Against all odds, I’ve started to like Phil Collins

This isn’t easy for me. In fact, it is perhaps the most difficult public admission I’ve ever made. I’m worried about how people will react, how friends and colleagues might reconsider their opinion of me after reading this.

But I can’t keep it locked up secretly inside me any longer. I have to admit it.

I’m starting to quite like Phil Collins.

This isn’t a fully fledged commitment – it’s not something I’d die on a hill for. But I’m unmistakably starting to warm to the chirpy, balding balladeer.

This is particularly shocking because for at least a decade, from the early eighties to early nineties, he was, for me, the personification of everything that was wrong with the world. Phil Collins was worse than bankers with Porsches, than Black Wednesday, than jackets with padded shoulders; worse, even, than Brothers in Arms.

In fact, my antipathy to Phil is so long-established that it even predates the time when I was first aware of who he was. In my first couple of years in secondary school (in the late seventies, before he went solo) I was instinctively contemptuous of older boys with bad hair and bad trousers whose favourite band was always Genesis, instead of the punkier, cooler new wave artists that I had embraced.

But over the last couple of years, whenever I’ve caught one of his hits playing on a cheesy radio coming out of a van window, it has sounded better than anything they’ve played before. It has often sounded better than anything I’ve played lately too.

The most recent and most grave of these moments came just last week via the hit Chicago restaurant drama, The Bear. Its soundtrack contains any number of artists who appear in my record collection and whom I’ve been listening to for years: acts like The Beach Boys, Van Morrison, Bian Eno and John Cale, REM, Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists and Wilco.

But what was the one song on The Bear soundtrack that really stopped me in my tracks? It was one that doesn’t appear in my record collection, to which I had never deliberately listened: ‘In Too Deep’ by Genesis (with a Collins vocal).

I knew it, of course. I hadn’t been able to avoid it, even though I had long wanted to – it was for years a radio staple, despite only reaching no. 19 in the charts, in September 1986. But had I ever properly listened before?

Its hook goes: ‘You know I love you, but I just can’t take this…You know I want to, but I’m in too deep.’ And here I was in too deep myself. With Phil. Because suddenly, a mere 37 years after I first heard it, this song had hooked me: almost unconsciously, I found I had repeat-played it several times. For the first time in my life I was deliberately playing Phil Collins.

Phil Collins! What’s happened to me?

Collins is perceived as a the cheeky chappy of the eighties charts – perhaps the musical counterpart to the film world’s Bob Hoskins. Yet unlike bona fide dodgy geezer Hoskins, Phil was of another class entirely. He was initially at a boys’ grammar before being moved to stage school by white collar Wandsworth parents Greville and Winifred, which led him to land the part in Oliver! on the West End stage of…the Artful Dodger. 

And there you had it: Phil’s geezerishness was an artful construct of dodgy provenance based on a character from Dickens. His Genesis bandmates went to Charterhouse, for goodness’ sake. Case closed, I thought – Phil was a fake. And having taken in his millions of dumb fans he now lives as an apparently crotchety multimillionaire recluse on the proceeds. 

Now I think…who cares?

On reflection, I suspect that the reason I disliked him so intensely for so long actually said a good deal more about me than him. I was snobby about music, po-facedly approving or disapproving of artists as if I were curating the soundtrack for cool TV shows myself rather than what I was really doing: simply listening to records alone in my bedroom. Despite the great consideration I gave it, no one cared about my taste except me and possibly one or two equally-nerdy, male friends.

And what I really disliked about Collins was more his fans than him: they didn’t do any of this curating, good-taste stuff. They just quite liked Phil Collins – and often a bunch of other cultural, fashion and lifestyle things that I also disapproved of almost as vehemently.

Certainly there is one group who would say I always had it wrong: US rappers have had an unlikely but deep affection for Collins for almost as many years as I’ve disliked him. He’s been covered or sampled countless times by hip hop and R&B artists including 2Pac, DMX, Lil’ Kim and Doug E. Fresh. There was even an urban music tribute album.

The Collins/hip hop love-in became so established that it was even parodied in the sitcom 30 Rock. The Bronx-raised actor Tracy Jordan says ‘I’m gonna make you a mixtape… do you like Phil Collins?’ – and TV executive Jack Donaghy replies: ‘I’ve got two ears and heart, don’t I?’

It seems that these days I do, too.