"Who Said I Would" by Phil Collins

1991 / #73

Rate Your Music score: 2.7 out of 5!

We could discuss how weird it is that Phil Collins - possibly the most played act on pop radio in the late 1980s and early 1990s - would have a lost hit.

What we really want to talk about though is the late Joel Whitburn, the legendary record collector known for his Record Research books that catalogued data from the Billboard charts. Joel collected every single to make the Hot 100 as well as many other records that made Billboard's other charts. He once told Billboard that his collection included over 200,000 singles. By the time of his death, his collection had become so big that he was building a second vault to protect it.

Among his books was one that listed every record that reached the Hot 100, along with their peak position and number of weeks on the chart. I remember seeing an edition of this book printed in the 1990s that listed the collector value of each record. One section of the book ranked the most valuable records. If I remember correctly, one of the most valuable - maybe the most valuable - was, of all things, "Who Said I Would" by Phil Collins.

It does indeed appear to be a very rare record. The single was only a few years old when that book was published, so there must have been very few copies in circulation to begin with - especially for a record that got gobs of airplay and made the Hot 100. The only American release of the single that appears on record kablammoin' website Discogs is a promo CD. But if there was no commercial single, how was it eligible for the Hot 100 back then? A few years later, "When I Come Around" by Green Day did not appear on the Hot 100, supposedly because it was ineligible. Yet it clearly had a commercial single, as someone once posted a video on YouTube of the 45 being played, and Discogs shows what appears to be an American commercial 45 release. How was Phil eligible for the chart but Green Day wasn't?

"Who Said I Would" was originally a track from Phil's 1985 LP No Jacket Required. The single version was from his live 1990 album Serious Hits...Live! The first time I ever heard of that album was when I was a junior in high school. It was on the same day someone shit on the floor of the school bus, and I was up at Kmart. I saw a whole rack of Phil's new LP on cassette there. (Kmart wouldn't dare sell vinyl records anymore.)

Despite him earning an entry in our online museum of lost hits, one thing is for sure: Everyone in the early '90s had their fill of Phil.