Phil Collins 'You Can't Hurry Love'

Chart peak: 1 (2 weeks)

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A logical start for the album, as the first new Number One single of 1983. And an interesting start for me, in that it's a track I (sort of) remember from the the time but hadn't heard recently. Once this ceased to be current, radio unsurprisingly tended to play the Supremes version.
What I remembered most was the video, introduced on Top Of The Pops as "Phil Collins, Phil Collins... and Phil Collins!" thanks to what my five-year old self saw as the incredible technological marvel of superimposing three of him in the same picture: of course, he's doing that because there were three Supremes but such subtleties were lost on me back then.

Hearing the track again, it's clear why I don't have strong musical recollections of it. Tempting as it might be to dismiss Phil Collins as the enemy of pop music "we" all know him as, or indeed to go revisionist and explain that he's really brilliant, there really isn't much going on here. He competently performs an approximation of the original backing track, and sings over the top of it in his not-especially-likeable voice and, er, that's it. There's no sense of why he wanted to do this, other than possibly the desire to have a big hit; if that was hit his instincts were right, as it turned out to be the only Top 40 single from his Hello I Must Be Going album.
Perhaps this is why he seems one of the major acts of this era who've had the least benefit of reassessment, save for some grudging recognition of his drumming skills, and those are barely relevant in a solo career dominated by programmed drums and click tracks. Even the advert-led revival of 'In The Air Tonight' doesn't seem to have made him much more respected, for all the records he sold off the back of it.

Oddly enough, shortly after I wrote the above I heard somebody on the radio trying to do exactly that. He made the expected references to Collins as a drummer but also trotted out the typical line that the 1980s were a flamboyant time in pop. Which is fine, but surely that's exactly the point: there's nothing flamboyant about this. He doesn't even drag up as the Supremes in the video. Perhaps you could argue that a straight cover of a sixties pop song was a surprising thing for a member of a progressive rock band to be be doing, but outwith that context it's nothing.

One other odd reminiscence - a food-based Top Of The Pops parody in The Beano where a character called Filled Colin sang "You can't curry gloves/No, you'll just lose some weight..."

Also appearing on: Now 3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27, 41, 44, 68.
Available on: Phil Collins : Hits