Phil Collins - You Can't Hurry Love (1982)

"You Can't Hurry Love" is a 1966 song originally recorded by The Supremes on the Motown label. The most notable cover of the ...

"You Can't Hurry Love" is a 1966 song originally recorded by The Supremes on the Motown label.

The most notable cover of the song was released in November 1982 as a single by Phil Collins from his second solo album, Hello, I Must Be Going! Collins's version reached number-one on the UK Singles Chart (becoming his first number-one solo hit in the UK Singles Chart, and peaking two positions higher than the original song did in that country), and reached number 10 in the United States. The single was certified gold in the UK. The orchestral strings on this track were recorded in Studio 1 at CBS Recording Studios, London W1 by Recording Engineer Mike Ross-Trevor (assisted by Richard Hollywood) on the evening of Thursday 24 June 1982.

Although Collins had previously done covers as album tracks (of Genesis's "Behind the Lines" and The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" on Face Value), "You Can't Hurry Love" was the first cover he released as a single. Collins explained:

"The idea of doing 'Can't Hurry Love' was to see if Hugh Padgham and I could duplicate that Sixties sound. It's very difficult today because most recording facilities are so much more sophisticated than they were back then. It's therefore hard to make the drums sound as rough as they did on the original. That's what we were going after, a remake, not an interpretation, but a remake."

Collins's version was the first track on the very first Now That's What I Call Music compilation CD. In the first verse, he changes "And I need to find, find / Someone to call mine" to "And I need to find time / Someone to call mine." On the second repeat of the chorus, he replaces the line "How much more can I take?" with "How much more must I take?", and likewise exchanges the words, "you gotta just give it time..." to "just trust in a good time...".

In 1983, the music video was released on the home video Phil Collins available on Video Home System (VHS) and LaserDisc (LD) which received a Grammy nomination for Best Video, Short Form. The video itself was also the first track featured on the first VHS compilation of Now: That's What I Call Music.