Sussudio

Sussudio: Phil Collins, the Irresistible Nonsense Word, and a Summer at Number One

The Strange Alchemy of a Made-Up Word

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Phil Collins was working through a beat at the piano — accounts suggest it derived from an early sketch during the No Jacket Required sessions — and found himself singing a nonsense syllable over the groove as a placeholder. The word was "sussudio." It meant nothing. It referred to nothing. It was pure sound, chosen because it fit the rhythm and the feeling of the thing. The plan was presumably to replace it with real words at some point. The plan was abandoned because the nonsense word was better. Collins kept it, built a song around it, and sent it to number one.

Phil Collins at the Peak of His Commercial Powers

By 1985, Phil Collins was operating at a scale that was genuinely unusual even by the standards of the decade's mega-sellers. He had completed the remarkable feat of performing at both the London and Philadelphia stages of Live Aid in the same day, flying the Concorde across the Atlantic between sets. His Genesis work and his solo career were both running simultaneously at the highest levels, and No Jacket Required would go on to become one of the best-selling albums of the year. Sussudio was the lead single and opener: four minutes of pure commercial pop that took everything Collins had absorbed from funk, soul, and the particular bright-plastic sonic palette of mid-80s production and compressed it into something irresistibly radio-ready.

Number One and Seventeen Weeks on the Chart

The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 on May 11, 1985, debuting at number 39. It climbed steadily through May and June, and reached number one on July 6, 1985. The seventeen-week chart run it ultimately accumulated, spending 17 weeks on the Hot 100, tells you how thoroughly it embedded itself in the summer's soundtrack. That peak came in a competitive year: Collins was sharing chart space with Madonna, Wham!, Bruce Springsteen, and a host of others operating at similar heights. To reach number one in that environment required a song with something genuinely compulsive about it.

The Aesthetic of 1985 Pop

If you want to understand what 1985 sounded like as a physical experience, queue up Sussudio and pay attention to the drums. Gated reverb was the signature of the era: drums that sound enormous, that pop and decay with an artificial cavernousness that no acoustic kit produces. Collins himself had been partly responsible for popularizing this sound on Peter Gabriel's Intruder in 1980, and by the mid-80s it was everywhere. The brass section that punctuates Sussudio, the synths that shimmer in the background, the bass that keeps everything grounded: all of it is period-specific in a way that makes the track immediately legible as a document of a very particular cultural moment, even forty years later.

The Afterlife of an Accidental Masterpiece

The song has never fully left the culture. It appears in film soundtracks, in commercials, in the kind of retrospective programming that revisits the decade. The 59 million YouTube views it has accumulated speak to the combination of nostalgia traffic and genuine discovery that keeps great pop from the past alive on streaming platforms. Generation-skipping happens: someone who was not born in 1985 hears it in a playlist or a movie and finds themselves wanting more. That is the reward for writing something so pure in its commercial ambition that it transcends the era that produced it. Press play. The nonsense word will be in your head by the second chorus.

“Sussudio” — Phil Collins' singular moment on the 1980s charts.