Phil Collins - Face Value
- FaceOff - עימות חזיתי
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 13.02.1980
What is a Reverb? An effect created when a sound wave is reflected off various surfaces before it reaches the listener.
The first Reverb in human history was heard in nature, in a canyon or a cave. The reflections in those places are fascinating and also slightly frightening. In craters, you can hear the reverb echoing back when you shout.
In the mid-seventies, Peter Gabriel left Genesis, and Phil Collins found himself in the position of lead singer, even though he had not wanted it. About five years would pass before Collins could thank Gabriel twice: once for leaving "Genesis" and handing him the reins, and a second time for inviting Collins to play on the recording sessions of Gabriel’s third solo album.
Collins, who recorded the drum parts on that album, played on the opening track "Intruder" without cymbals. The recording engineer Hugh Padgham, who was working with an SSL console that had built-in gates and compressors on every channel, accidentally opened the talkback microphone. The microphone happened to be reversed, creating heavy compression. Collins played the drums while speaking, and boom – Padgham could not believe what he was hearing.
The gated reverb was born. Collins, who fell in love with that sound, would take it a few months later to "In the Air Tonight", the song that opens his debut album "Face Value", released on February 13, 1981.
By the end of the seventies, Phil Collins was an extremely busy musician. Between recording sessions with "Genesis", now reduced to three members, the nine-month tour promoting the album "And Then There Were Three", and recordings with Brand X, he had very little time left for his family. The strain created bitterness for his wife Andrea, who was waiting for her husband at home. Not long after, they divorced.
Collins, devastated by the collapse of his marriage, channeled and documented everything on his heart into a debut album filled with computerized pop, emotionally charged, wrapped in the bombastic sound he had invented with Hugh Padgham only months earlier.
The album opens with 5:34 of pure brilliance. In the first minutes, Collins pulls the listener in through beats that imitate a heartbeat. Then he enters with vocals processed through a vocoder, making him sound like a robot. But this is a robot with feelings, a broken heart that shatters loudly alongside the booming drum sound, the very sound that would later become Collins’ trademark, and in many ways, the trademark of the eighties.
Despite the synthesized pop textures and the drum machine, Collins drew inspiration from the R&B acts of the period. The album includes groove-driven, funky-flavored songs such as "Behind the Lines", which had been performed a year earlier in a different arrangement on the album "Duke" by his mother band, "Genesis".
Collins moves effortlessly across the album from groove to prog, from fusion rock to synthesized pop. On the second single "I Missed Again", he adds a brass section and returns to an R&B atmosphere. He once again confronts his heartbreak in "If Leaving Me Is Easy", which features guest appearances by Eric Clapton.
Clapton also plays on the blues-flavored "The Roof Is Leaking", while the remaining guitar parts throughout the album are performed by Daryl Stuermer, the touring guitarist of "Genesis".
The album closes with a cover of "Tomorrow Never Knows" by "The Beatles", followed by a brief half-minute dedication in memory of John Lennon, who had been murdered only months earlier, including a subtle homage to "Over the Rainbow".
There is no room for mistakes with the album cover and Collins’ direct, piercing stare. It is designed to draw the listener deep into his mind and into the emotional storm unfolding inside Phil Collins’ heart.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music