Defend Phil Collins

went to see phil collins in '82 and it was great but when he started playing "in the air tonight" he put a big spotlight on me and then the cops came and arrested me. turned out i'd murdered somebody a couple years previously and phil saw the whole thing and wrote the song about me, and i wound up doing twenty for it, so i never saw the end of the show.

the phenix horns were great that night, though.

― rushomancy, Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:10 AM bookmarkflaglink

Phil is worth it for these LOLs alone

another day in paradise?

I've watched several of their videos in the past and enjoyed them a lot but I'm not sure why this is the one that blew up?

― Gerneten-flüken cake (jed_), Sunday, August 9, 2020 11:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Because Something in the Air Tonight is already meme-fodder.

Something in the Air Tonight

Rare Harrison / Collins collab

lol whoops.

Can't be posted enough:

“So I went down to Abbey Road and Harrison was there and Ringo and Billy Preston and Klaus Voormann and Phil Spector, and we started routining the song,” Collins recalled in an interview with Classic Rock. "Phil Spector would say: 'Let's hear guitar and drums,' or 'Let’s hear bass and drums'. And I'm not a conga player, so my hands are starting to bleed.

"And I'm cadging cigarettes off Ringo – I don’t even smoke, I just felt nervous."

Despite two hours of Collins' enthusiastic conga contributions, it was all seemingly a wasted effort when Phil Spector asked the congas to be played – and everyone realised Collins' microphone had been turned off for the entire two hours he'd just been playing. "And just after that they all disappeared – someone said they were watching TV or something – and I was told I could go," Collins added.

"A few months later I buy the album from my local record shop, look at the sleeve notes and I’m not there. And I’m thinking: 'There must be some mistake!' But it's a different version of the song, and I’m not on it."

And just when you think it couldn’t get worse for Collins – it does.

Years later when Collins bought former F1 driver Jackie Stewarts house, it transpired that Jackie and George were friends.

"Jackie told me George was remixing All Things Must Pass," Collins continued. "And he said: 'You were on it, weren’t you?' And I said: 'Well I was there'. "Two days later a tape's delivered from George Harrison with a note saying: 'Could this be you?'"

Collins rushed off to listen to the tape, and instantly recognised what he was hearing. "Suddenly the congas come in – too loud and just awful," he said. "And at the end of the tape you hear George Harrison saying: 'Hey, Phil, can we try another without the conga player?'

"So now I know, they didn't go off to watch TV, they went somewhere and said: 'Get rid of him,' cos I was playing so badly."

But all was not as it seemed. Not long after Collins found himself on the phone to Harrison – thanks to their mutual friend Jackie – who was keen to hear if the tape had arrived.

"'Did you get the tape?' And I said: 'I now realise I was fired by a Beatle.' "And he says: 'Don’t worry, it was a piss-take. I got Ray Cooper to play really badly and we dubbed it on. Thought you’d like it!"

"I said: 'You f***ing b*stard!'"

lol. Poor Phil.

It hurts me when reaction channels pause the music.

It's necessary to avoid a copyright strike and having the video pulled down, but even that doesn't always work.

That Harrison anecdote takes up like a half-hour or so of his audiobook

It's necessary to avoid a copyright strike and having the video pulled down, but even that doesn't always work.

To me it seems quite the opposite - if I want to listen to the song played straight through I can just go do that.

Reaction videos are not a big component of my watching habits, but if the idea is to actually listen and react to and talk about music, I makes sense to pause while you talk about it - even at the level of "damn, man, that guitar tone is NASTY!" "Yeah, it's sick, bro." - rather than talk over the music and potentially miss the next interesting moment.

Lol @ Harrison punking Phil.

xp - yeah, if they just played the track straight thru while nodding their heads or something (and injecting an occasional “reaction”), I can see why it would be hard to defend as fair use.

lmao that is a great story

https://variety.com/2020/music/news/phil-collins-twins-reaction-video-in-air-tonight-hit-sales-1234730673/

But, of course, none of these charts don’t take into account the number of listens that “In the Air Tonight” is getting just from fascinated viewers enjoying Tim and Fred Williams’ reaction video — which, as of this writing, is up to 3.2 million views.

jfc hire an editor

Editors are expensive!

They should make reaction videos

Something in the Air Tonight

Rare Harrison / Collins collab

― vitreous humorist (Ye Mad Puffin)

they had to get together sooner or later, because the revolution's here

They should make reaction videos

― rob

that would be a fantastic pivot

“In the Air Tonight” currently sits at No. 3 on the iTunes song sales chart, trailing only the brand new releases “WAP” by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion and “Beers and Sunshine” by Darius Rucker.

....

Another entry in the "News items from 2020 that would make utterly no sense to a time traveler from 2010" file.

Like "President Trump denies he's involved in getting Kanye West on the presidential ballot."

