Defending the indefensible: Phil Collins - what's he done to you?

"No wonder people were annoyed with me! And I do apologise!” So said Phil Collins in a 2014 Daily Mail interview in which he was asked to atone for near-ubiquity in the mid-eighties and early nineties that subsequently led him to being charged in Britain with a number of alleged offences, such as:

• Getting married often (true)
• Getting divorced often and writing songs about it (true)
• Divorcing by fax (not true)
• Being a Tory (not true and flatly denied)
• Being mates with Prince Charles (true - he was a trustee of the Prince's Trust).
• 'Going Hollywood' (true)
• Being respected by US hip-hop artists (true)
• Footballer Steven Gerrard being a Collins fan, thus "dragging the game back into the Dark Ages" (partly true)
• Leaving the UK after Tony Blair became prime minister (true - he married a Swiss national)
• Divorcing for a third time...and now, apparently, moving back in with her (true)

Let's face it, not even Gary Glitter and his odious proclivities has been slammed as badly. So, on the occasion of Collins' 65th birthday, it's time to give the man a break because, frankly, all this hatin' is undeserved.

For a start, Collins was, to begin with, a reluctant pop star. This makes his subsequent superstardom (joining Macca and Jacko as the only performers to have sold over 100 million albums as solo artists and as band members) something of a paradox. That's not to say Collins regrets his success, but that his success has only really been a problem in his country of origin.

Despite being a child actor (including the Artful Dodger in the West End production of Oliver! and blink-and-you-miss appearances in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and A Hard Day's Night), being part of a touted late 1960s band, Flaming Youth, who went nowhere, and then joining Genesis in 1970, the Phil Collins most people know about only came to be at the beginning of the 1980s. 

When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, Collins was the last resort to replace him as lead singer. He would have been happy to have remained on the drum stool, applying a God-given drumming talent that had seen him play percussion on sessions for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, would later see him farmed out to play on Brian Eno's acclaimed Another Green World, as well as starting his fusion side project, Brand X.

Joining Genesis to begin with had been an act of professional curiosity. Having seen them as one of those bands that were always appearing in Melody Maker's gig pages, Collins had figured that they would be a good source of regular work when he was offered to audition at Gabriel's parents' house in Chobham, Surrey. While he paddled around in the swimming pool, as you do, listening to the other auditioneers, he absorbed the material, subsequently nailing the job.

Collins wasn't a particular fan of prog rock. His music was soul, R&B and jazz. But with the obscure time signatures and meandering fantasy songs of the early Genesis, Collins' drumming style evolved with intricate, jazz-like flourishes and melodic fills, taking the power of peers like John Bonham and Keith Moon (whom he could have replaced in The Who) and adding a musical 'voice' to the drums.

His contribution to Genesis wasn't, however, merely percussive. With Steve Hackett joining in 1971, the two grammar school-educated West Londoners provided a grounded buttress to the rarified environment created by Gabriel, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, who'd formed Genesis at Charterhouse, the public school better known for turning out prime ministers, archbishops and captains of industry than hairy rock stars.

As Collins has often remarked, band politics were often an extension of school politics, and arguments over pencil cases and protractors, long forgotten, easily erupted again over guitar tunings and piano solos and other petty musical disagreements. Collins, with his stage school self-assurance and considerably greater streetwisery, was the perfect pin with which to puncture the air when things became too overwrought.

But with a new album to record in the autumn of 1975, and no lead singer emerging from 100s of applicants, Collins - who had been coaching the auditions - was clearly better at singing the new material than those trying out for the job.

And so, on February 2, 1976, three days after Collins' 25th birthday, the first post-Gabriel Genesis album, A Trick Of The Tail, was released. Fans had heard Collins' voice before - perfectly complementing Gabriel on stage, as well as providing lead vocals on album tracks like Nursery Cryme's For Absent Friends and More Fool Me on Selling England By The Pound. But with the new album Genesis started to assume a new persona, with Collins its focal point.

With Gabriel out of the picture, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford took on more of the songwriting. A Trick Of The Tail retained much of the whimsy that Gabriel and his Lewis Carroll-like wordplay had laid over complex musical arrangements, and with Dance On A Volcano and Squonk the band's association with fantasy - rather than poppy romance -continued. But in Ripples and Entangled, in particular, Collins' vocals brought Genesis closer to Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the band started to become a little more accessible. Robbery, Assault & Battery also added some levity. No surprise, then, that it was co-written by Collins.

Live, Collins' precocious sense of fun provided a different dynamic. Gabriel had been a relatively shy individual, gauchely telling obscure stories between songs and dressing up in costumes to help illustrate the meandering music. Collins, at a glance, brought another energy and the cheeky-chappiness of an end-of-pier comedian (while not abandoning drumming duties - joining touring drummers like King Crimson's Bill Bruford and long-standing stickman Chester Thompson on the instrumental parts of the so-called "long songs").

