Opening Strides

A woman in a Porsche spots Phil Collins by the side of a desert road. He has the jeans, the dusty setting and the look of a man who knows how this commercial ends. Sure enough, the car reverses. The woman picks up the lizard at his feet and drives away. Collins has just learned the first rule of appearing in a Genesis music video dressed as a male model. Even the local wildlife has a better chance of getting the girl.

The song behind that scene is “I Can’t Dance,” the fourth track on Genesis’s 1991 album We Can’t Dance. The change of pronoun suits the occasion. On the record, Collins plays one unfortunate fellow trying to get through a day in tight jeans. On screen, keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist Mike Rutherford join him for a peculiar group walk that makes all three men look equally answerable for what is happening. You can hear the beginnings of that walk before anyone sings. Rutherford’s guitar takes a few confident steps, hesitates for a beat, then sets off again. By the time the drums arrive, you know exactly where to put your feet. Whether you ought to let anyone see you do it is another matter.

Model Behaviour

Collins gives his narrator a surprisingly rich inner life for somebody hired to wear trousers. A hot stretch of ground registers first through the soles of his feet. A woman on the beach catches his eye, although her dog takes a more immediate interest in him. Later, somebody spills beer on his shoes in a smoky pool hall. These are the details a camera would crop out of a fashion shoot, and they make splendid material for a lyric. We get to spend an afternoon inside the photograph, experiencing the heat, the nuisance and the sticky footwear that everyone admiring the finished picture has been spared.

The chorus gives him a peculiar professional pride. His conversation may be limited and his musical gifts negligible, but people will pay for the way he crosses a room. Collins sings the inventory of shortcomings with such relish that it begins to sound like a sales pitch. Then, in the passage about checking his appearance, a little anxiety creeps in. Somebody could be watching at any moment. Listen to the performance with that in mind and the swagger takes on a different quality. Our man has good reason to keep his shoulders square and his chin up. The one time he lets himself slouch might be the time the photographer gets the shot.

Studio Footwork

The musical joke took shape at The Farm, Genesis’s studio in Surrey, where the trio recorded We Can’t Dance with co-producer Nick Davis between March and September 1991. Rutherford brought in the guitar figure, and the musicians initially followed its bluesy weight wherever it seemed to lead. Collins played a substantial drum part and Banks supplied broad keyboard chords. In Banks’s recollection, it was enjoyable enough to play, though nobody could hear much of a future in it. Anyone who has been in a rehearsal room will recognise the predicament. A riff can keep three people happily occupied for quite a while without giving a fourth person much reason to listen.

The breakthrough came when Collins was at the microphone and Banks tried playing percussion sounds on his sampler. With a different pair of hands keeping time, the guitar suddenly sounded faintly ridiculous, and Collins found a higher voice that suited it. The character and the arrangement grew up together. You can hear the benefit in the finished recording, especially in the gaps after Rutherford plays. A small percussive sound lands with the precision of a raised eyebrow. Collins has enough room to stretch a vowel or worry at a word, and every time the guitar comes back it seems to catch him in the act. The trio finished writing the piece in one session. Knowing when to go home may have been their most consequential production decision that day.

Denim Disasters

Director Jim Yukich understands how much of that vocabulary he needs to preserve. The roadside sequence looks just plausible enough to pass as a jeans commercial. The generous stretch of empty road gives Collins room to pose, the Porsche supplies the promise of an adventure, and its reversing manoeuvre lets him savour his apparent good fortune. The choice of a lizard is funny in itself, but the timing is exquisite. For one second Collins and the viewer have reached exactly the same conclusion about the driver. When she leaves, the road seems considerably emptier than it did before she came along.

At the beach, the dog gets hold of Collins’s jeans. It is an excellent use for the product in question. Denim photographs beautifully in a tug-of-war, and a man trying to keep possession of his trousers has very little attention left over for looking seductive. The pool-hall sequence carries the idea one stage further. Here is the setting of an actual 501 commercial, complete with a game that gives the men an excuse to size each other up. Collins loses his jeans in the wager. Imagine the two films running side by side in an advertising pitch. One director can promise the client a hero whose clothes everyone in the room will want. The other can deliver a hero who would quite like his clothes back.

