:: extras ::
Interview with Phil Collins about “Something’s Going On”
“So how did you come to produce Frida’s album?”
“Well, she – or rather, big Stig – phoned to say she wanted me to do it and I thought ‘Abba – great pop records, classic reproduction and here’s one of them wants me to produce her album!”, so it had to be worth looking into. I’d never met her before, so she came over and we had lunch together. I asked her what kind of thing she wanted to do and she said, ‘Well, I don’t really know’, so I asked if she wrote music and she said, ‘No’ – and it became apparent that we’d have to choose the songs and I found out that the reason she wanted to work with me was that she’d been through her own situation and so I guess I’m getting a tag for being a producer who only works with people who – leave just been divorced! Anyway, she’d listened to my album a lot, and I’d like to think she thought I’d been quite sympathetic if, being a lady, she didn’t want to come in after a particularly hard night emotionally. She liked the sound on my album, so we chose the songs for her and…”
“.. But the songs are so dreadful!” blurted Johnny with annoyance, quoting the existence of really good song-writers like Costello, Yazoo, ABC and Squeeze who he reckoned should have been commissioned instead of the more, obvious people like- Stephen Bishop, Gerry Rafferty and Rod Argent.
“To be quite honest, we had tapes coming out of our ears – there was no shortage of songs! But there really weren’t that many good ones, and we had Squeeze submitting songs and Costello submitting songs – I only heard two of the three he sent, but I didn’t think they were very good! Now, I like Elvis, some of the songs he writes, I think are fantastic, especially his earlier stuff, because I haven’t heard much of his recent work . . .”
“Get ‘Imperial Bedroom’, Phil,” advised Johnny, “it’s brilliant!”
“Well, he’s a guy who I believe what he’s doing is good, because he’s not an idiot,, he’s a very astute bloke, but the songs I heard, I didn’t think they were any good, and I didn’t think they were good for Frida. And the Squeeze song was just too British – I mean, you can’t have Frida singing about life in Clapham!”
“But,” continued Johnny on the attack, “it seemed such a conservative album – certainly not a 1982 album to rank alongside Simple Minds and ABC, nor even the brighter moments of Kim Wilde, especially after the early promise shown by the big-beat excitement of the single ‘I Know There’s Something Going On’.”
“I can see that . . ” admitted Phil with perhaps a hint of resignation.
“But what about that hideous duet the pair of you do at the end of the album!” jeered Johnny, closing in on his hapless victim.
“Oh that,” mumbled an embarrassed Phil. “That was a complete lapse of taste on my part – l think it’s hideous too, this is the one thing I’m not going to try to get out of. When we chose the song I was singing it to her to try and get her to loosen up, because it’s different if you’re foreign to sing English lyrics, and I didn’t think Frida sounded convincing on that track. So she said ‘Maybe you could sing this with me’ and at the time I didn’t think of it as a duet, as we were both going to sing all of it but because of the different key registers, it ended up sounding like Rita ‘n’ Kris or Elton ‘n’ Kiki – but I was committed to it by then. But you’re right, it is hideous! And they tried to put it out as a single, and l said no way am I going to be associated with this as a single and we used the record company excuse to stop it, by saying that Virgin, Charisma and Atlantic would cause a fuss. But, er … never again!”
APART FROM that one aberration, Phil insisted that both he and Frida thoroughly enjoyed working together, Frida being especially delighted to be much more involved with every aspect of the recording than with Abba, where she is literally called to the studio and told exactly what to sing, then sent home again until required for the photographs to go on the sleeve!
Among the telling anecdotes that Phil revealed to Johnny one concerned Abba’s phenomenal wealth. On a day off, Phil and engineer Hugh Padgham decided to take in one of Stockholm’s’ famous saunas, and asked Frida to recommend one. When Phil then mentioned there might be a problem as they weren’t members: she replied “Don’t worry – I own it!”.
“So will you be working with her again?” asked Johnny.
“l’ m supposed to be doing another album with her in the autumn – I’ve said I’ll do it, but if I don’t, it’ll be purely because I’ve’ already done that and l want to do something else.”