PHIL COLLINS – "A Groovy Kind Of Love"

Tom hits the nail on the head in the last paragraph – the painfully unsubtle piano and shrill strings make this song a rather unpleasant experience. A 3.

a case study in how to drain the joy and energy from a pleasantly lightweight piece of pop.
1988 is shaping up to be one of the worst years for Number 1s.
Was the yoof pound being spent in the indie ghetto or on club music?

Phils shoulda-been-a-number-one is surely Two Hearts the surprisingly snappy Motown homage that followed this up. Groovy Kind of Love itself is about as groovy as a 3-week old Sunday supplement.
I can assure you Mr. Ewing the film is a 4 as well.

I get the impression that Phil Collins was misguided in this choice of piano and strings arrangement. The initial intro with the heavy-handed chord motif sets the scene for something dark and dramatic. Then Phil’s studied and meaured tones come in. “When I’m feeling blue/all I have to do…”

So what was Phil thinking?

Well the emphasis, like Tom says is with the word “groovy”. Groovy, to most people is an anachronism, a retro catch-all, a word that can mean everything and nothing. To the 60’s Phil, it meant youth and inventiveness, but in the 80’s, he was getting older, getting richer and complacent. “Groovy” becomes this half-remembered past of epic tours and studio sessions, hotels and airports. “Groovy” represents frustration and boredom. The lows after the highs stretch out to fill the days. How to solve the dilemma? Acting. That’s the ticket. Do something else, be someone else. Get out of the studio and into a different one, with lights and cameras. Hobnob with Don Johnson in Miami for a bit, then bag the lead role opposite Julie Walters in Buster. But the producers want a love theme for the soundtrack album. They’ve got the Four Tops on board and Phil gets co-writing credits with Lamont Dozier (I bet he loved that!). They give Phil a Mindbenders song, a mid-tempo cusp-of-psychedelia pop song. Not his style at all.

So this pesky “groovy”, then. The dark clouds gather. He plays the demo slow. Just him and the piano. No drums. It comes across as like 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”. The producers hate it. It sounds “stalkerish”, so they lay over some strings to lift the mood. It’s a botch, but it’s Phil and Phil sells by the shedload. Phil wanted to revive that moody scary “In The Air Tonight” vibe. What he got was something that tried to be moody and stalkerish, but ended up being neither really. Just a middle-aged man in his cavernous basement watching himself being someone else.

As generationally targeted as any teenpop, the premise seems simple enough: take a sweet, silly little pop tune from a couple of decades earlier, and re-work it in a “mature”/”reflective”/”heartfelt” style for the same audience (pop-loving teens of the 1960s/student mystics of the 1970s/home-owning marrieds of the 1980s), who will duly be touched by its new-found poignancy, perhaps relating to Good Old Phil as a fellow traveller (from dreamer to pragmatist, adapting to the times).

As for the execution: Phil’s vocals are sort-of OK for the job – and not entirely devoid of emotion – but the perfunctory arrangement strangles the track at birth. When people with no knowledge of Collins’ work with the likes of John Martyn, Brian Eno and Brand X, no willingness to re-appraise the best of his early solo material, and no appreciation of what made Genesis a decent and sometimes great band for many years, slag Collins off for being a smug, soulless, dreary dick, this pile of gloopy tosh is probably informing a large part of their thinking.

“Two Hearts” is much the better record: a 7 to my ears, except the bridge, which is an 8 or 9 (thank you, Lamont Dozier).

The original hit version by the Mindbenders, featuring future 10cc-er Eric Stewart and kept off number one in February 1966 only by Nancy and her boots, with its conflict between strict march tempo (probably derived from “Cathy’s Clown”) and woozily delirious vocals, was a transitional record, blurring the fade from beat group to disorientated psychedelia – the strawberry ecstasy of that “any time you want to you can turn me on to anything you want to any time at all” is pivotal. But when Phil Collins got to it a generation later, to soundtrack his character’s melancholy in the film Buster, a less than merry romp which expected its audience to feel sorry for a bank robber and murderer, he ruthlessly melted it down into AoR Nurofen; there is little, if any, sense of dazzlement or wonder, and the record, from Anne Dudley’s elementary, ‘phoned-in string chart to its gloomy keyboard and dulled drum thuds, treats transcendence as another item on a wearisome Saturday morning shopping list. A plod ploddy enough to send the charts to sleep, and the first, and by some chalk the considerably less interesting, of two consecutive problematic sixties hangovers. One concludes that Collins really doesn’t care if the world should shatter, but it is so grievously the wrong sort of (not) caring.

Mike @ #10 refers to how I felt about Collins. Never a fan, I could acknowledge the fine work he did with Brand X and Genesis, and accept that there was some merit in much of his early solo work. I actually quite like the first album.

But this song, I believe, is where the tide turned. Whereas prior to this, he could be viewed as a sort of everyman and all-round good bloke, this ill-advised piece of crap just showed contempt; a total lack of quality control, admittedly driven by the movie-makers, but a real lapse in taste, integrity, respect and pride.

Collins’ failure to right this wrong meant that he now became Chris DeBurgh – ominpresent, and gradually tolerated less and less until actively despised by many who had been quite ambivolent up until this.

As a side note, considering how “omni-present” he seems to have been over the past 30 years or so, I was surprised to see that he has not been in the singles top 10 since 1996!