When Steve Hackett left the band after the release of Seconds Out - still the best live album ever - Genesis contracted into a trio. Banks, in particular, and Rutherford were still the core of the band's songwriting, but Collins had emerged as the band's personality, and with it had some influence. The irony of this is that the next album, ...And Then There Were Three produced a hit single, Follow You, Follow Me, a love song that introduced the band to a female audience for the first time. And it was, in fact, written by Rutherford.

If A Trick Of The Tail "launched" Phil Collins, to some extent, the commercial success - and enormous US tours that followed - was the making of him. After the 1978 tour, Rutherford and Banks went off to do solo albums. Collins was struggling to save his four-year-old first marriage - arguably the victim of his workaholism - and he offered to move to Canada where his wife Andrea Bertorelli had moved to with their children. It didn't work out, so he withdrew to his now empty West Sussex cottage and started noodling around in a makeshift bedroom studio.

The outcome was only intended to provide catharsis for the divorce he was now going through, plaintive, heart-on-sleeve songs like If Leaving Me Is Easy, Please Don't Ask ('given' to Genesis for their Duke album) and, of course, In The Air Tonight - famously self-described as "not a happy song" about Bertorelli.

It's pioneering use of both drum machines and that now-familiar 'gated reverb' drum sound (created during Collins' contribution to Gabriel's third solo album) turned In The Air Tonight into a huge hit, taking the singer from reluctant front man to Top Of The Pops, famously appearing playing a keyboard on top of a Black & Decker Workmate with a paint pot on it, a dig at Bertorelli who'd apparently run off with the decorator.

This was two of Collins' most enduring qualities at work: firstly, his comic schtick and secondly, his lack of any typical English reserve. What you see is what you get, which is why Face Value's sleeve was dominated by Collins' full moon face on the front cover, and thinning hair on the back of his head on the rear.

The child actor-turned drummer from Hounslow was no longer the reluctant front man. In The Air Tonight would make Collins part of the 80s zeitgeist: Michael Mann included it in the pilot episode of Miami Vice - its hissing Roland CR78 drum machine and simple three-chord arrangement played on a Prophet 5 keyboard underlaying a pivotal scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs driving moodily down - appropriately - Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

Face Value's follow-up, Hello, I Must Be Going! (a title quoting Groucho Marx) took Collins up another notch, its cover of The Supremes' You Can't Hurry Love - to some, a throwaway retread of an old soul number - becoming a global pop hit in 1982.

In 1983, and with another Genesis album behind him, Collins came to work for no less a figure than Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin had broken up following John Bonham's death, and Plant turned to Collins to kick start his solo career. "I was graced by my first two solo records, Pictures at Eleven and The Principle of Moments," Plant has said more recently. "A drummer contacted me and said, 'I love Bonham so much I wanna sit behind you when you sing'. It was Phil Collins. His career was just kicking in and he was the most spirited and positive and really encouraging force, because you can't imagine what it was like, me trying to carve my own way after all that."

Having scored another global hit about divorce with the power ballad Against All Odds, the title song of Taylor Hackford's film of the same name, 1985 came around. He'd begun the year drumming on Band Aid's Do They Know Its Christmas?, but things took off spectacularly with the album No Jacket Required. Its lead-in single Sussudio was a bold, brassy hit of the age - all electronic drums and synths, though it bore great similarity to Prince's 1999 (Collins admits to have been a fan). Still, that didn't stop the album garnering more hits, including Take Me Home, the video for which featured Collins at various points on a world tour that seemed to just say "I'm now a global superstar".

And he was. On July 12, 1985, he managed to be at both the Wembley and Philadelphia ends of Live Aid. In his inimitable manner, Collins maintained that he was just trying to do the cause a favour: originally a number of the London performers were going to try and get over to Philadelphia on Concorde, but in the end it was only Collins. However, what seemed like a good idea turned out to be anything less as, along with doing another solo set, he was asked to drum for Led Zeppelin (who already had The Power Station's Tony Thompson on board). With Jimmy Page apparently "drooling in a corner", what should have been a magnanimous gesture ended up as an unrehearsed nightmare. Not that the crowd would have cared.

That year, Collins even made an acting appearance in Miami Vice, playing dodgy game show host "Phil the Shill". By 1986 - in which Genesis sold out Wembley Stadium for a record four nights - he was, literally, everywhere, even playing Great Train Robber Buster Edwards in a supposed romantic comedy that had largely been written with the singer in mind. Though Collins hadn't signed up for Buster purely to act in it, songs for the soundtrack were inevitable, and the old Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders song Groovy Kind Of Love gave him yet another hit.

At the same time, in Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, we had Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman indulging hypothesising on Collins' career while entertaining a pair of hookers: "I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist", he suggests, having just instructed one of the girls to "eat it". Phil Collins was now an inextricable feature of the era.

