10 September 1988
So I can delay having to waste valuable seconds of my life contemplating Phil Collins again, let’s consider the song. ‘A Groovy Kind Of Love’ was a mildly charming up-tempo ’60s guitar pop hit for The Mindbenders written by Carole Bayer Sager, who had huge AOR songwriting success in the ’70s and early ’80s, and Toni Wine, who alongside her own successful songwriting was the female voice on ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by fictional cartoon group The Archies. The up-and-down melody is pretty much a lift from the rondo of Clementi’s Sonatina Op. 36 no. 5, a favourite of piano teachers, but no harm in that.
Phil Collins’ version is from the soundtrack of the movie Buster, a vanity project about a real-life Great Train Robber where Collins played the sort of “lovable” East End rogue he had already made his public persona throughout the ’80s. Here, ‘A Groovy Kind Of Love’ is slowed down to an orchestral crawl. It’s certainly not groovy; in fact, it’s a dreadful dirge. Better this than one of his own typical sour, middle-aged, passive-aggressive, whiny compositions, but you have to say that Phil Collins was a blight on the 1980s pop charts.
