Throwback Friday- Phil Collins “Sussudio”

In the spirit of UK pop after just publishing the interview series on Pierre Lewis, I thought I’d pick something from that genre for this week’s Throwback Friday.  Today, I bring you Phil Collins.

I love Throwback Fridays because there’s always a memory tied to these songs.  This takes me back to a family trip with my cousins out to the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Ocean City, Chincoteague, or Assateague…one of those) where we would go camping.  Counting jellyfish bites on our legs (something only fun to a child), bumping into horshoe crabs as we waded in the waters of the Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay, the nerve wracking drive over the Bay Bridge, stopped in traffic, going fishing, hanging in the arcade on the boardwalk, etc…  I remember sitting in the back seat with my cousin who’s just a few years older than me and thinking she was so cool because she had the Phil Collins “No Jacket Required” cassette tape.  We jammed to it in the backseat of their station wagon- you remember those that had the seat in the trunk that faced backwards and had that fake wood paneling along the sides?  Good times!

As soon as we got back from that trip, I couldn’t wait for my dad to take me to Kemp Mill Records in Columbia, Maryland and let me buy “No Jacket Required” by Phil Collins.  From there, I was hooked.  Similar to how I became drawn to Stevie Wonder, I began buying prior albums from Phil Collins to build up my collection, and he still stands as one of my favorite artists to date.  You know how the youngins don’t always like the same music as their parents.  Phil Collins was one of the few artists that brought my dad’s and my own music tastes together. He had known of Phil Collins long before me and had grown to love him as a percussionist and singer.  One of my all time favorites by Phil Collins is the song, “This Must Be Love“ from his album “Face Value” (I bought that one as a used CD down in Fells Point in Baltimore during my college days).  I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard in my life.

Excerpt from songfacts.com…

On a 1997 episode of VH1 Storytellers, Collins said: “This is one of those examples of improvising lyrics. You know, sometimes you can use the lyric, other times you’re in big trouble, because what you write doesn’t mean anything. So I set up this drum-machine pad, and I got some chords, and I started to sing into the microphone, and this word came out, which was “sus-sussudio.” It just literally came out, at the time… that was back when I could dance, so I kind of knew I had to find something else for that word, then I went back and tried to find another word that scanned as well as “sussudio,” and I couldn’t find one, so I went back to “sussudio.” Then I thought OK, let’s give it a meaning, what is it? The lyrics are based on this schoolboy crush on this girl at school. It’s happening with my daughter now, she’s 8 years old and she loves this boy, but she won’t tell him, like in the lyrics this boy loves her but they don’t talk about it… how do they know? ‘I know she likes me, I know she likes me, doesn’t know my name, doesn’t know I exist, but I know she likes me’… So that’s what the song is about, so “sussudio” became a name for this person, and since it’s become a name for a horse. My older daughter’s got a horse called Sussudio, and I’m sure there are children all over the world with the name Sussudio, so I apologize for that.” (thanks, Edward Pearce – Ashford, Kent, England)

Enjoy this week’s Throwback Friday post- Phil Collins “Sussudio.”