Genesis, for much of the 1970s, had been a band that that the music press appreciated, but hadn't always raved about. There were cooler bands, quite frankly, but Genesis were regarded as merely "interesting". That, though, didn't hamper their inexorable rise. But with Collins becoming the band's breakout star on the back of his own solo work, when he returned to the group that had launched him, the trio found a camaraderie and creativity that only they could achieve together. Thus, via the albums Abacab, Genesis, Invisible Touch and We Can't Dance, they became darlings of the nascent MTV, their profoundly American-orientated videos for singles playing on both the band's sense of humour and, in particular, Collins' own love of hamming it up. 

Being everywhere via Genesis, his own solo music, and his myriad side projects created a monster that would always be at odds with the press back in the UK. Things reached their nadir with the NME's Steven 'Seething' Wells writing a vicious piece headlined "Ugly Bald Bastard Speaks (to Phil Collins)". By then, I had possibly been the last author of any review in the NME of a Collins gig. Quite why he'd agreed to speak to the paper baffles me still. The NME and its IPC stablemate Melody Maker had taken to baiting Collins, with the Maker's letters page even printing his home address as an attempt to close off a correspondence that Collins himself had persisted with, such was his anger at comments the paper had published.

With the release, in 1990, of But Seriously, Collins reached the zenith of his fame. An album featuring then-neighbour Eric Clapton, his ubiquity - both in the charts but also at the all-star charity gigs so in-vogue at the time - saw him achieving commercial success few other British solo artists had reached then and certainly not since.

However, the album's hit single, Another Day In Paradise, a song about the plight of the homeless, drew derision. How could a multi-millionaire rock star be claiming to trying to solve the problem of urban homelessness? Undeterred, the Collins machine rolled on, with another Genesis album, We Can't Dance in 1992, more hits and another mega tour.

But in 1993 the machine hit turbulence. With Genesis on hiatus (Collins was never to record an album with them again), he released his next solo album, Both Sides. Recorded mostly at home on his own, it sounded like a collection of bedroom demos. Face Value may have begun that way, but Both Sides was committed to release in that form. It appeared that the man with the golden touch of the previous decade was losing it. A live jazz album - A Hot Night in Paris - followed, featuring arrangements of Genesis and solo songs that, actually, wasn't bad.

Collins was far from over at this point, but even with the next album Dance Into The Light, it felt like Collins was coasting. Towards the end of the 1990s Disney invited him to write songs for the animated Tarzan film, producing an Oscar-winning smash hit in You'll Be In My Heart. This, though, just added to the British disease of sniffing at success, with Collins being regarded at the start of the new Millennium as having "gone Hollywood".

In marrying his third wife, Swiss translator Orianne Cevey, Collins moved to Switzerland, settling down in a small village near Lausanne. This, of course, became interpreted as "Tory Phil leaves UK" in the wake of the Blair government coming to power in 1997. The Sun also claimed that Collins had divorced second wife Jill Tavelman "by fax" (the truth of it was that certain documents had to be sent by fax but this wasn't allowed to get in the way of a good story). Of course, much of this was the doing of the media, a classic case of a Brit being built up and then knocked down. By comparison, the US didn't stop being a fan, though Collins' increasing invisibility while he enjoyed playing dad in Switzerland started to place him on "Where are they now?" lists.

With Genesis reforming for a limited, greatest hits-spinning tour in 2007, Collins was still not committing himself to a major return to the fore. By the tour's end, Collins was having to play drums with the sticks gaffer-taped to his hands, the result of a worsening back problem. More medical problems were to follow, with an infection causing hearing loss in one ear. Not long after the lame Motown covers album Going Back came out in 2010, Collins announced his retirement. By this stage, the music press didn't care. Even some fans were of the view that Collins was no longer the writing, drumming and performing force he had once been. Perhaps success had changed him.

It is, though, time to reassess the album that took Phil Collins from drummer and then singing-drummer with one of Britain's hardest-to-place bands, to becoming a solo star who, in many respects, was the 1980s.

With a hint that he might be reconsidering his retirement, Collins has this week re-released Face Value, adding previously unreleased tracks, and updating the iconic black and white cover shot with a new picture showing the considerably aged and somewhat gaunt Collins of today.

It requires listening to afresh. For an album that was supposed to be about a bitter divorce, once past the truly innovative In The Air Tonight and, later, the quite obvious If Leaving Me Is Easy, This Must Be Love and Thunder & Lightning joyfully celebrate moving on. The album ends with a stunning cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, embracing all that the studio had to offer the Fabs themselves on the original. Behind The Lines is a cover version of the Genesis song Collins co-wrote for their Duke album, and with the addition of Earth, Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns, it is a totally different song, and even better for it. Likewise, I Missed Again is a riotously uptempo song. The Roof Is Leaking, with its depression era theme and mournful banjo, captures Collins' sadness as well as an expected nod to other musical styles not previously in his oeuvre.

Face Value was, for Genesis fans, a shock, especially when the same horn section turned up on the next Genesis album, Abacab. Those still wedded to 20-minute epics like Suppers Ready and Cinema Show took a while to adjust to "their" lead singer pouring his emotions out in heart-on-sleeve ballads. Even In The Air Tonight, a song which has since found new life in hip-hop (the tribute album Urban Renewal featured artists like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Kelis and Montell Jordan doing Collins covers), sounded like nothing any of his previous outlets had ever produced. And even now, from the first hiss of the drum machine through to the now-famous tom-tom fill, it is a song to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In the hairs tonight, if you will.

