I consider Face Value almost a masterpiece, so many great and moving songs full of dark moods. It is such a genuine and honest album, one wonders how he had the courage to release it. His feelings were naked to the listening public. It has a urgency which is hardly met by any other album. However, as good as the released album is, it's the original demos that i prefer. Among the recently released Drawing Board demos on The Other Sides digital-only compilation, the mp3 files offered on the old official fan club site, and some other ones aired by Capital Radio on the eve of the album release, nearly every song from Face Value is available on demo form. A playlist of all those home demos is such a good listening experience. In particular, we have 2 different available demo versions of In The Air Tonight: the Drawing Board one, which is a later stage demo with the lyrics basically finalized, and an earlier demo take which was broadcast by resident DJ Nicky Horne on Capital Radio during a Phil interview. They're both great ones. Capital Radio demo:
This Must Be Love It surprises me to see that this song wasn't a single, because this got played on my local radio station quite a lot. I always thought this was a very cool song, and it follows In The Air Tonight really neatly. The bass in the chorus is marvelous and is just like a cherry on top of the cake. There is a sweetness and honesty in so much of Collins work, even the later stuff that a lot of folks are not that fond of. To me that is one of the levelks that helped him connect with the general public, and one of the things that led him to be one of the most successful solo artists of all time. He wasn't afraid to expose his soft white underbelly, but he never seemed to wallow. This track has a beautiful, gentle groove and really is a great addition to the album.
Well, here in Italy it was a single!! It was actually the first Phil Collins single i ever bought, just because the record shop i went to had sold out all the In The Air Tonight copies - a song which i have listened to on the radio for weeks, and i finally decided to buy it - so i settled for This Must Be Love which had been freshly released. I liked it immediately and sometimes i even thought it was better than In The Air. Just to keep up with my demos trend, here it is, from the 2016 remaster of Face Value:
Perfectly ok as a single. Great track to follow In The Air Tonight. Lightens the mood. If you can imagine away the rest of Phil’s catalogue it would be a quite risky track at the time in terms of style.
Great fretless line and playing from Alphonso Johnson. Like the emotional vocal from Phil here too. Hell of a pocket and groove too. Not a big fan of the influences that went into this song, but I like it lots.
This Must Be Love: This is a fantastic ballad from Phil. Love the arrangement and has a hypnotic quality to it.
This Must Be Love Had Face Value been released in the post Thriller landscape which Phil's 3rd & 4th studio blockbusting albums had been then this classy, hypnotic, languid, soulful ballad would surely have been a top 20 hit single, and dominated radio airplay. Having said that I've heard it a few time played on BBC Radio 2 in the past decade, which is more than can be said for some of his actual hit singles. 4.0/5
Ok, here I go. (Hi guys). Part of what attracted me to The Genesis thread was the opportunity to explore a little more the nitty-gritty of the songs' meanings. That and genesis being the fundamental, quintessential band of my teenage years. None of these can be applied to Collins (whose songs are either self-explanatory or relatively obscure and meaningless streams of consciousness), yet Phil has a special place in my journey because it was the first artist I focused upon as a young folk. Before that, it was some random teenager oriented Italian singer and casual radio listening. A female version of Another Day in Paradise one day came up, and I was hooked. But seriously is actually the first cassette I spent money on (actually, it was my mother's money but let's skip the details ). By the time my attention was lead to Genesis, my pre-internet enjoyment of Collins' music got totally satisfied by But Seriously and Serious Hits Live. I later got Both Sides about that album made it clear that the ship had sailed. I never got the itch of getting back to his catalogue, and even when I expanded to solo music after completing Genesis discography, Collins and the Mechanics where the one I was absolutely uninterested in. Only much later, and partially, I compensated to that. And here, in this distance in time, lies my ambivalent relationship with his early albums. I can surely appreciate them coldly, so to speak, analytically, but that special magic that is born out of teenage love to your favourite artist is of course not there. On the other hand, revisiting But Seriously immediately brought back a flood of emotions (or, be correct, the memory of those emotions) and while I was afraid of finding limitations and shortcomings after more than twenty years of ignoring it, to my surprise I still found that is a terrific album and I still like it quite much, even though a single listening might be enough for a long time. So I don't know how consistent I will be with this thread and with the revisiting or his whole catalogue. But I'm in. --- As far as Face Value is concerned, taking into account what said above, I don't find it the fundamental album that the educated opinion seems to be making of it. Actually, coming from his mid-period, and live version of In the Air Tonight, there's something more naive, less fleshed out, in this album. Not the Collins I grew up with and got used to. Of course, that's a subjective and biased reaction. If I look it in his historical placement, I can understand why that album came out as surprising as it was. The opening track is so abused by pop culture that I really can't imagine how shockingly surprising it could have been. Not for Genesis fans, maybe, but but for the casual ones that ended up running into music shops and buying the record. I also find that there is a dramatic difference between In The Air Tonight and everything that comes later. As Mama would prove, largely copycating its model, this song is so fuel can satisfy the crave four atmosphere that Genesis fans are used to. It has the drama, it has the intensity. The rest of the record as I remember it is more laid back, there are jazzy influences and a lot of non-Genesis elements. In fact, when I listened to the record I unconsciously didn't take into account the opening track for my general evaluation, because of oversaturation. Which is totally unfair and incorrect of course but it is how it is. But if another Genesis influence can be found in this record, that is, has someone else already pointed out, the free variety with which the material is assembled. Genesis was always the sum of the parts, sometimes more different than they apparently looked. This album is more like the sum of Phil's parts, and he's confident and bold enough not to give a damn about choosing a musical signature and stick with it for the entire album. That's really something, and maybe would make a pop album confusing today. But it was the late 70s, another world culturally.
