Once Upon a Time at the Top of the Charts: Phil Collins’ ...BUT SERIOUSLY

30 years ago this week, Phil Collins landed atop the Billboard 200 with his first new solo album since the multi-platinum success of NO JACKET REQUIRED half a decade earlier.

Although he’d continued to secure high-placing chart hits with his singles from the Buster soundtrack (“A Groovy Kind of Love” and “Two Hearts”), Collins’ fans were primed and ready to hear a new full-length LP from their hero, and they proved it by making …BUT SERIOUSLY the best-selling album of 1990 in the UK, hitting #1 and remaining there for a staggering 15 nonconsecutive weeks. It didn’t do too shabby in the States, either, where – as you already know – it topped the Billboard 200, shifting double-platinum units.

Recorded partly at The Farm in England and partly at Los Angeles’s A&M Studios, …BUT SERIOUSLY also spawned a remarkable five top-40 hits in the UK: “Another Day in Paradise,” “I Wish It Would Rain Down,” “Something Happened on the Way to Heaven,” “That’s Just the Way It Is,” and “Hang in Long Enough.” Four of those five tracks also found the same fate in the States, with the lone exception, “That’s Just the Way It Is,” having the very good excuse of not being released as a single in America.

Alas, it would be another four years before Collins returned with his next studio album, 1993’s BOTH SIDES, but when you’ve sold that many copies of your last album, you’ve earned a bit of a grace period, wouldn’t you say?