I won't pretend that I went off Collins' music as it lost its edge at the turn of the Noughties. But in Collins himself, his history as one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, the accessibility he brought to Genesis before they became music TV mainstays, and his work as a producer and collaborator with people like my musical hero John Martyn, warrants greater appreciation than the short cuts too many take to ignorantly dismiss him for his supposed politics, his personal life and the unashamedly populist end of his music.

You don't have to love him at all, or at least love the bits of his career you don't have to like, but if you like music and appreciate musicianship, there are parts of Phil Collins' musical history that deserve enormous credit. And I would start by listening to an album that was released 40 years ago next week, A Trick Of The Tail.

  

Calling all stations - David Bowie's Station To Station turns 40

© John Robert Rowlands.

It's started already. There are already grumblings on the interweb of Bowie Fatigue. Good God, the man has barely been gone 12 days and already social media's billious underbelly is carping.

Me, personally, I've done what any self-respecting music fan would do and have taken to what I call "positive wallowing" - scouring YouTube for Bowie interviews and TV appearances from, it would seem, largely around the time of his 'third age'. This was post-Let's Dance and post-Tin Machine, perhaps post-midlife crisis, too, but a period in which the albums Hours, Outside and Reality seemed to reflect a contented Bowie lacking any obvious desire to create yet another personality to project his songwriting through.

Looking at appearances on Jonathan Ross and Conan O'Brien's chat shows, even an interview on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, for heaven's sake, you see a Bowie you'd want to hang out with. Funny, relaxed, self-aware but not self-possessed. Unlike some of the great and the good who unloaded their own grief at the man's passing. "He had such a profound effect on my life, I don't know where to start," said Damon Albarn.

Tempting as it is to mock, he had a point. Where do you start? "Who else has left a mark like this?" asked Kate Bush, herself no slouch in the convention-busting department. "No one" was her rheotorical answer.

Elsewhere I've covered the enormity, the breadth and the depth of Bowie's canon, so I won't repeat myself. But this day, January 23, does possess considerable significance in Bowieology.

For it was this day in 1976 that Bowie released Station To Station, and album which - as it's title might suggest - represented yet another transition.

By the age of 29 he'd already produced nine studio albums and had been and gone through the musical theatre of his debut, invented space rock, midwifed glam rock, produced his own My Way and given it all up to try a hand at blue-eyed (or wonky blue-eyed) Philadelphia soul, quite well, as it happened.

With pop unsure whether to follow the disco boom (which, thanks Google, I've also discovered to be a questionable nightclub still going in Greece) or the chambray-shirted West Coast soft-rock movement, David Bowie entered LA's Cherokee Studios in September 1975 to work on an album that marked first steps towards a more industrial sound.

Bowie had always been an artistic kleptomaniac, acquiring influences and styles from wherever he went. Right up until Blackstar he was still hoovering up loose trinkets from across the cultural spectrum, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly amongst them. But in the mid-1970s, Bowie's reception of cultural influences was also being impacted by his enthusiastic consumption of drugs, especially Los Angeles' confection of choice, cocaine.

Having spent the summer of 1975 making Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, an acclaimed but still baffling pyscho-sci-fi drama that seemed to have been about The Dame himself, Bowie's entry to Cherokee Studios was to follow-up the "plastic soul" as he later branded Young Americans.

The conventional wisdom is that Station To Station marked a musical shift towards the Europe that the Berlin trilogy, which followed, clearly embraced. But the truth is that Station To Station was still a highly soulful album - Golden Years and TVC15 especially, even if the acquired trinket since Young Americans was the synthesised industry of Kraftwerk, who'd released Autobahn in 1974.

The real European shift, however, was in Bowie's thinking: opening Station To Station, its title song announces the "The return of the thin white duke", at a stroke profering another persona, but one clearly ready to depart California: "Flashing no colour tall in this room overlooking the ocean" and, tellingly, later: "It's not the side effects of the cocaine, it's too late to be grateful, it's too late to be late again, it's too late to be hateful. The European canon is here."

Paul Tryka, who's biography Starman is without the definitive Bowie study, describes Station To Station as a "love letter to Europe" and a "remarkably coherent statement from a man whose grip on reality was intermittent", although in Cameron Crowe's seminal Rolling Stone feature on Bowie in February 1976, those around him claimed that Bowie was now drug-free. However, he was, so he told Crowe, "very, very bored".

Whether Bowie was clean or still using when he began recording Station To Station it was clear he was restlessness. Los Angeles will do that, whether you've succumbed to its temptations or not. Around this time, too, there were rumours of an interest in occultist Aleister Crowley. After Station To Station had come out, Bowie became embroiled in a series of incidents in which he appeared to flirt with facism - being quoted in Sweden that "Britain could benefit from a fascist leader", being caught in possesion of Nazi paraphernalia and then, in May 1976 being photographed at London's Victoria Station giving what many believed to have been a Nazi salute.