Also, pretty pleeeease... I know there are some of you that remember Phil's book much more than I do... It would be nice to beef up the album's discussion with biographic details. Phil's music is greatly biographic after all and I think the more backgroud details, the better.
Yeah, I don't remember a lot of exact details either. I remember him saying "This Must Be Love" was about his relationship with his eventual second wife, Jill.
Revisiting Genesis and especially We Can't Dance made me realize even more how much musical and "melodic" phil's drumming is. It's like he's singing with the drums, not just building rhythms. I'm not a drums kind of guy, so I can't say how this is frequent in great drummers, but for sure I notice it in his. The most foretelling marketing line ever?
I dont' know, I think This Must Be Love is pretty dull. The melody kind of meanders here and there without ever resolving the journey that it sets up. Love the bass playing though.
This Must Be Love is raises up by the vocals which take the track to another level as they do throughout this album, it’s intimate and up close and on this occasion somewhat at odds with the song itself. I get the feeling with this song that he’s almost trying to convince himself that he’s in love and not just on the rebound. “I know what you think, I’ve heard it before”. I think many of us will have been there or know people who move from one relationship to another pretty quickly. I’m always struck by the album that even the songs which are ostensibly more upbeat still get somewhat undercut by the vocals from someone who’s clearly still in real pain. We’ll come on to take about I’m Not Moving, but there again a song which initially feels pretty defiant is really a call for help. The way he sings the line “If it hurts Don’t do it” slays me every time, he’s clearly hurting and not afraid to show it.
I suspect this thread will be interesting for the point at which participants get on and off the albums/artist as we move through the decade(s). I think It Must Be Love has a quality that is unusual in love songs in that I hear the title phrase as a question - which fits in with the angst and uncertainty theme of the album in my view. In The Air Tonight is all doom. It Must Be Love is uncertainty with some whimsy and a really catchy but unconventional melody culminating in that (vulnerable) falsetto in the chorus. I don't think it is a love song in the purest sense. It is still a song of internal struggle.
Behind The Lines This version is very different to the Genesis version. It has a funkier groove here and it has a less in your face kind of style. I enjoy both versions for different reasons. It is interesting to me that the song made it onto Duke and Face Value, in such a short period of time. Collins version certainly has its own personality, and I think it works well.
What's great about Face Value is the sonic experiments Phil was ready to take. His second album was similar before Phil's music became more safe in sound and themes. Take In The Air Tonight. Such a cold, moody opener. At the time, many probably thought of that track as being quite typical of Phil, judging by the sound of Genesis at the time (the Duke album in particular). Nowadays with all of his sappy ballads stuck in public conscience, listening to Phil's early solo stuff is very surprising at times (I explored this period with the 2016 deluxe edition series, FWIW). What struck me as particularly noteworthy was the subtle sense of danger Phil sent out at the time. This wasn't the nice, funny british guy from the "Invisible Touch" video, this was a maniac, like someone straight out of Michael Mann's "Thief". Thunder & Lightning, Droned, the cover of Tomorrow Never Knows... no easy listening by any means. I prefer his second album (more on that when we get there), but Face Value is truly unique in his catalogue just as well. At times you could be thinking you're listening to Peter Gabriel's Melt album.
