On March 25, 1985, the Academy Awards settled into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.
It was Oscar night, and the prize for Best Original Song carried five nominated contenders.
Phil Collins sat in the audience in a dinner jacket, a nominee without a microphone.
The Academy had not invited him to sing the song he had written entirely alone.
Instead, a Broadway dancer named Ann Reinking performed it, mostly lip-synced, inside a choreographed routine.
Collins watched a stranger interpret the most personal ballad he had ever written.
The performance drew harsh notices afterwards from the Los Angeles Times and People magazine.
In a Rolling Stone interview, Collins made little secret of his lasting displeasure.
When the envelope finally opened, the award went home with Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”
There was just one problem.
The song being turned into choreography that night had recently ruled American radio for three straight weeks.
It had become the first of seven solo number ones Collins would collect in the United States.
Yet five years earlier he had ranked it the least favourite ballad he had written.
He had left it off two different albums, convinced the world had no need of it.
The discarded song would not stay discarded.
This is the story of how a leftover became a standard.
The Ballad He Liked Least
The music began during the sessions for Face Value, Collins’s debut solo album, around 1980.
He was writing at home, filling tapes with ballads drawn from the end of his first marriage.
On the demo box, the piece carried a questioning working title: “How Can You Just Sit There?”
Collins later admitted it was his least favourite of the several ballads he wrote at the time.
So he left it off Face Value, the album that soon made him a solo star.
Two years later he passed over it again while assembling Hello, I Must Be Going!
Newer songs kept arriving, and the quiet piano piece simply stayed in the drawer.
He later said that the breakup had turned him from a pure musician into a lyricist.
Meanwhile the parent album sold millions, and the leftover tune waited in silence.
A Rough Cut in a Chicago Hotel Room
In 1983, director Taylor Hackford was finishing a romantic thriller called Against All Odds.
The picture retold the 1947 noir classic Out of the Past as a modern love triangle.
Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward played two corners of that triangle on screen.
Hackford had used a theme song the same way inside An Officer and a Gentleman.
That earlier song had even carried home an Academy Award of its own.
Signed to Atlantic, Hackford was offered a roster of the label’s artists for the new film.
He picked Collins, he later explained, purely because of the quality of that voice.
Genesis were touring America, so Hackford flew to Chicago to catch a concert.
Afterwards, Collins watched the film’s rough cut alone on a hotel-room videocassette recorder.
He thought about what the picture needed, and he remembered the ballad in the drawer.
Collins offered Hackford the old demo, and the director loved what he heard immediately.
He wrote fresh lyrics to fit the film, keeping the melody he had nearly buried.
Hackford called the result a textbook case of a song designed for its picture.
The finished recording would play over the film’s closing credits as audiences filed out.
Two Days with Arif Mardin
There was barely time to record it properly, because Genesis were still mid-tour.
Collins handed production duties to Arif Mardin, Atlantic’s celebrated arranger and studio craftsman.
Mardin had shaped records for Aretha Franklin and a generation of Atlantic stars.
The two men built the entire record in roughly two days of work.
Mardin arranged and conducted the sweeping string section that lifts the final choruses.
New York musician Rob Mounsey played the piano part that carries the song.
The piano, keyboard bass and strings were recorded at RCA Studios in New York.
Collins added his own vocals and drums separately, in a Los Angeles studio.
The finished record joined a bare piano opening to one of the decade’s biggest choruses.
For all its sweeping orchestral scale, the finished recording runs barely three and a half minutes.
A Wall of Rain
Hackford trusted the song enough to direct its music video himself.
The clip showed Collins singing before a long wall of falling rainwater.
Neon light washed the set in red, blue and green as he performed.
Each colour stood for one corner of the film’s tangled love triangle.
The camera finally pulled back to reveal Collins standing inside a glowing neon triangle.
The entire clip reportedly cost forty-five thousand dollars, modest even by 1984 standards.
MTV put the video at number one for several weeks in early 1984.