Darius Rucker has been having #1 country albums since 2008

"Beers and Sunshine" was a #2 stream...

also a cure for Covid-19

-Chuck D

Because Something In the Air Tonight is already meme-fodder.

― peace, man, Monday, August 10, 2020 10:32 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

See? It continues.

Not sure who to thank for this, but it’s brilliant. Volume up. pic.twitter.com/q4OjWl4XXx

— Mark (@markaduck) August 10, 2020

While we're at it with the Phil Collins pic.twitter.com/p1HD73DY4E

— 🏳️‍🌈 BLACK LIVES MATTER 🏳️‍🌈 (@politelyviolent) August 7, 2020

I find hairy/beardy Phil endearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Duq_h2aboLI

I'm gonna assume y'all have seen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=7ceT8tyxtq4&feature=emb_logo

or perhaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ceT8tyxtq4

tipsy's clip catches an interesting moment - first, they are so totally miming that Phil starts late and (a bit too obviously) looks around in the hope that no one notices. Also lol at Mike and Tony pretending to sing backup.

Second, I am very pleased to see what must have been a pretty early live appearance of the mighty Chester Thompson. Just a few months before it would have, presumably, been Bruford.

Put well by my friend: "The best thing about these first-time videos is that they idealize how you always want someone to react when you play them a great new song."

I misread the thread title as "Defund Phil Collins" and I thought really?! I'm out.

He was, er, reacting to this, btw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XH5gXRnR2E

Man, Delp's vocals. I can't tell if Mercury in "Under Pressure" tops this in the arena rock vocalist reaching for the heavens category.

not sure about this, the prose is also annoying

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/magazine/the-racial-anxiety-lurking-behind-reaction-videos.html

We were just talking last night about how we Gen X'ers just don't get why people watch Twitch.

I think reaction videos fall into the same category. Maybe you need to have grown up with social media to be truly entertained by other people being entertained?

― enochroot

That doesn’t explain tv in japan where every show there has audience reactions.

I guess it’s like canned laughs. It heightens the “reaction” you should be feeling as an audience.

There’s no denying the Williams brothers’ charm, or the allure of Collins’s song. But is it a stretch to focus on the racial anxiety lurking behind reaction videos?

we can learn so much

Well, I have noticed that for whatever reason a lot of the reaction videos are from black listeners. But I have no idea if that's just what's being served to me.

There’s no denying the Williams brothers’ charm, or the allure of Collins’s song. But is it a stretch to focus on the racial anxiety lurking behind reaction videos?

He writes this in the penultimate paragraph, but doesn't actually "focus" on it (if he believes it's not, in fact, a "stretch"). This is the kind of piece that gestures towards a possible point without actually making it.

that's called "clickbait"

I thought it did, and it reminded me of white people on Twitter posting bug-eyed gifs of Black people for the sake of a dumb point.

i.e. I thought the piece worked. Then again, I know him well so I may have a bias.

i always get JR and JBR confused

We were just talking last night about how we Gen X'ers just don't get why people watch Twitch.

Just picking this up since Moka quoted it, but people watching Twitch is just about the only fully comprehensible part of modern weirdness for this Generation X'er. A big part of the 80s for me was standing round in the arcade waiting my turn/watching other people's turns. One of the first things I remember doing when YouTube came along was looking at videos of 80s videogames I could never complete being completed. So this stuff seems totally natural.

this video rules

At some point in the 80s, I stumbled across Chester Thompson. He was backing Frank Zappa at the time but he was so good he wound up getting tapped to tour with Phil Collins' drumming-centric solo tours. https://t.co/IA0q2uukJ2

— Timothy Hensley (@geistweg) September 1, 2020

Yeah Thompson was/is a fine musician in his own right, as well as a very skilled interpreter of Collins's drumming. I understand that he didn't audition - Collins just called him up and asked, and he had that gig (Genesis/Collins) for like 30 years. There are a lot of really good drummers who wouldn't have fit as well in the role. Bill Bruford is good, but too different in style.

Anyway, map, I've watched that clip several times before and it's very satisfying. A couple things stand out.

At the beginning, Chester is playing that tuned-percussion ostinato live, with a real instrument, whereas it was most assuredly programmed on the record. I guess it makes sense that a band of that size, in a live setting, might not want to be chained to a sequencer. A human performer can adjust. It's cool, but almost sad when he stops playing it. (Could no one else on that stage have played it?)

The main floor-tom-based line is Very Phil; Chester is so focused on bringing it across with power. Mad respect, but there is also a longer, more sneaky fill (phill?) that starts on the higher toms and crosses the bar line - it's the one that ends on the china cymbal. The recording has it like twice; Thompson pulls it out rather more often - but with such assurance that the overall pulse never wavers.

And - BONUS SKLAR!

The Sklar the merrier.