I didn’t detest this at the time, even quite liked it when he loosened up on the final verse – at 16, I was beginning to get soppy about girls, so I’m pinning it on that.

Listening now, it sounds as if it’s going to be Up Where We Belong for one promising moment before melting into indistinct slop. As vinylscot @ 16 says, this is where the rot sets in. I think I’d probably still rather like No Jacket Required, but after that it’s all emotionally spare, low-effort chart-shots from a man increasingly comfortable with his own celebrity.

(Going to test my No Jacket Required feelings now)

To make a purely commercial and dry observation both this and ‘Two Hearts’ topped the Billboard 100 in the US. The ”turning point” was probably ‘…But Seriously’ a year later, especially in the States where it sold just a third of what ‘No Jacket Required’ did (ironically it sold more than it’s predecessor in the UK). Towards the final single releases from that album you begin to see a decline in chart positions.

By the beginning of the 90’s tastes were changing, but not before the Swiss bank accounts had been built up enough to comfortably cope with later divorce proceedings.

It’s a 4 for me anyway and definitely less offensive than shite like ‘Against All Odds’ and ‘Separate Lives’. We came perilously close to discussing the former on Popular.

By which I mean that the word was not defunct, not the song. (The system isn’t allowing me to edit my comment to clarify that, for some reason.)

#22: Melodically it’s an ingenious improvisation on the basics – do-re-mi-fa-so –(oh, all right, C-D-E-F-G) and then lazily, or not so lazily, spinning off from there. My childhood piano teacher pointed this song out to me as a good example of how to write a simple melody.

Phil’s version is like a ghost of the sixties for eighties people who grew up with fab gear never-ending youth promises but know that (a) they can’t go back there and would look stupid if they did; and (b) fab gear never-ending youth promises are in 1988 happening for another generation but they can’t grasp or translate it, viz. fear of death.

”#25 Mark your argument here is drifting intriguingly close to “music for people who don’t like music”, albeit with a positive spin. We’ll be seeing a lot of this kind of thing (we have already, obviously).”

If ever there was an act which served to vindicate this theory it would be Bon Jovi. I’ve known a number of people who loved them and cared little for anything else. Hardly scientific I know, but that’s my experience.

People who like Bon Jovi like music. Just not the sort of music that others might like.

I believe there’s an accent on the final “e” of Buble (grave or acute, not sure which) so “boo-blay” is indeed how it would sound.

Stuck at no.3 behind Phil and the next no.1 was Womack & Womack’s Teardrops, which is possibly the opposite of a ‘pretty, mobile melody’ while still being (kind of) hummable. It has an incredibly subtle, stumbling tune, walking in circles, and an instrumental break that makes a virtue of drizzly emptiness – just two muted electric piano chords and a backing vocal that holds its head in its hands. Lyrically it describes how hard it is to listen to old records and hear them the same way you did when you were younger, carefree and feckless. Maybe one of those records is the Mindbenders’ Groovy Kind Of Love.

Now! watch: this was on Now 13, sat between the chicken soup of Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry Be Happy and Breathe’s Hands To Heaven. Ian from Breathe has just provided me with some lovely living room furniture for my record collection (it still doesn’t contain Hands To Heaven, though).

‘Teardrops’ would be a 9 or 10 from me.

I say “groovy” quite a lot, mostly in an effort to replace the overused and devalued “cool”

Two thoughts about fandom versus non-fandom
– in the Doctor Who context, Russell T Davies in his “Writer’s Tale” is fairly dismissive of the reactions of fans on the likes of the Outpost Gallifrey website, mainly because he’s the fanboy who got to resurrect the series and they’re not!
– and in the context of football, your “fans v non-fans” distinction reminded me of the grumble of a lifelong fan during Euro 96 – “I’m sick and tired of explaining the offside rule to girls called Fiona with St George crosses painted on their faces singing about thirty years of hurt” – in other words, I’ve stood by footy through the fallow years, and now that the game’s trendy again I resent the Jenny-come-latelys because I worry about being taken for granted by the people chasing the new audience.

I tend to get the impression from YouTube comments boxes that Fans* (well at least the most vocal) of a certain “Kid A” persuasion or “Wish You Were Here” persuasion, (although not exclusively so…Kanye West also has his army of robot acolytes) the most rabidly loyal if you like, tend to exclude other forms and genres of music in an attempt to prove that they are the most loyal/worthy. These people then seem to justify their opinion by pouring scorn on anyone who offers an unfavoured opinion, even from within the fanbase.

*Such fans could fit Mark’s descriptions in comments above.

@43 On unironic groovyin’: despite mentioning its “ironic-yet-cool” appeal in the ’80s, these days I’m like LondonLee, using it as a less-hackneyed alternative to “cool” (although I use that too). If you avoid the drawn-out groooovy of ’70s cliche, it takes on a different flavour.

@49 re ‘why Phil was so big in the 80’s (or Dire bloody Straights for that)’

I think there were a number of contributing factors:

1. the rise of the CD player – the platform for the music became a status symbol again – and these acts benefitted from this
2. Baby boomers with disposable income – the ideal audience for these acts who were seen as both edgy and safe (hard to believe – but I saw DS when they were a support band for Talking Heads and PC had his prog past)
3. Radio 1 was still dominated by the DJs from the 60s and 70s and who favoured this music
4. the youth market was increasingly fragmented – spending their money on indie and dance music that was unlikely to trouble the charts