The song Phil Collins admit he “lost the plot” making

Posted On August 20, 2025August 20, 2025

The most important part of making an album is having a good handle on the musicians you’re working with. It’s never easy working with a lot of different egos clashing with each other, but even if there’s one de facto leader of the group, people like Phil Collins can find themselves pressing their opinion a bit too much.

But it’s not like Collins didn’t realise when things could get out of hand. When working with every other band that he had during his prime, he knew that it was best for him to make what served the song half the time rather than grandstanding. When he got the call to become Genesis’s drummer, though, the door was wide open to throw in as many fills as he wanted to, which created the most beautiful controlled chaos anyone had ever heard.

Say what you will about the kind of soppy ballads that he made during his 1980s years, but The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is proof enough that Collins could dominate any drum kit that he had in front of him. And even when he went solo with Face Value and started his journey into the land of adult contemporary music, there’s a reason why the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of his solo career is the massive drum fill in the middle of ‘In the Air Tonight’.

When you break it down, though, Face Value might be the most adventurous of his 1980s output. Genesis were certainly moving in more mainstream directions whenever they hit on albums like their self-titled and Invisible Touch, but as a nice way to kick off the decade, Collins’s solo record does have some callbacks to his life as a fusion player, which helped when getting a star-studded guest list.

Outside of working on the demos by pouring his heart out about his fractured marriage, many of the songs are among the best pop hooks, which also come courtesy of people like Eric Clapton. If he wanted to stretch his muscles, Collins also needed to serve his own creative muse, but for ‘The Roof Is Leaking’, he admitted that his direction to Clapton was completely alien to what the guitar legend was known for.

Despite being able to play nearly anything, Collins said he critically screwed up when asking Clapton to play one lick over and over again, saying, “I had Eric come down to the studio to re-record the song, ‘The Roof Is Leaking’. And I missed the plot there — I lost the plot, really. What he does on that song’s demo — you can hear it on the bonus disc, mastered from a cassette — is what it should be, and also what he did in the studio is what it should be. I had wanted him to do the same thing each time. He’s not that guy!”

While Clapton is no stranger to the odd musical motif, putting him in that position felt like one of the worst things Collins could have done. Anyone could learn a basic lick and pick it up when it came time to run the track, but having it be one of the greatest guitar legends of all time is like someone owning a sports car and exclusively using it to go around the corner to the market every other weekend.

Collins did eventually learn the error of his ways and even helped Clapton back into relevance on Behind the Sun, so this was only a snag in their creative partnership. But if this kind of thing kept up, we would have probably remembered Collins as the kind of producer who only sees musicians as tools rather than the geniuses they are.  

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