However abstaining, Bowie's previously Olympic taste for drugs had left him 'erratic', to put things mildly. Moving to Berlin to clean up with Iggy Pop was, he would later joke, a strange choice given that Berlin was, in 1977, Europe's drug gateway.

Perhaps, then, influenced by addiction's manias, or even by the experience of spending several weeks as Roeg's alien, Bowie's approach to Station To Station drew out themes of emotional attachment, madness, disillusionment or, simply, the doldrums he spoke of to Crowe. Golden Years, mind you, is both mysically and lyrically quite 'up', and in fact, the whole album delivers a warmth at odds with some of its lyrical themes, perhaps a consequence of the musicians who added colour to the record - stalwarts like Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, and pianist Roy Bittan, now a fixture of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band.

There is, though, a simmering disquiet to Station To Station, manic flashes glinting through the apparent stability of the album's "funk on the edge" as Charles Shaar Murray described it in Melody Maker. And with Bowie edging towards Europe, both geographically and in the apparent nature of his suggested political interests, there are clues laid here and there as to his future (a trail of breadcrumbs similar, I supposed, to that laid on Blackstar), with Stay creating a sense of longing for something or someone long lost, and a cover of the Johnny Mathis theme tune to the 1957 film Wild Is The Wind asking "Let me fly away with you".

Despite official claims to the contrary, the David Bowie who commenced recording Station To Station in Septmber 1975 wasn't any more lucid than the Bowie who released it on January 23, 1976. "I was in a serious decline, emotionally and socially," he admitted 20 years later, recognising that he was living on a cliff edge then. "I was lucky enough to know somewhere within me that I really was killing myself, and I had to do something drastic to pull myself out of that." And so, after touring the album, he and Iggy took off for Europe, producing a year later Low and its grey, spartan contrast to the sunshine of Southern California, the cold turkey experience of "Pale blinds drawn all day, nothing to do, nothing to say" as Sound And Vision would describe.

Station To Station may have been the precursor to change, the album that Bowie needed to record to shed the fraudelence of LA and its painted-on sunshine, and get ready for something new, but it is far from being a gloomy album. Even if it is clear that Bowie was looking to get out of La-La Land and, in particular loose the chains of addictions, the line that defines the record in its entirety is right there in Golden Years: "Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere - angel! Come get up my baby."

Takin' it easier - Glenn Frey: 1948-2016

© Simon Poulter 2013

There's a common misconception amongst us Brits that our American cousins are bereft of irony. Not so. Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme's creation of the Eagles Of Death Metal proves otherwise.

As at least one legend has it, the Californian band that met the spotlight in the grimmest of circumstances last November arrived at their moniker after Hughes and Homme saw a man in a London bar dancing to The Scorpions' Wind of Change. The man explained that he was frugging to death metal. "No it's not," Homme is said to have replied. "This is like the Eagles of death metal."

That Homme entertained a play on words around one of America's most revered, representative and also sneered-at rock bands demonstrates a delightful, if unexpected, degree of chutzpah. 

To some, the 'original' Eagles are a brand of corporate rock and roll, as familiar as Starbucks or as predictable as a Ford car. Punk, which was very angry about many things, had bands like the Eagles in its sights for this very reason, as well as the post-hippie prevelence for chambray shirts, denim and centre-parted hair.

It should also be noted that punk really erupted in 1976, the year that the Eagles released their biggest selling album, Hotel California, the title track of which remains today their most defining, and itself was a somewhat punkish rejection of the plastic facade that was LA life back then.

Even now, the Eagles generate caustic derision from those of a reactionary bent, agitated by their gentle, unprepossesing country rock and the "peaceful, easy feeling" of their soft harmonies and readiness for narcoleptic FM radio. This, they say, is music "only unadventurous Americans could like".

However, the unexpected death yesterday of the Eagles founder member Glenn Frey triggers reconsideration of one of the most extroardinary periods in the storied history of California's musical timeline.

Whenever I've been asked to name a period that I would have most liked to have lived in, it is never Shakespeare's England (plague, smallpox and syphillis...?), Dickens' London or The Beatles' Liverpool, but the canyons in the Hollwood Hills in the late 1960s. For then, as Barney Hopkins' essential read Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters And Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons 1967-1976 details, you had the confluence of rock, country and folk in Laurel Canyon or Malibu Canyon, with the likes of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors and Joni Mitchell hanging out, creating beautiful things.

LA was an incredible hotbed of music, the southern Californian sunshine fertilising what had become a giant campus for songwriters and session players, where everyone knew everyone everyone - CSN&Y, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, Randy Newman, Warren Zeavon and J D Souther. 

