Phil Collins takes a lot of abuse.  Remember Noel Gallagher telling voters to vote Labour in 2005 because Phil Collins was threatening to return to the UK if the Tories got in?  Admittedly, Phil brings some of that abuse on himself by being notoriously thin-skinned and quick to take offense.  (I’ve always gotten the impression that one reasons why the Gallagher brothers always picked on Phil was because they knew he’d never have sense enough to just ignore them and would always reply.)  But Phil Collins deserves better than he’s often given.

Not only does his music epitomize an era but he’s also one of the better drummers around.  Collins famously started out as a Genesis’s drummer, only becoming their ubiquitous lead singer after Peter Gabriel left the band.  (Going from Gabriel to Collins was just as extreme as you might think, which is why Peter Gabriel’s Genesis is often considered to be a totally different band from Phil Collins’s Genesis.)  In I Don’t Care Anymore, Collins shows off his skills as a drummer and regardless of what you might think about Collins’s overall career, the song definitely rocks.

Like most of Collins’s better songs, I Don’t Care Anymore is a dark and angry song that exists a universe away from the Disney soundtrack material that Collins produced in the 90s.  He wrote this song while he was going through his first divorce, a process that left him emotionally exhausted and feeling as if he didn’t care anymore.

The video, which is largely a performance clip, was directed by Stuart Orme, who directed several videos in the 80s.  He also did the video for Collins’s In The Air Tonight, a song that’s even darker than this one.

Enjoy!