Phil fucking Collins was everywhere in the 1980s – on the cover of this ubiquitous gazillion-selling album, for example, which bears his gaunt, bald, middle-aged, thoroughly unedifying visage, looking out at you from Hades. Could this conceivably be the face of a world-bestriding popstar in 2025? Granted, Capaldi looks like something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but his grotesquery is almost gleeful, celebratory, and clearly calculated to appeal to the exaggerated maternalism of cooing and suicidally empathetic Zoomers. Sheeran, obviously, is also A Very Big Deal, despite being a stumpy ginger hobbit come down from the Celtic highlands to torment exasperated Anglo-Saxon villagers with his unceasing guitar-strumming twattery.
Nonetheless, fugly 21st century poptarts such as these are at least distinctive looking, and as P.T. Barnum was all too aware, there’s plenty of room in showbusiness for people who look like the Toxic Avenger. But Collins was different – there was nothing exotic about his unsightliness; he looked like a bland, harried, 46-year-old supermarket manager from Reading. It remains a mystery to me that this middle-aged square got as stratospherically big as he did, irrespective of how talented he was, and I maintain that it wouldn’t be possible today, with the Cult of Ganymede having tightened its mordant grip over our increasingly farcical culture.
For make no mistake, this album was massive – a US / UK number one-hogging, 25 million unit-shifting, Grammy Award-winning Megalodon of psychopathic Reaganite pop. Which is a bit incongruous, given that Collins came out of yer pot-smoking uncle’s favourite band Genesis. But after visionary nutjob and self-serious messianic artiste Peter Gabriel flounced off to write artsy-fartsy jazz rock in a remote farmstead, Phil turned what remained of the band into an unthreatening, though occasionally amusing and enjoyable pop outfit. No Jacket Required was his third solo album but, by this point, it was all just MTV to Phil’s various incarnations – his previous records had been speckled with Motown covers, and although Genesis were still going strong, they were aiming for radio play, rather than critical acclaim for 13-minute mellotron-driven rock operas about the oedipal complexes of Puerto Rican drifters.
And yet, it’s far from easy to divine why it was precisely No Jacket Required that catapulted Phil into the reified realms of Bowie / Elton John-like decade-defining superstardom – which, whether you like it or not, really is no exaggeration if you look at his album sales. “In The Air Tonight” isn’t on it. Neither is “Another Day in Paradise.” It’s not even got the jingly-jangly idiot-pop of “Two Hearts” to draw in the mentally deficient punters. From the vantage point of 2025, the closest thing to recognisable hits are “Sussudio”, a solid but not terribly memorable slice of ecstatic 80s nonsense; and the dreary, treacly “One More Night”, which personally I always skip, because the very idea of Phil Collins as some kind of harp-strumming Lothario is deeply objectionable to me.
The rest of it is dancey yuppie pop rock, the kind of thing that Patrick Bateman would put on in the background while taking a power drill to his secretary’s head. It’s almost wholly bereft of risk or darkness, and only on the unsettling “Long Long Way To Go” does the mood briefly shift from riotous after-office-drinks to the inevitable dark-night-of-the-soul comedown that all City finance bros were forced to endure when the cocaine ran out and they realised that their dads never loved them. That’s what happens when you get Sting on to do backing vocals.
None of which is to say that No Jacket Required is a bad or even mediocre album, of course; it’s Phil Collins. Everything is made with conspicuous competence, confidence, and care; the songs don’t blow you away, but almost all of them land. “Take Me Home” is the sound of an exhausted middle-aged rockstar burying his desire to quit beneath layers of soaring 80s electronic strut, while some of the rockier numbers, like “I Don’t Wanna Know”, “Only You Know and I Know”, and “Don’t Lose My Number”, are exactly what you want to hear in a Docklands club after closing a deal that will see 200 plebs lose their jobs just before Christmas.
Obviously, No Jacket Require is nowhere near as trendy or envelope-pushing as Purple Rain, Hounds of Love, or the utterly flawless So, and there’s nothing as timeless as “Thriller”, “Beat It”, or “Billie Jean” on there. It’s merely solid, well-made, unfashionable 80s pop music, more Mike and the Mechanics than Prince and the Revolution, but it’s odd how often I find myself coming back to it for the grooves, the tunes, the London Docklands in the 80s vibes.
Rating: * * * *
Standout track: “Take Me Home”