It finished fourth in the channel’s year-end countdown of that year’s biggest videos.
Hackford later said the song decidedly helped his film find its audience.
When the single climbed into the top five, cinema ticket sales reportedly climbed too.
Number One in America
Atlantic released the single in the United States during February 1984.
By spring it stood at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It stayed there for three consecutive weeks, a career first for Collins alone.
Canada kept the record at number one for four weeks on its own chart.
American record buyers eventually made the single a certified gold seller there.
Billboard would rank it the fifth biggest American single of the entire year.
Canada’s RPM magazine placed it second in its own year-end national reckoning.
In Britain it reached number two and stayed there for three long weeks.
Lionel Richie’s “Hello” blocked its path first, then Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” took over.
Ireland and Norway both sent the record all the way to number one.
It became the first of seven American number ones Collins would collect alone.
AllMusic later called it a definitive Collins single and a defining eighties love song.
The Grammy
At the 1985 Grammy Awards, the song won Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male.
It was also nominated for Song of the Year at the same ceremony.
A Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song arrived alongside the Oscar one.
The industry that had overlooked the demo now queued up to honour it.
The win made official what American radio had already decided the previous spring.
Collins, a drummer by training, had beaten the era’s pure singers at their own craft.
Oscar Night
Then came the Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.
Oscar night, however, treated the song’s writer as a spectator rather than a performer.
Ann Reinking’s staged interpretation was widely dismissed by critics the following morning.
Collins himself gave the performance a distinctly poor review in Rolling Stone.
The prize went to Stevie Wonder, whose winning song had soundtracked The Woman in Red.
The episode followed Collins into interviews for years whenever film songs were mentioned.
He later joked about the episode whenever another of his film songs was nominated.
The Song That Kept Coming Back
That July, Collins sang it before the world at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid.
Fifteen years later, Mariah Carey remade the song for her album Rainbow.
Her subsequent duet version with Westlife carried it back to number one in Britain.
In 2005, the first X Factor winner, Steve Brookstein, took it to number one again.
Rapper RZA named it his favourite power ballad in a magazine survey of the form.
The Guardian and American Songwriter both ranked it his second-best solo song ever.
A live performance preserved on the Serious Hits live album carried it to another generation.
In 2015, Collins finally released that original Face Value-era demo to the public.
The discarded song would not stay discarded.
You may keep a drawer like his, literal or otherwise, for things you once misjudged.
Somewhere inside it waits the letter, photograph or melody you decided the world did not need.
Rejection is sometimes just applause running late.
Phil Collins: The Drummer Who Sang
Putney Born, Chiswick Raised
Philip David Charles Collins was born on January 30, 1951, at Putney Hospital in London.
His father, Greville, sold insurance policies for the London Assurance company.
His mother, June, worked first in a toy shop, then around show business.
The family settled at 453 Hanworth Road, between Brentford and Chiswick, by his third birthday.
Phil was the youngest of three children growing up in that house.
His sister Carole skated professionally before becoming a theatrical agent like their mother.
His brother Clive grew up to draw cartoons for a living instead.
It was a house where show business and insurance shared the same kitchen table.
The Agent’s Son
June became a theatrical agent at the Barbara Speake Stage School in Acton.
The school trained child performers for London stages, tours and film sets.
June spotted talent early, including a football-playing boy named Jack Wild in the park.
Both boys were sent to Barbara Speake, and Wild later became the film’s Dodger.
At fourteen, Collins quit his grammar school to attend the stage school full-time.
In 1964 he appeared, uncredited, among the screaming teenagers in A Hard Day’s Night.
Later that year he won the Artful Dodger in two West End runs of Oliver!
The part paid fifteen pounds a week, serious money for a thirteen-year-old schoolboy.
His Dodger days ended the night his voice broke halfway through a performance.
He spoke his lines for the rest of that show like a tiny professional.
In 1967 he starred in Calamity the Cow, a film for the Children’s Film Foundation.
A filmed scene for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was cut before release the following year.