Drawn to this world was Detroit-born Frey, who wound up sharing an apartment with Jackson Browne and Souther (forming the syllable-tastic Longbranch Pennywhistle), and moving into a music scene that gravitated around Ronstadt (already working with Don Henley) and West Hollywood's Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Out of this musical minestrone soup came captivating combinations, with one band in particular emerging at its fulcrum: legendary guitar and banjo player Bernie Leadon from the Burritos, bassist Randy Meisner from Poco, seasoned lead guitarist Don Felder, Henley - the boy from a 'one stop light' Texan town - and Frey. 

This original line-up (i.e. before Leadon, Meisner and Felder left and Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit came in) set about their self-titled debut album, though recording took place a long way from LA's blue-eyed beaches, but at London's Olympic Studios under then producer-du-jour Glyn Johns. 

The album process may not have been a happy one for band or producer, but it did at least put them on the map, thanks in no small part to Browne and Frey's domestic arrangement also producing the quintessential Eagles song, Take It Easy, a song that became something of a metaphor for the band's musical outlook, with it's memorable line - represented in the photograph at the top of this page from my Route 66 adventure in 2013 - "Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin' down to take a look at me."

Seeing the Eagles for myself, finally, at Madison Square Garden a few months after my Winslow visit, on a tour in which the reformed line-up of Frey, Leadon, Henley, Schmitt and Walsh ran through the band's musical history as part homespun fireside chat, part concert, one thing was clear: for all of Henley's higher profile as an 80s solo star, and Walsh's deserved reputation as one of rock's greatest guitarists, Frey was the architect of the Eagles' broader spectrum.

His voice, heard on Take It Easy and thus the first voice on the first track on the first album by the Eagles, has often been overlooked for its role in shaping the Eagles' sound, as an instrument in its own right. But there it was, 41 years after the world first heard "Well, I'm running down the road tryin' to loosen my load", stronger than ever, and as sublime as ever.

© Simon Poulter 2013

What wasn't quite certain, that November evening in New York, was just how much true love remained across that stage. Until the Eagles re-emerged with the Hell Freezes Over album as part of the unplugged trend, their tenure as one of the biggest bands in the 1970s extended almost exclusively within that term - releasing just six albums between their 1972 debut and their breakup release, The Long Run in 1979.

"It had stopped being fun," Frey told The Independent in 1992. "We no longer trusted each others' instincts," adding that being in a band of competitive talents with all the tour distractions that the era offered up exposed themselves to each other. 

"Like, how we each reacted to the pressure, and how it was hard to cope with it rationally because we'd been living this lifestyle of limos, private jets, first-class hotels and people doing what you told them to. Plus, both Henley and I had developed drug habits, which didn't help matters."

The Eagles' breakup saw all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, enter the 1980s with new solo careers. Henley, like that other drumming singer Phil Collins, joined the realms of MTV-saturated AOR. 

As has often been remarked, actors want to be rock stars (Bruce Willis, Don Johnson) and rock stars have a habit of wanting to become actors (Lennon, Jagger, Bowie, Sting, Collins). And so Frey enjoyed his own place in the zeitgeist, contributing The Heat Is On to the Beverley Hills Cop soundtrack, and having his song Smuggler's Blues turned into an episode of Miami Vice, in which he starred. He also turned up in episodes of Wiseguy (a seminal series for its time) and, later, Jerry Maguire. These, though, can be regarded as distractions.

In the 80s and 90s Frey produced a handful of spotty albums - No Fun Aloud, The Allnighter, Soul Searchin' and Strange Weather, to varying degrees of reception, but nothing ever to scale the same heights as the Eagles in their prime. Their inevitable thaw, and the return to touring wasn't intended to replensish the coffers, but perhaps, vicariously through the encouragement of promoters, it replenished the relationship that remained at the band's core.

Frey and Henley were, though, never the Eagles' Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, or Becker and Fagen. For a start, theirs wasn't a songwriting partnership. One would often sing on songs written by the other in conjunction with other members of the band, but only occasionally would they co-create.

It was their drive that fuelled the original seven-year blizzard of soft-rock - Frey's upper Midwest hardiness and Henley's Texan bluntness leading to both the fabled creative tension as well as the greatest creativity. "I love him and love the records he makes – he's a craftsman – but most of the time I don't like him!" Frey said of Henley in The Independent interview. 

The sentiment was - respectfully, but somewhat tartly - reciprocated by Henley in his statement following Frey's death: "He was like a brother to me; we were family, and like most families, there was some dysfunction. But, the bond we forged 45 years ago was never broken, even during the 14 years that the Eagles were dissolved."

Now, sadly, it has, as rock music mourns the loss of yet another of its sons, one who may not have been one of its biggest points of influence, but certainly remains one of its biggest in terms of legacy.

And the winner is...Black Tie, White Noise

Picture: JMEnternational

After a week of truly gloomy news in the entertainment industry, which has seen the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman and, this morning, an announcement that Dame Barbara Windsor will leave EastEnders - for good!!! (I realise that this does sit at one end of the scale...) - it's time to allow regular sniping of the business of show to recommence.

