. Neil Young played a show in Helsinki a few days ago and I’m sure there were many teenagers in the audience. It’s not uncommon to see a kid wearing an Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt. But none of this applies to Phil Collins.


The problem of Phil Collins is that Phil Collins never was cool and never will be cool. I think the picture above clearly demonstrates the impossibleness of calling Phil “cool” in the 70’s. Fortunately he gave up the beard some years later, probably because after the concept of “music video” was invented, no lead vocalist was allowed to look like that anymore. Back in 1985, I was a 14-year old wiseass know-it-all and as devoted a follower of Genesis and other prog music as only a 14-year old can be when Phil Collins released “Sussudio”, the first single of his third solo album “No Jacket Required”. If you check out the video I’m sure you’ll understand the difficult position it put a young and devoted prog music fan into. No wonder I wholeheartedly pursued the new path suddenly opening before me when a little later I was introduced to “Ride The Lightning” by a hot new group called Metallica who probably didn’t rank “Sussudio” among their major musical influences. And so the rest of my teenage years were wasted in a stupor of thrash metal albums and empty beer bottles. I blame this on Phil Collins.

He was quite a capable drummer, though. Maybe I’m just jealous. Jealous of his drumming capability I’m never able to match and jealous of his 70’s beard and the sheer nerve of a man who lets something like that sprout out of his face.

Here’s the video of “Sussudio”.