Drums in a Suitcase
Music had been competing with acting since he was five years old.
That Christmas he received a toy drum kit, and the house got louder.
His uncles built him a bigger makeshift kit that folded neatly into a suitcase.
He practised by playing along with whatever the television and radio offered.
At seven, singing at a Butlin’s talent contest, he halted the backing orchestra mid-song.
The boy calmly informed the musicians that they were playing in the wrong key.
The Beatles, and Ringo Starr especially, became his compass as a young drummer.
Formal lessons in rudiments came from Lloyd Ryan and, later, from Frank King.
Jazz giant Buddy Rich taught him, by example, the musical importance of the hi-hat.
A little-known London band, the Action, introduced him to Motown and Stax soul.
He idolized their drummer Roger Powell and copied his playing note for note.
Collins never learned to read music, inventing his own notation system instead.
At the Marquee Club he set out chairs and swept floors to watch bands.
Flaming Youth
School bands came first, including the Real Thing at Chiswick County Grammar.
Its backing singers included Andrea Bertorelli, who later became his first wife.
He wrote his first song, called “Lying, Crying, Dying”, with the group the Freehold.
A Yes audition he simply never turned up for became part of family legend.
In 1969 his band Flaming Youth recorded the album Ark 2 for Fontana Records.
The concept album described humanity evacuating a burning Earth aboard a spaceship.
Each member of the band sang a lead vocal somewhere on the record.
In May 1970 Collins played congas on a George Harrison session in London.
His part on “The Art of Dying” was quietly left off the finished album.
Decades later Harrison mailed him a fake tape of that performance as a prank.
The Swimming Pool Audition
That summer, Genesis advertised in Melody Maker for a drummer sensitive to acoustic music.
Collins recognised Charisma boss Tony Stratton Smith’s name on the small advertisement.
The auditions happened at the country house of singer Peter Gabriel’s parents.
Collins arrived early with guitarist Ronnie Caryl and was invited to swim.
Floating in the pool, he memorised every piece the earlier drummers attempted.
By his own turn, he already knew the music better than the men inside.
Gabriel later said he could judge Collins’s class simply from how he sat down.
On August 8, 1970, Collins became the fourth drummer in Genesis history.
The band then took a fortnight’s holiday, and their new drummer painted houses for wages.
He was nineteen, unknown, and suddenly drumming for a signed professional band.
Five Years Behind Peter Gabriel
For five years he drove the band from behind the kit, singing harmonies.
His first Genesis lead vocal arrived on “For Absent Friends” in 1971.
On the Selling England tour he sang “More Fool Me” alone under the lights.
Mike Rutherford later said the band’s engine room had never sounded so powerful before.
Collins and Gabriel discovered their voices blended into one unusually strong instrument together.
Engineers began multi-tracking the pair because the blend was faster and stronger.
He also found time to drum on Brian Eno’s album Taking Tiger Mountain in 1974.
He traded favours with Eno, who processed sounds on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
Between Genesis commitments, he joined the jazz-fusion outfit Brand X in 1975.
The Singer They Already Had
In August 1975, Gabriel’s departure from Genesis was announced to a shocked press.
The band advertised for a replacement singer and received around four hundred replies.
Collins spent those auditions singing backing vocals behind each hopeful replacement.
The search stretched on while the band recorded its next album without a singer.
Finally Collins stepped forward from the drums and sang the new material himself.
A Trick of the Tail, in 1976, became a substantial hit on both Atlantic shores.
Audiences accepted the drummer’s voice, and the band’s touring grew larger every year.
Guitarist Steve Hackett left in 1977, reducing Genesis to its famous trio.
By 1980, the trio’s Duke had given Genesis its first British number-one album.
Face Value and the Solo Surge
Collins recorded his first solo album while his first marriage was ending.
Face Value arrived in February 1981, rawer and more personal than any Genesis record.
Critics who expected progressive rock heard soul, funk and raw confession instead.
Its opening single, “In the Air Tonight”, carried a drum sound producers everywhere copied.
