How big a star is Phil Collins? Major. How big is his ego? Invisible. Cranky has interviewed hundreds of celebrities, in his various careers, and virtually all of the A-plus list come in to their StarTalk session with a publicist and a flock of aides and half a dozen more helpers and hangers on. Collins walked into his interview solo. Cranky felt like he should have brought a six pack with him, because Collins' personality is so, um, normal. Yes, we talked of Genesis but the focus was on his songs for Disney's animated Tarzan. You can sample some of the songs through the RealPlayer highlighted links. We begin this StarTalk with the song that you'll hear once you press the PLAY button at the start of this 'graph. . .

CrankyCritic: "Son of Man" absolutely kicks royal ass, man...
Phil Collins: Heh heh heh [ed.note: Cranky forgot that Collins is a Loyal Subject. Any insult to Her Majesty was not intended]
CrankyCritic: I've had that one track repeating on my CD player all day
Phil Collins: Oh, fantastic
CrankyCritic: I don't think I've heard you pound the skins that way in years. Have I missed something or is there something different going on?
Phil Collins: That track was probably the first song I wrote. It was the first track that I did the drums on. Something didn't feel as good as the demo. About three or four months ago we thought we'd try a few experiments. We got some jambos, an African percussion instrument, and my percussionist, Luis Conte brought all this stuff down and we replaced all the drums with this African stuff. Then we went away we thought It's fantastic. It's original. It's ethnic . . . but it hasn't got the balls of the real drums. So I went back in and redid the real drums and then suddenly that was it. We had the best of both worlds. It's really solid. These things have got to be tribal.

CrankyCritic: How long have you been working on this project?
Phil Collins: Four years.
CrankyCritic: Since animation is such an incredibly collaborative effort, how was working on this different for you versus the solo writing or your work with Genesis?
Phil Collins: Well, you get a chance to argue more with other musicians. You tend not to argue with the directors! [big belly laugh] Actually, we had been very frank with each other. You must remember that when I wrote these songs, there was nothing to look at. It's not as if you see a bit of animation or the general outline of the film; you're just firing blind. You have nothing, apart from a few pictures from the layout artists, nothing to go on apart from your own gut reaction to the story. I played You'll Be In My Heart for the music producer, Chris Montan, when I thought I'd finished it. He said "Y'know the chorus is killer. But I don't think you've got the verse yet." I don't have a big ego, that's God's honest truth, but to actually have someone say "well this isn't quite good enough. I think you can do better." I knew I was going to have to bury any kind of ego that I have. I thanked him. I said "This is going to be great because if you don't say that when I play you something, then I think I've delivered something that you wanted." It's a good example of being honest enough to say you can do better than this. It is a collaborative process. Either you like doing that or you don't. You have to be able to adapt.

CrankyCritic: This was a different project in that you had to write for a story as opposed to writing a story in a song. What was the challenge like for you?
Phil Collins: Well, there's pros and cons. The good thing about writing with a story is that you know the emotions your song has to deliver. I've always said that writing "You'll Be In My Heart" had to lyrically work as much for an ape singing it to a baby as it did for me to be singing it on a stage. It has to work like that. So you really have to try and be a little bit – I can't think of the word – sort of one size fits all, y'know. The disadvantages are that you are working with a group of people. At one point, they didn't know if they had a place for "Son of Man". They all liked the song but the place where it was originally written for, where Tarzan kills Sabor [after which the tribe accepts him as one of their own], they decided they didn't want a song there. They didn't know where it was going to go. They suddenly thought "We need something for where Tarzan goes from five to twenty (years old) Write more lyrics." And that's where it went. It's that collaboration again.

CrankyCritic: Your solo records don't have narrative stories the way your work with Genesis did.
Phil Collins: That's true.
CrankyCritic: You've also said that you'd like to work with Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks again, but not as Genesis...
Phil Collins: Yes.
CrankyCritic: ... and that you'd like to do more movie music ...
Phil Collins: Yes.
CrankyCritic: Is that the kind of thing you could see happening?
Phil Collins: I don't know what kind of outlook that would have. I haven't even spoken with Mike or Tony about it. We only had Genesis because we were writers; I was less of a writer than a player. Genesis existed in the early days because nobody else would sing their songs. They went out and played them themselves. It was a band of writers. They, more than anyone else, would understand the idea, would get off on the idea of writing. Whether I'd like to have a group writing and still have to please another group [like film producers], that sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen to me. In another shape or form I think it would be great to work with them again. For me, Strangers Like Me is the song that owes more to my time with Genesis than even "Son of Man" because there's that kind of building in the chords that, dramatically, is more of what a Genesis tune might do. I can imagine Tony working on that. That is very unlike me, the three chord maybe more soulful stuff that I do. I'm just glad I've got that experience to fall back on.

