“I went over to the piano and started fooling around with the riff and in 20 minutes this song almost wrote itself. We were all dancing around the studio and loving what we were hearing”: The story of Phil Collins and Philip Bailey’s classic ’80s hit

Phil Collins and Philip Bailey.

The history of music is riddled with happy accidents, idle noodlings and sonic misadventures that have helped inspire massive hits.

One that springs to mind is the drum groove that Jeff Beck started playing when Stevie Wonder left the room for a few moments at Electric Lady Studios in 1972, a groove that immediately inspired the returning Wonder to write Superstition.