‘Phil good’ factor is back again...
ARE YOU up to speed on the Phil Collins Effect or – as it’s known in academic circles – the PCE? Research led by a “professor of behaviour” at City University of London, suggests PCE can be plotted on an N-shaped graph depicting the peaks and troughs of rock star Phil Collins’s popularity.
A big star in the 1970s/1980s, then nowheresville in the 1990s and now the epitome of cool again. It’s a formula that can be applied to many performers – provided they live long enough.
They pay people at universities for this kind of stuff? I mean – N-shaped – that’s basically a doodle more than a graph isn’t it? Up, down and up.that’s a “comeback” – hardly ground-breaking research.
The comedy writer Barry Cryer once described Frankie Howerd’s career as being “a series of comebacks”.
A big comedy star in the 1960s and 1970s Howerd was out in the cold for years.
But then he became popular with student audiences and performed his one-man shows at universities and small venues.
Frank Sinatra first announced his retirement in 1971 and went on to do about a thousand more comeback concerts. Tina Turner was considered a 1960s nostalgia turn until the 1980s when – in her 40s – she released the Private Dancer album and re-established her claim as the Queen of Rock’n’roll.
But it’s the millennials that have rediscovered our Phil.
Brothers Fred and Tim Williams from Gary, Indiana, made a Youtube film of themselves listening to Collins singing his 1981 hit In The Air Tonight for the first time (bless!). When the drums finally kick in they look flabbergasted.
“I ain’t never seen anyone drop a beat three minutes into a song,” says Fred of Collins’s drumming, in a video that has – as they say – gone viral.
Fred adds: “You killed it, Phil!” The ultimate accolade.
It’s true that Phil Collins and his band Genesis have often been considered pretty naff by lofty music writers. But not being a lofty music writer I’ve always been quite happy to drip around to all manifestations of Genesis and Phil’s solo career. I really like In The Air Tonight. I’m not proud.
David Bowie, who since his death has acquired god-like status (a sort of post mortem PCE), had his own time in the critical wilderness. In 2002 he dismissed his Let’s Dance era as his “Phil Collins Years”.
Ouch! Apparently that upset Phil.another insult to add to all the others.
He’s had a lot of stick over the decades, for being a bald, smug, cheesy, former stage-school boy, a purveyor of middle-of-theroad, prog-rock-turned-synthy dad-dance music, with several failed marriages to boot.
Now, thanks to the PCE, he’s been rediscovered, not only by Fred and Tim Williams but by lofty music writers who now point to what – from where I’m standing – is an amazingly stellar career. Enjoy it Phil. For you, at last, the only way is up. Or down.