Pop culture is, we must acknowledge without question, what it is. Almost by definition, there is little room for the eclectic and the obscure, and in an ideal world, elitist interests too. The Brit Awards, for example, began as a patriotic nod to HRH The Queen in her silver jubilee year with the appropriately stuffy British sobriquet, the 'British Phonographic Institute Awards', a celebration of the nation's music industry.

Over time, and via disastrous Mick Fleetwood/Sam Fox presenting combos, Chumbawumba tipping ice buckets over ministers of the crown and Jarvis Cocker goofing up Michael Jackson's grandiosity, it has evolved into a giant, paid ticket-only beanfeast at the 02 Arena.

No harm in that: in the 1960s, the annual NME Poll Winner's Party was the must-attend celebration of pop. And, as with all good awards ceremonies, the Brits always feature plenty to get annoyed about. No-one has a monopoly of opinion on what makes good and what makes bad, and taste is 90% subjectivity an probably less than 10% objectivity. But there are times when these awards dos - and I'll come to the Oscars and BAFTAs in a moment - and the nominations therein are just plain baffling.

For many years, the Brits were, as a celebration of the British music industry, less about artistic endeavour and more about recognising the number of "units" shifted. Personally I loathe those industry awards evenings where a load of predominantly male salesmen in hired Moss Bros dinner suits quaff wine, smoke cigars and behave boorishly, and then get the chance to stand on the stage of a London hotel ballroom to receive a trophy from some regional BBC news presenter. That, though, is the sort of environment where record company accountants would best enjoy acknowledgement.

The Brits, though, should be the Oscars of British music, where creative excellence is rewarded, where artistic daring is lauded and, more importantly, rock, pop and all the other genres get to be celebrated for giving those of us who love our music a damn good time. So, what about this year's Brits, nominations for which were announced this week? What sign is there of it being a superb festival of the last 12 month's grooviest choons?

Let's start with one of the perennial clangers, Best British Female. For years, this would feature almost exclusively Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Yazz, Sade and, possibly, Clodagh Rodgers, even when they hadn't been near a recording studio in centuries. This year's BFF includes a nomination for the definitely dead Amy Winehouse, purely, it would seem, for having appeared on the soundtrack of an admittedly breathtaking film about her ill-fated life.

Inevitably Adele features prominently this year, the living embodiment of both irresistible force and unstoppable object. Depressingly, I don't see there to be any other winner, and although it's good to see the likes of Florence Welch, Jess Glynne and Laura Marling, where are Ellie Goulding and Lianne La Havas?

The nods for British Male Solo Artist - ​Aphex Twin, Calvin Harris, James Bay, Jamie xx and Mark Ronson - just depress on account of the fact Britain is currently lacking any bloke making anything truly interesting. And this in the week that we lost one of its greatest exponents.

Blur lead the odds for Best British Group, ​but with the exception of Foals, the appearance of Coldplay and One Direction, for God's sake, are all too predictable. Would it have killed the Brits committee to have included Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds in one of these two categories? Johnny Marr? They are quite good, if you weren't aware...

The Best International Group category has traditionally been a platform for either U2 or Foo Fighters, or Foo Fighters and U2. I may be wrong, but in truly lean years I'm sure U2 have also appeared in the Best British Group category on account of Adam Clayton being born in Oxfordshire. This year the list includes Eagles of Death Metal. As noble as this entry is for representing rock'n'roll defiance (and I'm not going to tread on the sensitivities of those - including two friends - who were caught up in the bloodbath in Paris), surely EoDM could have received a special award? Are they really one of the international groups of the year? Good, though, that the category also includes Alabama Shakes and Tame Impala.

I'm not going to go through every category, otherwise I will end up very angry indeed at the inclusion of Adele's suicidally dreary Hello as single of the year and, worse, Sam Smith's truly abject Bond theme Writing's On The Wall (yeah, I'll say...) for British Artist Video of the Year.

I know that, at 48, I have ascended to that life stage where I can legitimately be a curmudgeonly old fart, but the Brits just seem to lack a certain excitement, true pioneers. They were always meant to be a corporate event, but since getting the Smash Hits treatment, The Brits should at least amp it up and celebrate the actually good things about the British music industry.

I'm not going to re-engage the argument that music was better in the 70s, because it was and it wasn't, and there is no shortage of adventurous, exciting, music coming through now, as there has always been and always will. But for a trade association representing a national music industry that, arguably, has had more impact around the world than any others (face facts America), it should reflect the still-burning furnace of British musical invention with a bit more than Coldplay in any category that will have them.

However, there are greater crimes being committed in this, the season of black tie showbiz piss-ups. This week we've seen the 2016 nominations for the Oscars and their slightly lesser (in the mind of the rest of the world...) British cousin, the BAFTAs.

Whereas the Brits seem too populist and predictable, the film awards have, to some degree, been less so. I'm not so naive that I don't realise how film business politics plays a big part in nominations for the Oscars in particular, but there is something cringingly dismal that, yet again, diversity gets such a poor showing this year.

