Jesus He knows me

And He knows I was always going to write about Phil Collins

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This week I watched Oscar hopeful The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by comedy veteran Michael Showalter, and starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as real-life televangelist couple Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker. I didn’t know much about the pair going into the film, and was most intrigued by the moving scene, set in 1985, in which Tammy Faye—much to the chagrin of her conservative activist backers—sat down for a live TV interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor living with AIDS. (You can watch the real interview here.) It turns out that Bakker became something of an unlikely gay icon, and this in turn made me think of a terrific recent short film by Matt Wolf, one of my favorite working documentary filmmakers. Here’s the synopsis for Another Hayride (2021, 18mins):

As the AIDS epidemic took hold in the early 1980s, self-help guru Louise Hay created a space for healing called the Hayride. Drawing hundreds of gay men confronting a deadly and stigmatized disease, Louise promised that they could overcome AIDS through self-love. Some said this early new age wellness movement was unscientific and harmful. Others who were suffering said that Louise healed them. In the face of a deadly pandemic and government neglect, resilience takes unusual forms, and for Louise Hay’s circle, intimate forms of reckoning were transformative.

I always like to kick off each newsletter with a recommendation, and here it is: watch Another Hayride for free on Matt Wolf’s Vimeo channel.

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While The Eyes of Tammy Faye casts a somewhat ambivalent eye over the ethics of televangelism, Genesis’s 1992 single “Jesus He Knows Me” pulls no such punches. In the song, singer Phil Collins embodies a ruthless, self-serving, Jim Bakker-inflected TV preacher who gleefully plucks from the pockets of his flock, and betrays his family with a series of extramarital dalliances.

As satire, “Jesus He Knows Me” is about as subtle as a cricket bat to the back of the head (“God will take good care of you / But just-a do as I say don’t do as I do,” chuckles Phil)—not that satire needs to be subtle to be effective: after all, megachurch chancers like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland are still lining their pockets today, and make themselves broad, outsize targets for ribbing. (See also: current HBO comedy series The Righteous Gemstones.)

As music, it’s elite-level drivetime pop, chugging along on a bed of crisp drums, insistent bass, lightly ominous keyboard washes, and itchy rhythm guitar, before cresting with a massive, power-chord chorus (“Jesus He knows me / And He knows I’m right! / I been talking to Jesus / All my life!”) As a seven-year-old, I was in love with this song, which I heard for the first time on Now That’s What I Call Music 23 (1992), a particularly strong edition of the grab-bag pop compilation series. (Other certified bangers on Now 23: “Sleeping Satellite” by Tasmin Archer, “Would I Lie To You?” by Charles and Eddie, “Too Funky” by George Michael, and “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” by Sophie B. Hawkins.)

That said, it doesn’t matter how many times I listen to “Jesus He Knows Me”, I’m always shocked by its sudden devolution into a cod-reggae breakdown that’s somehow simultaneously limp and stiff—listen closely and you can hear the ghost of Bob Marley wailing in pain. It’s up there with other famous did-I-imagine-this? pop hairpin turns like the insane (but kind of great) industrial drum break in Sting’s otherwise dainty “An Englishman in New York”, or, most alarmingly of all, the moment when, after three sleepy minutes, Lionel Richie’s syrupy ballad “Say You, Say Me” inexplicably erupts into “Ghostbusters” for twenty seconds, and then calmly returns to its regular business as if nothing weird has happened. One dreads to think of how many drivers veered clean off the highway the first time they heard this.

I can’t talk about “Jesus He Knows Me” without mentioning its gaudy, memorable video, directed by Double Dragon [!] helmer James Yukich, in which Collins and fellow band members Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks play dodgy preachers (Banks is especially good at playing dead-eyed sleaze here), as well as doubling up as members of their gullible, happy clappy flock. Curiously, the version on Genesis’s official YouTube channel omits the video’s opening sequence, in which a yellow-jacketed, Lego-haired Collins, in preacher mode, delivers a sermon straight down the camera in a truly rotten American accent.

You might think Collins is overdoing it, but his performance—and the sermon he delivers—was inspired by the real-life evangelical preacher Ernest Angley, who died last year. In 2008, Collins appeared on the BBC comedy show Room 101 to discuss his repulsion/fascination relationship with American TV preachers, and the segment features a clip of Angley in action; the similarities are striking. (In the same segment, host Paul Merton makes a particularly nasty joke at the expense of Tammy Faye Bakker’s looks. Growing up in the UK, I was used to— and unquestioningly enjoyed—such mean-spirited comedy, and it’s taken me years to develop a more critical viewpoint on this stuff. But it struck an especially sour note for me after watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye which, while far from perfect, makes a complex and tragic character out of a person all too easily viewed as a 2D cartoon.)

Collins is playing to the gallery in the “Jesus He Knows Me” video, but as a former child actor (whose first credit was as a screaming extra in The Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night), he knows what he’s doing. I’ve always had a soft spot for Collins’ onscreen appearances, whether as the lead in David Green’s heist comedy Buster (1988), as Phil “The Shill” in a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, or as himself in Brass Eye’s legendary “Paedogeddon” episode. Well, perhaps he didn’t quite know what he was doing on this particular occasion, and maybe I'm not over my fondness for mean-spirited British comedy just yet…

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