A solo career now ran in parallel with the band, neither cancelling the other.
Hello, I Must Be Going! followed in 1982, confirming the debut was no accident.
No Jacket Required, in 1985, turned him into the decade’s most unavoidable voice.
He scored three American number ones in 1985, more than any artist that year.
The album also collected three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.
Genesis answered with Invisible Touch, whose title song became the band’s only American number one.
Two Continents in One Day
On July 13, 1985, Live Aid staged simultaneous charity concerts in London and Philadelphia.
At Wembley he performed “Against All Odds” alone at a piano, then “In the Air Tonight”.
Then he joined Sting for two songs before sprinting for the airport.
A Concorde carried him across the Atlantic in time for the American show.
In Philadelphia he sang again and drummed behind Eric Clapton that same evening.
He also sat behind Robert Plant and Jimmy Page for the Led Zeppelin reunion.
That wobbling reunion set was argued about by its participants for years afterwards.
He remains the only performer who played both Live Aid concerts in person.
That November, his duet “Separate Lives”, from another Hackford film, topped the American chart.
Buster, Paradise, and a Quieter Road
In 1987 he paused recording, aware his face and voice were suddenly everywhere.
He returned to acting as the train robber Buster Edwards in Buster in 1988.
Julie Walters played his wife, who happened to share his mother’s name, June.
His “A Groovy Kind of Love” became his only single to top both national charts.
Its other Collins song, “Two Hearts”, won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
…But Seriously, in 1989, spent fifteen weeks at number one in Britain.
It became the United Kingdom’s best-selling album of the following year outright.
“Another Day in Paradise” became the final American number one of the 1980s.
The song later collected the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1991.
In March 1996, Collins announced he was leaving Genesis after twenty-six years.
He formed a big band, sat back behind the drums, and toured jazz festivals.
Quincy Jones conducted, Tony Bennett sang, and the drummer looked completely at home.
Tarzan and a Star
Disney recruited him in the mid-1990s to write songs for its animated Tarzan.
He recorded his Tarzan songs in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
“You’ll Be in My Heart” spent nineteen weeks atop America’s adult contemporary chart.
In June 1999 he received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The star sits at 6834 Hollywood Boulevard, honouring his career in recording.
In 2000 the song won him the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
That night he also performed at the ceremony, fifteen years after watching from a seat.
In 2000 he also lost much of the hearing in one ear to a virus.
The Chair, the Son, and the Last Show
Genesis reunited in 2007 for the Turn It On Again tour across two continents.
In 2010 the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York.
A spinal operation around that time sharply limited what his hands could still do.
He still managed to drum on Going Back, his Motown covers album, in 2010.
In 2011 he announced a step back from music to raise his two young sons.
Four years later he cheerfully announced that he was not retired after all.
His Not Dead Yet tour opened in 2017 and eventually ran to ninety-seven shows.
Five nights at the Royal Albert Hall sold out in fifteen seconds flat.
His son Nicholas, still a teenager, played every drum part his father once had.
June Collins had put her boy on a stage; now his boy kept him on one.
In 2021 Genesis returned once more, with Nicholas again occupying the drum stool.
The final concert came at London’s O2 Arena on March 26, 2022.
From his chair at the front, Collins told the crowd, “It’s the last show for Genesis.”
Between band and solo work, he has sold well over one hundred million albums.
Only Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson share that particular double achievement with him.
His shelves hold eight Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and one Academy Award.
In 2026, voters elected him to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist too.
Every ending he met handed him another beginning.
Return, finally, to that seat inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1985.
The dancer had finished, the applause had faded, and another man’s name filled the envelope.
Collins applauded politely and went home to the biggest year of his entire career.
Fifteen years later he stood on an Academy stage holding the statuette himself.
The discarded song would not stay discarded.
It plays tonight in supermarkets, wedding halls and oldies rotations across the world.
Hackford’s film is remembered today chiefly for the song playing over its closing credits.
The least favourite ballad became the song the world refused to let him bury.