It should, of course, never be about tokenism, but were this last year's films so bereft of strong performances from black actors and women that the main categories this year shouldn't have a more diverse profile? Creed, Straight Outta Compton anyone...? No. This year's Academy Awards will be the whitest, straightest Oscars in living memory.

But it's not just ethnic or cultural diversity that have been badly served by the Oscars and, indeed, the BAFTAs. What about populism? Sure, The Martian is a big, balls-out bucket o'popcorn blockbuster, and it's actually quite refreshing to see a film like Mad Max: Fury Road get a look-in on gongs (though surely someone's having a laugh putting a post-apocalyptic Mad Max film up for an Oscar in the Make-up & Hair Styling category...).

But where are two of the year's biggest films - SPECTRE and Star Wars: The Force Awakens? It's possible that the latter failed to appear in time for consideration but, still, the lack of properly good, properly popular films - action, sci-fi or broad comedy - in these awards is a frustration as annually predictable as waking up on Christmas morning and not finding the keys to a Porsche under the tree.

Even with its flaws SPECTRE was exceptionally entertaining, and the Bond franchise is continuing to show every other action series how to do it. Likewise The Force Awakens, a staggeringly good romp and one that will appeal to sci-fi obsessives and regular film-goers with equal measure - damn good fun for a couple of hours on a Saturday night, with plenty of humour and pathos.

OK, neither might have, like, 'heavy, themes; neither might have the heft of human emotion stretched to its limits by survival in bear-infested forests or transgender acceptance, but does that make them any less worthy?

For the BAFTAs not to recognise either SPECTRE or The Force Awakens is even more shocking. As an awards ceremony that bigs up its Britishness (and you don't get more cut-him-open-and-he-bleeds-pure-tweed than Stephen Fry as co-host), and yet doesn't recognise two of the biggest commercial hits of the year, which were made on British soil, mostly, and which represent the very best of British acting and production talent, is just embarrassing.

Did I mention daylight snobbery? Of course I didn't. That would be terribly naughty of me...

The next day continues

So this is weird. Downright odd, actually. Five days ago I was listening to a brand new David Bowie album for the first time and four days ago writing a review of it. And, then, two days ago I was coming to terms with his death.

Hard to take it all in, and not just from the perspective of grief. How incredible - if that's the right word - these last few days have been. The euphoria of a record reconfirming the continuation of an incredible canon of work and a career that had seemed lost, then news that its author was gone.

Cute as it may be to suggest that Bowie's death was as cleverly stage managed as any of his artistic endeavours in life, the reality is that we won't ever know whether nature just took its course, or that, somehow, reaction to Blackstar being released, along with almost exclusively glowing reviews generated in advance, would prove to be the final inhalation.

"He always did what he wanted to do," wrote producer Tony Visconti, who first worked with Bowie on his 1969 David Bowie album. In a Facebook post he said: "He wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was no different from his life - a work of Art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift."

In the same post, Visconti revealed that Bowie had taken him into his confidence early about his life expectancy: "I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn't, however, prepared for it."

No one was. No one is. Even taking the cod philosophy of Gerry O'Driscoll, the Abbey Road handyman quoted on Pink Floyd's The Great Gig In The Sky: "I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it – you've got to go sometime", you don't lose the sting of it.

On Monday night I went out for a walk down to the Flamme de la Liberté, the unofficial memorial to Princess Diana above the Pont D'Alma tunnel where she died, not out of any morbid fixation, but that I hadn't actually been out of my apartment since the news about Bowie had broken, needed to stretch my legs, and Pont D'Alma is only a ten minute walk away.

But when I got there it dawned on me how Bowie's abrupt death was, almost, sort of, kind of like that of Diana. A bit. In a way. Not to get too Daily Express about it, Diana had been enjoying a new lease of life when she died in that tunnel, indulging the good life of Paris and doing so with her new(ish) love. So when the news, that Sunday morning, hit the world so unexpectedly, it was like a punch to the solar plexus and the "outpouring of grief" (© all news organisations) that followed was accentuated by the unexpected shock. Because we think celebrities are immortal, right? I remember when Jim Henson died, people were grief stricken: "What will happen to The Muppets now?". OK, bad example.

With Bowie it was the same or similar or not far off it. As enigmatically as he'd lived his life, his expiration came without warning. We were all on a high because a) he was back and b) he'd produced something so satisfying and nourishing that he couldn't possibly just exit stage left like that. But he did.

So this post marks the start of a new blog. The old one, What Would David Bowie Do? was, as I've oft pointed out, never actually about Bowie. It just seems ludicrous to maintain a blog with his name in it - regardless of the reason why his name is in it - when he's no longer around. It just doesn't.

Thus, What Would David Bowie Do? ends - after, appropriately, five years - as it should: like Miss Havisham at Satis House collecting dust in her wedding dress or a watch stopped at the exact moment of an alien encounter, with the final post being that review of Blackstar.

New adventures abound (and no apologies for the new title - it was indeed the best I could come up with and, yes, it does cover pretty much anything I might post on it, and, yes, it is a nod.