PHILIP BAILEY (DUET WITH PHIL COLLINS) – "Easy Lover"

WHAAAAAAAAAA Tom this has to be a 10! This song is all killer no filler!
+ I don’t know how their voices work together so well but they DO
+ keyboard vs guitar FITE on each riff!
+ it’s the ONLY WAY-AY!
+ Before you know it you’ll be on your KNEES!
+ P Bailey is high up enough that you can sing along an octave down!

Sorry dude but this is one of my favourite songs EVER EVER EVER and I am descending into mad keyboard rage over here hgaliheofisjfkifhsigkb.

Listen to Collins pound those fucking cymbals, man! Bang! Crash! Just the sheer force behind this song! At least an 8 coming from me, man.

I vaguely recall being really happy that this was #1 at the time so happy to leave the verdict there. Somewhere between ‘Beat It’ (good) and ‘Invisible Touch’ (annoying!) seems a fair description and as usual I like that there’s a lot going on. This may be the #1 I loved most as a child that I do not currently possess in any form tho – fascinating!

The only number one performed by two singing drummers called Phil with part-time solo careers – although only Collins plays drums on the record – the utilitarian video for “Easy Lover,” depicting Bailey and Collins rolling up their sleeves and getting on with making the record in the studio, gave early notice of the re-emergence of frills-free “Real Music” in 1985, a catchment area which somehow managed to snare everybody from Dire Straits to Trouble Funk. No more trivial dressing up and colouring in of fading New Pop books – and, to echo my first year Home Economics teacher at grammar school, wasn’t it all a bit of an irrelevance when there are people starving in Africa?

“Easy Lover” accordingly “rocks” with Collins’ cavernous Big Bang of percussion filtering out any subtlety or real swing – such things are left to Nathan East’s occasionally inventive bass. And while it provides partial redemption for Earth, Wind and Fire never having had a UK number one single in their own right (“September” and “Let’s Groove” both made #3, although Maurice White did produce Deniece Williams’ “Free”), it is, like so many number ones of this period, utterly functional – it comes in, hangs about and does its job for a little while (in the case of “Easy Lover,” for five minutes, although you don’t really notice it) and then wanders off, leaving minds unchanged and souls untouched.

If ever I had something as trite as a ‘guilty pleasure’ this might be it.

Listening to it again, it’s pretty flat in places though. A 7 maybe?

My main problem with this is how long it is. Lose two and a half minutes and it would be a good (albeit lightweight) pop song, but by the time it gets to the guitar solo and there’s still two minutes left I’ve utterly lost interest.
By the way, the video is a bit odd, isn’t it? It’s like its own outtakes compilation. There seems to be an odd subtext that they’re having some kind of torrid love-affair with each-other too. Or maybe it’s just me.

definitely a 10 from me. phil collins doesn’t often get the credit he deserves as a master arranger for others; witness this as well as his work with robert plant from the same year. this has everything a successful radio hit needed in 1985. for how much is going on here, there is no filler. best experienced as a terrible-sounding 128k mp3 booming loudly from a crappy stereo while making cheap vodka-based drinks with your roommate on a thursday night.

Not much to do with this one except admire its taut slickness.
When I said in the comments on Foreigner that several of the number ones of 1985 seemed very “grown-up” I meant stuff like this as much as ” I want to know love is”. Compared to Phil and Phils record the teeny stuff from 1982-84 like Wham or “Karma Chamelon” or Duran Duran sounds almost naive. “Easy Lover” sounds confident and professional.
The work of 2 experienced musicians who know they a hit.
However that comment in #3 makes sense. ” Easy Lover ” would sound right at home in todays charts. The production and slant of the lyrics would be different, but I could envisage Lady Gaga or Britney Spears having a #1 with this one.

#6, #7, #17 all say they like it but wouldn’t want to own it. Given the weightlessness – and, if you want, costlessness – of contemporary musical ownership, what does that mean? I agree; I quite like this but I wouldn’t want to own it. I certainly like it more than lots and lots of songs on my mp3 player. So what’s going on? Am I worried about someone grabbing my iPod and finding it? Do I not want to be surprised by it coming up unbidden on shuffle? Do I not want to add to Phil Collins already-substantial bank account? Or is there something else going on. I genuinely don’t know.

