Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars: In 1985, Phil Collins Was the Face of the Mid-’80s Corporate Pop Star

(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981 — along with a handful of sidebar columns and lists on other important pop star themes from the period. Find one such sidebar below about how Phil Collins provided a more normie alternative to MJ and Madonna’s mid-’80s pop superstardom, and find our Greatest Pop Star picks for every year up to present day here.)

Phil Collins was everywhere back in 1985. Switch on the radio and you were bound to hear a song that featured him in some fashion. Perhaps it was one of the four top 10 hits from his third solo album, No Jacket Required: “Sussudio” and “One More Night” both topped the Billboard Hot 100, while “Don’t Lose My Number” and “Take Me Home” came close. Maybe it was as a duet partner with Philip Bailey or Marilyn Martin: both “Easy Lover” and “Separate Lives” permeated the airwaves and the public consciousness. 

Perhaps it was one of his recurrent hits, either from his main band Genesis or his solo albums; Miami Vice turned his ominous “In The Air Tonight” into a modern standard. Or it could’ve been his work as a drummer and producer: Eric Clapton’s Behind the Sun was his big project that year, but his visibility as a sideman increased exponentially when he hopped onto the Concord so he could play on stages on either side of the Atlantic during Live Aid — playing a solo set, then supporting Clapton, and finally filling in for the departed John Bonham in Led Zeppelin. 

Jimmy Page would later grouse about Collins, claiming Zeppelin deflated due to his “lack of preparation,” but the fact that the singer/drummer was everywhere at once at Live Aid only underscored how it was impossible to escape him in 1985. His very omnipresence turned him into a superstar, even if at first glance it would seem that he would’ve been the furthest thing from a pop icon. Chalk some of this up to his everyday appearance and his studied lack of flair: Back in 1985, the joke was Phil Collins didn’t seem like a pop star, he looked like an accountant. It was a jab that cut in multiple directions, insulting Collins’s looks, consigning him to anonymity and dismissing his music as being nothing more than crass, calculated commercialism.

The accountant joke left a mark because it had a grain of truth. Phil Collins personified the pop star as middle management, attempting to offer something pleasing to everyone. He happily appropriated Prince’s synth-funk for “Sussudio” and crafted power ballads designed for adult contemporary, while never neglecting the art-rock that brought him to the dance. In a sense, 1985 is the year when all of the bets he laid paid off. Hamming it up in videos helped make him a staple on MTV, his pop instincts turned him into a fixture on top 40 radio, and “Take Me Home” evoked the same eerie atmospherics as “In The Air Tonight,” a reminder that beneath his cheerful demeanor, Collins began as a prog-rocker. 

Whether he got spooky or silly, Collins maintained that same unflappable pose, smiling through hooks, harmonies and collaborations. Collins appeared in so many different incarnations, it appeared that he could do it all, and that was deliberate: Phil Collins styled himself as the placid face of a multi-purpose pop star, appealing to every demographic imaginable. In the middle of the 1980s, a decade where pop music grew increasingly corporatized, there could’ve been no pop star who captured the times so thoroughly. 

(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 1986 here, or head back to the full list here.)