Classic Rock has today launched The 20 Minute Club, a companion "minipod" to The 20 Million Club podcast, dedicated to classic singles.
The 20 Million Club, presented by Nicky Horne and featuring Editor Sian Llewellyn and members of the Classic Rock team, is a podcast about the biggest-selling albums of all time – the ones that have sold 20 million or more.
The 20 Minute Club is a new series of bonus episodes covering classic singles that were in the charts (either the UK Top 40 or the US Billboard Hot 100) at the same time as our featured album.
The newest episode of The 20 Million Club sees the team take a deep dive into Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction, released on July 21, 1987, so in the first episode of The 20 Minute Club, we'll take a shorter look at hit singles that were in the charts the same week that Appetite was released.
We kick off with Genesis' single In Too Deep, from the album Invisible Touch. A no.3 single in the US in July 1987, it had fallen to 43 the week that Appetite For Destruction came out. The team discuss American Psycho, Mona Lisa and the how "the music of Phil Collins and Genesis just became one big homogenous blob of yuppie sex music".
Episodes of The 20 Minute Club will automatically appear in The 20 Million Club feed and can be listened to right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or anywhere you get podcasts. Subscribe to never miss an episode.
Written for the 1986 Bob Hoskins crime drama Mona Lisa, where its romantic sentiment seems at odds in a scene where Hoskins' character trails around Soho peep shows, In Too Deep also featured prominently in a key scene in the movie of Brett Easton Ellis's book American Psycho, where the protagonist Patrick Bateman comments: “In Too Deep is the most moving pop song of the 80s”.
Ellis later jokingly claimed that listening to Genesis was one of the most traumatic parts of writing the book: "There were moments in the book that were harrowing to write about and I’m thinking of Genesis… and the mutilation of women, but I found listening to Genesis more harrowing. I was not a big Genesis fan but I was figuring out who Patrick would like and felt he’d be part of the Genesis audience. Do you know how many times I listened to Tonight, Tonight, Tonight?"
In 2016, Ellis claimed that he was snubbed by Collins at an event (“Phil Collins didn't want to meet me … because he had gotten upset about the Genesis stuff in the book") but in a web chat on The Guardian that same year, Collins said he was "flattered" that his music was referenced heavily in American Psycho.
"If my music is being held as representative of an era, then that's more than I thought would happen to me when I was 13 or 14," he said. "I thought the movie of American Psycho was quite funny - I don't know if it was meant to be. I don't think him being a psychopath and liking my music is linked - my music was just omnipresent in that era."
Genesis’ upcoming The Last Domino? tour begins in Birmingham at the Utilita Arena (NIA) on September 20.
Episodes of The 20 Minute Club will automatically appear in The 20 Million Club feed and can be listened to right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or anywhere you get podcasts. Subscribe to never miss an episode and please leave a review.
