1982 · Behind the Songs
The angriest single Phil Collins ever released — and one the UK never got.
By the start of 1983, Phil Collins had already proved that the man behind the Genesis drum kit could stand at the front of the stage. His second solo album, Hello, I Must Be Going!, had given him a chart-topping remake of “You Can’t Hurry Love,” but its second American single, released that February, came from a much darker room. Collins wrote, played, and produced “I Don’t Care Anymore” himself, with Hugh Padgham co-producing — a one-man exorcism dressed up as a pop single.
Everything about the record points inward. The drums carry his famous gated-reverb thunder, the synthesizers stay deliberately simple, and the guitar riffs circle like bad weather while the lyric aims its anger at the wreck of his first marriage. Billboard heard “a moody, brooding cry of rebellion” that married his R&B instincts to his progressive-rock past. American listeners agreed, up to a point: the single reached No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the Top Rock Tracks chart, though it was never released as a single in Britain. It did earn Collins his first Grammy nomination, for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance in 1984 — the trophy went to Michael Jackson for “Beat It.”
The video keeps the song’s claustrophobia intact: a dark room, a spotlight over each musician, and Collins’ touring band — Chester Thompson, Daryl Stuermer, Peter Robinson, and Mo Foster — arranged like witnesses. Only Stuermer’s guitar actually appears on the record; Foster mimes his part on a set of Moog Taurus bass pedals, struck by hand. Years later, the song found a second, heavier life in cover versions by From Zero, Tweaker, Saint Asonia, and Hellyeah, whose 2016 take was built around a lost recording by Dimebag Darrell. Heard today, the track feels less like a hit single than a man playing every instrument on his own resentment — and refusing to turn the lights on.