This Phil Collins Hit Resembles a Prince Classic From 1982

Two artists helped define the sound of pop music in the 1980s with colossal hits: Phil Collins and Prince. For his part, Collins, who will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year as a solo artist, has sold 100 million albums on his own (and 100 million more with Genesis).

But there’s one song that ties the two together, proving how even one of the world’s biggest-selling pop stars was finding influence in another.

“Sussudio”

Collins is smitten here with a girl. And she’s got him so dizzy with want that he shouts gibberish instead of her name. “Sussudio” features a nonsense word Collins uttered while programming the song’s groove on a drum machine. Remember this drum machine; it’ll be important soon.

There’s a girl that’s been on my mind,
All the time, Su-ssusudio.
Now she don’t even know my name,
But I think she likes me just the same.
Su-ssusudio.

It was a smash hit in 1985, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. But Collins’s funky track resembles another popular tune from three years earlier.

“1999”

According to Collins, the similarities between “Sussudio” and Prince’s “1999” were no accident. “I loved that song. I bought it when it first came out, and I used to listen to it on the road. I just took the tempo … I locked it into the drum machine. That was the end of it,” he said.

The sky was all purple,
There were people running everywhere.
Trying to run from the destruction,
You know I didn’t even care.

The title track of Prince’s fifth studio album describes the anxiety many felt about the end of the 20^th century. But instead of giving in to despair, Prince’s hit offers optimism.

Say, say two thousand, zero, zero,
Party over, oops, out of time.
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.

A Prince survival guide to a gloomy future: If we are facing the apocalypse, then let’s go crazy. Collins felt it.

Still, both tracks share synthesizers and drum machines that were ubiquitous in the 1980s. And Collins is certainly no stranger to pioneering drum sounds that inspired others too.

Photo by Ross Marino/Getty Images