My Life in
15 Songs
Phil
Collins
By Andy Greene
RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 71F
or a long time, phil collins was every-
body’s punching bag. Old-school Genesis fans
blamed him for turning the group away from its
prog-rock roots. Critics dismissed his 1980s hits as
derivative schlock, and the fans he won that decade
largely turned away from him in the 1990s. “People
assess you by your hits,” he says, lounging in the master bedroom
of his Miami Beach mansion. “So when the radio plays ‘Against All
Odds’ or fuckin’ ‘Separate Lives’ again and again, they become your
fl agship.” ¶ But now, Collins, 65, is having the last laugh: A new
generation is discovering his music, and artists from Lorde to
Pharrell Williams have cited him as a major infl uence. (Adele evenThe singer on the critics who hate him,
the rappers who love him and why he’s
also a little sick of ‘Sussudio’