Some of the best footage comes between these little disasters. Crew members fuss over Collins and throw dust onto him, revealing how much labour goes into making a man look as though he has spent a few unobserved hours outdoors. Against a plain background, the three members of Genesis perform their stiff, synchronised walk with solemn concentration. Then Collins gets an encore, borrowing the extravagant movements of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” coda. After all that effort to appear cool in somebody else’s clothes, he finally looks delighted in his own skin. He might carry on indefinitely if Banks and Rutherford did not come back to haul him away.

Odd Steps

The walk had a history of its own. Collins recalled seeing children at stage school try to tap-dance by moving the arm and leg on the same side together. Try it for a few paces and you can feel why he remembered it. An ordinary stride depends on a little counterbalance that most of us never notice. Take it away and walking down a corridor suddenly requires your full intellectual resources. Collins’s contribution was to recognise how funny the movement would look if three adults rehearsed it until they could all get it wrong at precisely the same time.

Record buyers could also find an extended version bearing the wonderfully optimistic name “Sex Mix.” The single was paired with “On the Shoreline,” while a concert performance subsequently appeared on The Way We Walk, Volume One: The Shorts. Read those titles together and you can trace the gradual promotion of the narrator’s one marketable ability. Walking begins as the modest consolation he offers himself in the chorus. A year later, it has made its way onto the cover of a Genesis live album.

First Reviews

In 1991, much depended on how a listener felt about hearing Genesis exercise this degree of restraint. Ted Shaw of The Windsor Star singled out the bluesy tune and the metallic sounds around it, praising the result as “a wonderful pop creation.” David Browne, reviewing the album for Entertainment Weekly, heard a “very polite primal stomp.” For Browne, the track was one of the occasions when a sluggish record briefly stirred. There is a whole argument about Genesis tucked into his choice of adjective. How primal can a stomp be when three experienced musicians have taken such care over exactly where each foot comes down?

Both descriptions are easy to hear in the same four minutes. Turn up the guitar and it has a satisfying, dirty bite. Follow the percussion and the whole affair has the neatness of a well-rehearsed sketch. Its placement on the album makes that second quality especially conspicuous. Immediately beforehand comes “Driving the Last Spike,” an extended account of nineteenth-century railway labourers. A listener who has settled into that world might reasonably need a minute to adjust to Phil Collins having trouble with a dog. As a single, the song could make its own introduction, and it reached number seven in both Britain and the United States.

Walking On

One measure of the song’s cultural reach is how little equipment it takes to bring it back. Three friends, a few feet of floor and the first crooked swing of an arm will do it. On the 1992 tour, the routine gave spectators far from the stage a piece of business they could recognise in silhouette. It also gave Genesis a way of taking the video on the road without bringing the Porsche, the pool table or an obliging reptile. A gesture developed for a succession of quick camera cuts had turned out to be unusually well suited to the back row of an arena.

There is another reason to revisit the clip now. Levi’s once trusted viewers to recognise a certain kind of man from the way he entered a room. Genesis trusted those same viewers to recognise the work that went into his entrance. Today, anyone who has watched a friend cross the same patch of pavement several times to get one casual-looking phone video understands the business with the dust. The original commercials give the parody its period detail. The awkward experience of trying to look natural while somebody points a camera at you gives it a much longer life.

Last Laugh

Play “I Can’t Dance” once more with the screen turned off. There is a moment, after the opening guitar figure has gone round a few times, when you can almost see a shoulder beginning to move. That is a lovely piece of musicianship. Rutherford gives the imaginary body its gait, Banks supplies the little jolts that travel through it, and Collins lets us hear what the poor fellow is thinking. Long before the Porsche appears, the three of them have put a man on that road.

What makes him worth coming back to is his persistence. The afternoon has cost him a ride, a little dignity and a perfectly good pair of jeans. Even so, when the riff comes round again, you know he will straighten his back and give the walk another go. By then you may have tried it yourself. There is probably a perfectly ordinary stretch of floor somewhere in your house where, for four minutes, getting from one end to the other can be a surprisingly good time.