I like this, it’s got a real urgency to it and plenty of hooks, especially the huge gated guitar riff and the pause in the ‘She’s. An eaze. E-LOVER!’ towards the end. I suspect the comments about it going on too long are right though – I’m running it through on the internal jukebox now, and it just isn’t resolving. It’s a cracking track anyway, some top performances. I’d thought I might’ve gone higher, but right now it strikes me as the definitive 8.

I was also hoping to mention Fur Q’s ‘Uzi Lover’ but I see I’ve been beaten to it. How quaint that that was once the reductio ad absurdam of rap!

I liked this back then much more than I do now and I went to watch the video expecting to have my old opinion of it confirmed or even improved, but instead it just fell flat for me. Something about it suddenly seemed so manufactured and by-the-numbers. Yes, it’s a catchy tune that motors along nicely but I find it coldly professional now. “Grown up” yes, but not in a good way.

I hope I still like ‘Walking On The Chinese Wall’ though.

# 5 Steve you’re bang on with “Beat It” and this one directly followed PC’s re-write of “1999” (retitled “Sussudio”).

I remember a lot of snide comments about the scene in the video where Collins is having what’s left of his hair combed and giving him a smidgeon of credit for leaving that in.

Other than that I’m a bit short of words for this one -an efficient but sterile piece of pop rock that was quickly knocked up because they (correctly) felt PB’s album lacked a single- which then and now I listen to with complete indifference.

This is everything I hated about the way pop was going in 1985, the year bands started dressing like accountants. It was the video that took the biscuit though – all that insincere bonhomie, Phil and Phil joshing like the great mates they were. I remember watching TOTP with my mother who didn’t really get the whole ‘making of the record’ vid. ‘But where is the easy lover?’ she asked, puzzled by the absence of a narrative.

Other people have mentioned how adult the charts were in 1985 and this is how it seemed to me at the time. Even though I had been too young to be swept along by punk, by the age of 15 I had been indoctrinated by the movement’s ideals, specifically that pop should be young, forward-looking and definitely not involve balding ex-prog rockers. The fact that contemporaries of mine were singing the praises of Collins, Genesis, Dire Straits etc seemed nothing more than a betrayal of their youth. I began to retreat, in disgust, to the refuge of Peel and late night Radio One.

Thing is, this also fits a significant “new pop” template, the one Def Leppard and Mutt Lange brought to hair metal with Pyromania in 83: which was utterly off the radar of the uk commentariat radar, which despised and had banished metal from the discussion; was thus unaware of its rapid and unexpected studio evolution — it suddenly struck me that trevor horn, who certainly DID know of pyromania, bcz ts fingerprints are all over his Frankie work, COULD have pushed the envelope further actually — re nu-pop, rock guitar was out of favour, so he’d hired steve howe specifically to taboo-bust this for the frankie LP, which was a nice gesture, but howe was the wrong proggy really, too filigree, too pretty; something more in the line of the lumpen-gone-stellar layered sugarcrunch of lep, not name guitarists even, just solid journeymen willing to be used as sound-treatment, and THEN combined THIS with the shattering kaleidoscope mysticism of high period EWF (81-83)

and then hired p.collins to wander round forlornly blokeishly as the middle-england everyman unable to connect but unable to tear himself away

and covered a song off lamb lies down on broadway obv

(boy it’s lucky ztt only got morley and not me when ‘m on a deadline)
(weirdly enough i only heard this ever for the first time today! it’s nice, esp.the arrangement, but not as goodv as the idea sketched above)

For all the talk of pop’s new ‘adult’ direction post Band Aid, it must be recorded that myself and all of my 12 year-old boy peers really adored this at the time. It seemed exciting, soulful and even racey – easy lovers being the sort of girls that we might aspire to knowing as soon as puberty started – and we would have liked to have been the confident playboy stars as seen in the video.

Mind you we all thought that Alison Moyet’s ‘Ole Devil Called Love’ was a work of tremendous sophistication and classiness at this time as well, so what did we know?

