TAKE TWO: PHIL COLLINS, CROOKED SMILES & THE LONG WAY OUT

Buzz Drainpipe, on Buster (1988) and Frauds (1993)

I. BUSTER (1988): THE POP STAR WHO WALKED INTO A PERIOD FILM AND DIDN’T APOLOGIZE

In Buster, Phil Collins doesn’t try to disappear. He doesn’t sand down the voice, the face, the weight of fame. He brings it with him like a suitcase he refuses to check. That’s the trick.

This is a crime picture with a conscience—pastel grit, British kitchens, men who think they’re bigger than the rooms they’re standing in. Collins plays Buster Edwards not as a mythic outlaw, but as a man who keeps mistaking motion for escape. The performance is all earnest gravity: he believes, and because he believes, you’re forced to watch the belief curdle.

And then there’s the music. Not background—architecture. The soundtrack isn’t commentary; it’s a parallel confession. “Two Hearts” smiles while the film frowns. “A Groovy Kind of Love” floats like a half-remembered promise. Pop as denial mechanism. Melody as plausible alibi.

What makes Buster linger is that it doesn’t flatter the outlaw fantasy. It shows the long, fluorescent-lit hangover of having gotten away with something you can’t keep. Collins understands this instinctively. He plays regret as a muscle that tightens slowly, years after the crime.

This isn’t a rock star acting.
It’s a man realizing that charm doesn’t launder consequences.

II. FRAUDS (1993): THE AFTER-PARTY WHERE EVERYONE KNOWS THE TRICK

By Frauds, the mask is off—and that’s the joke.

Frauds is small, cheap, and knowingly artificial. It’s a movie about cons that never pretends to be anything but a con itself. Collins plays a confidence man who’s tired of the effort it takes to be convincing. The film’s great quiet insight: the hustle doesn’t fail because it’s immoral—it fails because it’s exhausting.

Here, Collins leans into something darker and funnier. The grin curdles into a wince. Timing replaces sincerity. He’s not trying to be loved; he’s trying to get through the scene. That shift matters. This is post-’80s pop culture, post-myth, post-center. Everyone knows the moves. The audience is in on the gag. The movie shrugs and keeps going.

If Buster is about running from the past, Frauds is about being trapped inside technique. The patter won’t save you. The reveal doesn’t land. The room is too quiet. And Collins—precisely because he was sincerity incarnate—makes that emptiness register.

This is not redemption.
It’s acceptance with a cigarette burn in the margin.

CODA: TWO FILMS, ONE ARC

Put together, Buster and Frauds read like a diptych about fame aging into self-knowledge.

Buster: belief → motion → consequence

Frauds: awareness → performance → fatigue

Collins didn’t fail at acting. He did something rarer: he let the era show on his face. He allowed pop’s confidence to turn into something provisional, even slightly embarrassing. That’s honest work.

These aren’t cult classics because they don’t flatter the viewer. They don’t promise cool. They promise process. And process, as any maintenance worker of culture knows, is where the truth leaks out.

Verdict:
Phil Collins didn’t cross over.
He stayed put and let the world change around him—and somehow that’s the braver move.

BONUS PAIRING: BRAND X — UNORTHODOX BEHAVIOUR (1976)

Buzz Drainpipe footnote, left in the margins with a pencil stub

If Buster is Phil Collins learning that sincerity has consequences, and Frauds is him discovering that technique can rot from the inside, then Unorthodox Behaviour is the missing prequel—the version of Collins before charm was even on the table.

This is not pop Phil.
This is system Phil.

Brand X’s first album sounds like a rehearsal room where the walls have been removed and the math is allowed to run free. Jazz-fusion, yes—but not the polite, champagne-bar version. This is anxious fusion, played by musicians who don’t trust genre boundaries and don’t particularly care if you follow along.

Collins’ drumming here is crucial to understanding the later arc. It’s restless, architectural, almost suspicious of groove. Time signatures buckle. Fills aren’t decorative—they’re interrogative. He’s not asking “does this feel good?” He’s asking “does this hold?”

That instinct carries forward.

In Brand X, rhythm is a problem to be solved.

In Buster, morality is a problem postponed.

In Frauds, identity itself becomes a problem with no elegant solution.

What Unorthodox Behaviour reveals is that Collins was never just a hitmaker who wandered into acting. He started as a structural thinker—someone interested in tension, release, and the labor required to keep complex systems moving without collapse.

Listen closely and you can hear it:
the same man who would later write songs that sound like emotional inevitabilities was once obsessed with how long instability could be sustained.

That’s why this album belongs with those films.

Not because it “rocks.”
Not because it’s obscure.
But because it documents the moment before performance, when the work was still nakedly about process.

Final alignment:

Unorthodox Behaviour — learning how systems bend

Buster — learning what breaks when they do

Frauds — learning how people fake stability after the fact

Three artifacts.
One long education.

Buzz Drainpipe approved.
Dream in terminal green.