PHIL COLLINS: BOTH SIDES/WORLD TOUR 1994/’95
by ahand83
In 1993 Phil Collins released his 5th studio album ‘Both Sides’. He recorded the album almost entirely at his home in Surrey, England on a 12-track recorder and played all the instruments himself, (that includes bagpipes and smooth jazzy trumpet). It was the man’s attempt to do things his very own way without interference of other producers or musicians. The song ‘Can’t Find My Way’ starts with the passage “I’ve been doing some thinking, here on my own.”
Therefore, ‘Both Sides’ reflected a man in his midlife forties singing the moody blues. Collins’ marriage to Jill Tavelman was hanging by a thread, after his short lived affair with high school sweetheart Lavinia Lang. The affair is captured in the song ‘I’ve Forgotten Everything’. It’s the song that set off the writing of the album in ’92 when Phil came out of a monstrous world tour with Genesis. Finally released in November ‘93, the album got very mixed reviews. Overall it was seen as a disappointment and it didn’t sell as well as its predecessors. The title track ‘Both Sides Of The Story’ became a modest hit, but the other two singles ‘Everyday’ and ‘We Wait And We Wonder’ did almost nothing commercially. Collins himself considered Both Sides his best album despite the reactions of both the public and the critics. Had Collins’ fame and success finally reached its peak?
Still, Phil Collins was a megastar and he knew how to put on a good show. In 1994 he took his new batch of songs on the road with a partly new band. The band, playfully named ‘The Indescribable Din’ (Din meaning “a loud continued noise”), featured veterans Daryl Stuermer, Brad Cole and Harry Kim, but also some new faces like Nathan East (who played bass with Eric Clapton amongst others), Ricky Lawson on drums (replacing Chester Thompson) and Amy Keys as a new backing vocalist. The tour rehearsals took place at the Working Man’s Club in Chiddingfold, nearby The Farm, Genesis’ recording studio. A home video of the rehearsals called ‘A Closer Look’ was sold during the gigs on VHS. It can be found here to watch. Phil explained that he now had a ‘better’ band. Not so much a better band because of better musicians, but because of starting fresh and working with other people. Rehearsals started on February 5th 1994 and the first gig was on April 1st at the Prins van Oranjehal in Utrecht, Netherlands. Collins played four shows at this venue, a set of two shows separated by a week. People who came to see the concert were treated on a theater like stage set, the most ambitious on a Phil Collins tour so far. Reviews of the first concert described the stage as a trashy suburb, New York’s Broadway or even a coal mine. The set was designed by Jeremy Railton who had also worked with Michael Jackson, Cher, Ozzy Osborne and Fleetwood Mac to name a few.
The ‘Both Sides World Tour’ kept Phil Collins busy for in total 165 shows up until May 1995. During the tour Collins met his soon to become third wife Orianne Cevey in Geneva, Switzerland. The couple became a big target for the English press and tabloids. The cover of The Sun of September 30th 1994 quoted “Phil: I’m Faxing Furious”, saying Collins had divorced his wife Jill by fax. The ‘fax incident’ stuck with Collins and it damaged his image of being ‘Mr. Nice Guy’. At this point Phil Collins was the kind of artist you didn’t want to listen to anymore. Phil Collins was dull, uncool as f**k and Both Sides definitely was a confirmation of that.
Over the years Phil Collins got rehabilitated. After the respectable tribute by American hip-hop and R&B artists in 2001 the acknowledgement for Collins’ work kept growing. In 2015 the ‘Take A Look At Me Now’ reissue campaign got launched and PC’s albums were provided with new reworked covers as well as extra demos, remixes and live recordings. ‘Both Sides’ was re-released in 2016 and the bonus disc contained a rather disappointing amount of five live versions from the 1994/1995 tour. ‘Both Sides’ was mentioned by Mojo and they were quite accurate by it’s different approach: “Collins turned out an overlooked gem, marinated in gentleness, minimalism and melancholy. It’s a hermetic world, created by Collins alone at home, with an un-forced, dream-like quality surrounding songs like ‘I’ve Forgotten Everything’ and ‘Can’t Turn Back The Years’ that address the tragic reality of love that couldn’t last.” It’s one of those enduring albums, misunderstood at the time, but one that keeps coming back as a persistent work of art. Critics have not been kind to the record, as well as to the man who made it. Collins says in Mojo: “A journalist who came to interview me in Switzerland once said ‘Both Sides’ could be the one that stands the test of time. We’ll see about that.” So we will and listen to it, over and over again. Then, “when will we ever learn? Yet I’m a believer.”