24 years on, and I still have a residual Pavlovian reaction of excitement when this comes on, and then I start to think “I’d much rather be listening to Earth, Wind & Fire” which eventually sours into an irritable “God, this record GOES ON!”

#30: I distinctly remember Hosey Barynks (anag) being pretty ecstatic about “Photograph” in particular in the ’83 NME and yes the Leppard/Lange template – the precise reverse of the Sheffield coin which also held the League/Rushent template – should have been better acknowledged at home, both critically and commercially. Unfortunately the charts of the period (as Popular has already documented) were already full of would-be New Popists attempting to Grow Up, viz. Spandau putting all the art to one side and concentrating on being Big Tony Hadley’s Big Cabaret Band (Horn was going to produce True the album but ultimately opted to do Duck Rock instead), Wham! moaning about Don’t Lock Me In ‘Cos I Can Break Down The Door (as Burchill rightly put it at the time, for pity’s sake man you’re nearly twenty, you should have GONE by now!) and Tears For Fears attempting to be old long-haired prog-rockers, so the Defs were totally missed/overlooked – however, this was to be stood on its head in ’87 when they finally broke through here with “Animal” (which is also the obtuse obverse of ACT’s “Snobbery And Decay” from the same year).

The story with Steve Howe and Pleasuredome was that much of that album’s music was taken from a solo album SH had already started with Trevor, called Lost In The Wired Jungle or something similar, all about falling into a computer and, um, getting lost. At the time, as I understand it, ZTT were pretty keen to sign both James and the Smiths but both passed. Wonder how much further TH would have pushed the guitar thing had he Morrissey and Marr to deal with?

haha yes Mr Anag wrote the deathless line (in a famous piece on the jacksons): “Anyone dissing Toto in my presence can politely eff off”: he and Cookie Puss, esp.the latter, certainly had an ear for this kind of material, but it remained their quirk and never really entered the general discussion

actually BH can’t have sed “dissing” but my copy of the essay is silted way down in my pigpile of research for *my* MJ piece

so philip bailey was a drummer too? that certainly explains the main production idea – let’s make the drums REALLY LOUD. I’m in the like-a-lot crew, though also down with the the don’t have, and don’t much want a copy of my own-ers. as billy says, this didn’t seem at all grown up and sensible at the time – more like hyper exciting noise craziness.

i don’t think the picture here is from the uk single- my brother had a copy and i remember it as just being both of their names and the title in chunky pastel capitals.

…and let us not forget that the (usually hideous, I’m afraid) jacket sleeves had by law to be ROLLED UP.

The credit problem comes down to the issue of whose album the song comes from. I must say I’ve never got used to the “person A featuring person B” way of doing it; it’s always seemed a bit absurd to me. “David A Stewart Featuring Candy Dulfer”? What, does that mean she’s jutting out of his forehead or something?

I think the only pop stars who *really* started dressing like accountants in 1985 were Dexys. It’s fair to say that it wasn’t a hugely popular look at the time…

generation gap indeed! i think it’s unfair to deride this for being soulless when we’ve had a rash of recent number ones (“you spin me”, admit it or not, is the epitome of soulless) which can easily be characaterized as same. it’s as if some of you have decided you don’t like this, therefore it must be ideologically UNpure, and then work backwards to find convoluted proof of its impurity. throw in some insinuations of prog (the WRONG KIND of prog, even!) and poor phil is sentenced to life on the swing band gang. yet “there’s something going on”, despite being vaguely proggier, is somehow preferable to this!

poor phil. i don’t even much like the guy but somehow i always feel the need to stick up for him. he exists in some weird twilight world where no one wants to claim him. rockists think he’s too pop, but poptimists don’t think he’s pop enough. so he slogs on, creating inventive prog-pop gems but gets no notice because he has no revolutionary pop image and no revolutionary pop hair.

re Collins lack of revolutionary pop hair, alas we are still a few years away from ‘Phil’s World Of Wigs’ the highly amusing feature of Record Mirror’s Babble pages.

#46 revolutionary pop hair or not, it is a proven fact that no rapper worth his salt can get out of bed in the morning without a blast of the anti-homelessness anthem “another day in paradise”, so all is not lost for poor phil.