CrankyCritic: Back to the movie, then. Tell us about the making of Trashin' The Camp in which the music and animation are absolutely interconnected; animals trash a safari camp to the percussive sounds of breaking glass and typewriter bells.
Phil Collins: We circled each other for months. They couldn't animate until they had something to animate to. I didn't know what they were going to animate. Their artists had some ideas about what apes could do if they came across the kind of equipment that would be in this period in this camp. I had a sound of paper tearing, there was never a picture of that, but I had the sound. I wrote "the sound you hear on bar five could be an ape tearing a page out of a book". I kind of liked the idea that this ape sits there through this whole thing hypnotized, oblivious to everything else, just tearing pages out of a book. Very zen. I then had to just jump in the deep end and construct some sort of rhythm and just feed things in and eventually whack the whole lot out, when the groove started. I went for different odd sounds. Once we started doing it, it accelerated.

CrankyCritic: Did you really punch on your head until it turned red?
Phil Collins: Yeah. There was one bit where Terk was on Tantor's head and they said "We need a sound of an elephant skin being hit" and I said "Right." My head was still red the next day. And they didn't even use that verse in the film!

CrankyCritic: Randy Newman moved from doing songs to doing full scoring. How about you?
Phil Collins: Yeah. I'd love to do that. I've been trying to do that for five or six years now but no one wants to give me the opportunity to do it. It's something I really would like to do more of. I am doing another Disney movie, but that won't be yet. I would like to do a live action film. I'll have to do it with someone because that's the reason I haven't been able to do it so far; because they don't want to risk that much money with someone like me [laughs]. I'm quite happy to collaborate with someone in terms of me writing the music and then he showing me how to spot cues and how to arrange, and me learning through that process.

CrankyCritic: Some of the songs you had to shorten tremendously. Now that they're done, are there any you'd like to do a full five minute treatment on?
Phil Collins: On the album, they put that verse of "Trashing The Can" back in. "Son of Man" was very much shortened and I ended up getting so used to it that when they said "Do you want to put the song back together again, the way it was?" I said No. That's one of the advantages of doing things over four years. You have time to reassess, to see if things grate on you or if things you didn't like begin to work.

CrankyCritic: There have been rumors of a new Genesis song -- You and Peter Gabriel?
Phil Collins: No.Two years ago we started working, for the boxed set, on a new version of "The Carpet Crawlers" which Trevor Horn produced and Peter and I sing on. It wasn't done in time for the set so it will come out, I guess, on Greatest Hits, which comes out the end of the year.

CrankyCritic: I'm sure you're aware that there's an R&B hip-hop tribute album in the works.
Phil Collins: Yeah.
CrankyCritic: Since the rock critics have been fairly unkind to you, is this a kind of vindication?
Phil Collins: Well, the critic likes to compartmentalize but to the musician there is no such thing. Charlie Watts could say "I bought 'You Can't Hurry Love'," which actually happened to me, which I couldn't believe. "I have the 12 inch version, man" Charlie Watts! And Ice-T was on a television documentary in England and the guy said "Well let's look at your record collection, Ice. What's Phil Collins doing here???" Ice said "Don't mess with my man Phil." When I heard that, I was blown away. Music's music. That's a cliché, but inside the business there is no such thing as compartmentalizing. That's why N'Sync can work with me. [as it does on the soundtrack]

CrankyCritic: Have you heard any of the songs from the tribute?
Phil Collins: I've heard "Another Day In Paradise" by Sound of Blackness but I haven't heard anything else. This tribute is nothing to do with me [laughing] . . .like I'm doing my own tribute album. I'm very flattered by it. Very excited by it. I just hope it happens because getting these guys in the studio is very difficult.

Tarzan® owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Songs from the soundtrack of Disney's Tarzan are Copyright © 1998, 1999 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and Walt Disney Music Company. Tarzan images are © Edgar Rice Burroughs and Disney Enterprises. Not to be used or reproduced for any commercial purpose. The Cranky Critic® is a Registered Trademark of, and his moviesite is  Copyright © 1995-99 by, Chuck Schwartz. All Rights Reserved