Phil Collins' greatest solo songs – ranked!

20. You’ve Been Cheatin’ (2010)

It gets forgotten that above all, Phil Collins is a music fan. His last album to date, 2010’s Going Back – from which this Impressions cover comes – is simply his favourite Motown and soul tracks, replayed note for note (with original musicians involved) and Collins singing. It sounds like the most fun he had at any time in his career.

19. The Phil Collins Big Band – That’s All (1999)

Partly a way of getting a Genesis song into this list, but also to illustrate how Collins used his commercial waning to branch out into doing the things he wanted to do, now there was less pressure for huge hits. His album A Hot Night in Paris – his own songs, in the big band idiom – is unexpectedly joyful.

18. Everyday (1993)

Both Sides – on which Collins played everything himself – was more of a mood piece of an album than a collection of hits, but if there’s one thing Collins can do without breaking a sweat, it’s sit at a keyboard to compose a lovelorn ballad. It turned out Both Lives was actually too smooth – a mere double platinum in the UK compared with the nine-times platinum of its predecessor, … But Seriously.

17. Just Another Story (1996)

Collins’ love of Prince was evident in the 80s, but you can hear it strongly a decade later; Just Another Story is pretty much an attempt to rewrite Sign o’ the Times. The vocal phrasing is similar in places, the coolness of the instrumentation very similar. It’s also a far better stab at social commentary than Another Day in Paradise.

16. Droned (1981)

What would Collins’ solo career have been like had In the Air Tonight not been a monstrous hit? Perhaps it would have reflected more closely the Collins who was a noted collaborator of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, and who continued working with Peter Gabriel after he had left Genesis. This instrumental from his debut solo LP, Face Value, proves how many directions were open to Collins at that point.

15. Like China (1982)

There was still eccentricity on his second album, Hello … I Must Be Going, notably this, a heavy rock character piece delivered in a broad cockney accent, which sounds very much like it would be at home in a musical. Lyrically and vocally it’s far less a conventional song than something theatrical – you can imagine the Artful Dodger coming out in Collins.

14. You’ll Be in My Heart (1999)

The success of The Lion King led Disney to try the same model – get big star to write a couple of songs – for Tarzan. “I have these hackles that rise when people say: ‘What’s he doing Disney for? It’s just kids’ music!’” Collins told me in 2018. “If you’re a songwriter, especially, you should want to see what it feels like outside comfort zones and try to see what makes that music tick.”

Related: Alan McGee: The non-ironic revival of Phil Collins

13. The Roof Is Leaking (1981)

Unlike anything else on Face Value, this piano ballad accompanied by ragged slide guitar is about struggling through winter. Oddly, it comes over rather like a realist version of Rod Stewart’s Mandolin Wind with all the romance removed and all the hardship emphasised.

12. Don’t Let Him Steal Your Heart Away (1982)

The bitterness of Face Value – written and recorded in the aftermath of Collins’s wife leaving him – was softened on its follow-up. This is still an angry heartbreak ballad, but it’s filled with love more than hate, and the arrangement – redolent of his beloved Beatles – gives it an attractively warm melancholy.

11. I Wish It Would Rain Down (1989)

By Collins’s fourth album, … But Seriously, huge success seemed to have sanded away the musical oddities of his first two solo records, but the craftsmanship was undeniable. I Wish It Would Rain Down is late-80s power ballad perfection: the crashing guitars at the chorus, the restraint of the verses, the force of the central hook.

10. Easy Lover (1984)

Earth, Wind & Fire were another Collins touchstone, and Easy Lover was officially a single for their singer Philip Bailey. But it was a Collins duet, co-write and co-production that fell slap bang in the middle of his run of 80s hits. There’s no heartbreak here, just a lesson in how to construct an irresistible hit single.

9. One More Night (1985)

By 1985, Collins was pop’s unlikely king – playing both legs of Live Aid, churning out hits at will. You would expect triumphalism, but he still loved his tinny drum machine and his introverted ballads. One More Night is pretty much as perfect as MOR ballads get, like listening to melted chocolate.

8. I Missed Again (1981)

Given punch and force by the Earth, Wind & Fire horn section (one of the defining sounds of Collins’s 80s works), I Missed Again sounded like a Genesis song that had been pumped up and freed of unnecessary noodling, and helped cast Collins in his most familiar role: the hugely successful, globe-straddling rock star who just can’t get it right.

7. Dance Into the Light (1996)

Collins was a latecomer to pop royalty’s musical globetrotting phase – maybe it took him being happy to do so – and he didn’t do it with quite such scholarly devotion as, say, Paul Simon, but the horn-driven Afro-reggae swing of Dance Into the Light is so simply joyful that it’s a complete delight.

6. If Leaving Me Is Easy (1981)

I would wager few Genesis fans were expecting their boy to be an expert composer of R&B ballads. The limitations at work led to invention – Collins multitracking and then pitchshifting his own voice to create a choral effect – and I would also lay money the 1975’s Matty Healy knows this track back to front.

5. Don’t Lose My Number (1985)

On his third album, No Jacket Required, hooks were pouring out of Collins as if he were a fishing tackle factory. Even when he had barely written a lyric – this one was pretty much improvised in the studio – he had melodies so indelible he could have sung the studio logs and made a hit. The production – by Collins and Hugh Padgham – is high-80s in every respect – you can actually feel the drum sound.

4. Take Me Home (1985)

It does almost nothing – a drum pattern, a simple chord progression, some burbling electronics, repeating for nearly six minutes – but there’s such emotional force to this, the fourth single from No Jacket Required, that when the chorus finally arrives, at 2min 17sec, it’s like a flood gate opening.

3. Sussudio (1985)

So indebted to Prince that, really, it should have been called 1998-and-a-Half, Sussudio makes absolutely no literal sense. It’s not a song – you’d struggle to whistle it – so much as an incredible record, in which every element is perfectly pitched for maximum effect. Not a single one of its 263 seconds is wasted.

2. Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) (1984)

When Collins returned to the stage in 2017, he opened his sets with this, which was daring since he patently struggled with the high notes. But that made it all the more moving: if the recording is studio perfection, adding frailty to the mix only emphasised the vulnerability of the song. It’s a song so good that the director Taylor Hackford credited it with making the film Against All Odds a hit.

1. In the Air Tonight (1981)

There’s a reason those two YouTuber kids were blown away by In the Air Tonight. Forty years on, it still sounds like a record from another world: strange and tense and compelling, and filled with moments of instrumental brilliance – not just the drum break that causes the kids to bounce in amazement – but the phasing and multitracking of individual words for emphasis, the scrape and clang of guitars in the background. Collins never gets the credit he deserves as one of mainstream pop’s great experimentalists. This record alone would merit canonisation.

• This article’s subheading was updated to reflect that not all of these songs come from Collins’s post-Genesis career.