Phil Collins 3: No Jacket Required

After years of slowly but surely dragging Genesis to the mainstream, Mr. Showbiz cashed in all his favors and got a major label push to get this into everyone’s house. No Jacket Required was so huge it didn’t even need “Easy Lover” (big hit duet with Philip Bailey the previous fall) or “Against All Odds” (a.k.a. “Take A Look At Me Now”, a movie theme song from a year earlier) or even “Separate Lives” (the so-called love theme from White Nights, a duet with Marilyn Martin, which came out that Xmas) to sell it. This thing was huge, even winning a Grammy. (We would be remiss were we not to mention Howard Jones’ hit remake of “No One Is To Blame” the following spring, featuring Phil on harmonies and boomy drums.)

Then, as now, there are exactly two songs we really, really like: the brooding “Long Long Way To Go”, which sounds most like his earliest solo experiments and features Sting on harmonies, and “Inside Out”, which sounds like “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” at half-speed, but works the simple theme well enough. It could almost pass for Genesis, even without the bridge that resembles “Taking It All Too Hard”.

The rest of the album is pure pop, heavy on the horns and synths, even further away from prog, with a distinct Prince influence on the more upbeat tunes (especially “Who Said I Would”). Which is fine, if you like that sort of thing. And the public did, eating up all the singles and loving all the wacky videos. Whenever we hear any of those songs—and “Sussudio”, “One More Night”, and “Take Me Home” are still in heavy rotation on the local “lite” radio stations—we’re reminded of a scorchingly hot summer sitting in front of an air conditioner, matching the sweaty guy on the album cover. (Patton Oswalt knows what we’re talking about.) Drop the phrase “great! great sandwich” into any conversation and see which of your contemporaries notice. Be forewarned that anyone who doesn’t remember the video for “Don’t Lose My Number” will be utterly baffled by the aside.

The CD version of No Jacket Required, for those early adopters, offered an extra track in the way of “We Said Hello Goodbye”, a nice midtempo ballad with an extended, moderately lush prelude, though something of an afterthought following the anthemic qualities of “Take Me Home”. It was included in the same spot on all reissues, as well as the 21st century “Take A Look At Me Now” edition, the extra disc of which (cheekily labeled Extra Large Jacket Required) was loaded with live versions of nine songs on the album plus “Easy Lover”, all recorded in the ‘90s save one. Demos of three eventual album tracks, none very illuminating, round out the disc, while fanatics bemoaned the absence of the B-sides “The Man With The Horn” and “I Like The Way”, and anything from 1988’s 12"ers compilation of six extended remixes.

Phil Collins No Jacket Required (1985)—3
2016 “Take A Look At Me Now” edition: same as 1985, plus 13 extra tracks