A chorus of disapproval profile Phil Collins

A month previously, Phil had learned that his five songs on the complete Tarzan soundtrack had notched him Grammy Award No 8. Moreover, the Grammy and the Oscar will find themselves jostling for elbow-room on the mantlepiece of Phil's Swiss mansion, rented from Jackie Stewart, on the shores of Lake Geneva: in January, Hollywood's Foreign Press Association gave You'll Be In My Heart a Golden Globe.

Phil picked it up en route to his next Stateside gig. It was no ordinary gig, either. Phil was performing before a multi-million-strong live

TV audience at the most overblown annual sporting event on American sport's roster of annual overblown events, the Superbowl.

Not unnaturally, a grateful Phil took the opportunity at the Golden Globe ceremony to deliver a humble little homily. ''All of us know in this room the flows and the ebbs of careers,'' he said in his speech of acceptance.

''Actors know this, musicians know this - and my career is no different from that, and I would like to thank the foreign press for making me feel like my career is in a flow.''

Phil's never delivered any such flowing speech of thanks to the British press, of course. No need. Because for the overwhelming length of Phil Collins's 19-year-long solo career, most of the British press haven't had a good word for him. Or to be more exact, the one good word most British journos have enjoyed having for Phil Collins is ''git''.

Furthermore, having long insisted that Phil Collins and his hits represent the worst excesses of the decade which epitomised naked ambition and self-centredness, the eighties, his legions of detractors were delighted on Wednesday when reports of a London courtroom action - Philip Collins Limited versus Louis Satterfield and Rahmlee Davis for the sum of #13,000 - added further fuel to their fire.

For Phil Collins is a man whose personal wealth has been conservatively estimated at a staggering #100m,

making him the world's ninth-richest British musicbiz figure, #450m behind Sir Paul McCartney, but a full #70m ahead of his erstwhile partner in Genesis, Mike Rutherford. So why should he be suing two little-known former members of his backing band for the trifling sum of #13,000?

Collins's legal claim states that, for a six-year period after an agreement signed prior to his mammoth 1990 world tour, he accidentally overpaid royalties to trombonist Satterfield

and trumpeter Davis amounting to #500,000. The duo were contracted to receive payment for having played on five tracks of a live album documenting Phil's last major nine-month-long

global excursion: 127 shows in 16 different countries and 56 cities. In error, however, the pair received monies for all 15 songs on the LP.

Bafflingly, Collins has said he's not seeking to recover the full amount from the two former horn-playing members of Earth Wind And Fire, merely a remaining sum that Phil Collins Lim-ited reckons its MD and chief share-holder is owed. Satterfield, aged 62, and Davis, 51, claim that withdrawal of the royalties will leave them destitute, unlike Collins, 49.

Presiding legal eagle Justice Parker has seemed a little baffled, too. ''It is not much, is it?'' he remarked at the start of the High Court hearing. ''For more than six years, these royalties were paid, and after six years a letter arrives to say in effect: 'Oh, it's a mistake!' It's not a very attractive position, is it?''

It's not a very attractive PR position for Phil Collins to be in at all, having directly inspired a gleeful hatchet job in Thursday's Guardian. Phil ain't gonna like it when he reads it, although evidently he didn't have much of an opinion of British press-wallahs to begin with.

Indeed, there's a tale of Phil once taking such umbrage at a bad review in a tiny local English weekly newspaper that he rang up the organ's pop critic

to complain in person. Poor shell-shocked chap wasn't able to concentrate on his regular duties covering that week's jam-making contest at the Women's Institute.

This is in marked contrast to the man from the Guardian, Tom Cox, whose zestful vitriol this week

knew no bounds. Cox revelled in the apparent fact that second-hand record shops are waist-deep in old Phil Collins albums, discarded by his

waning fan-base, that can't even be shifted at three for a pound!

He joyfully seized upon Collins-era Genesis as being the favourite band of the serial killer hero of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho! He was overjoyed with his perception of Phil Collins as a pop icon so uncool that he's an Arctic tundra which even the white-hot vagaries of public taste will never thaw back into fashion!

One thing that's indisputable is that Phil Collins has fallen from favour with his estwhile hardcore British

fans over the past few years, with desultory sales figures resulting for his most recent album.

In part, this is surely due to a couple of ill-considered Phil Collins official pronouncements on social affairs. First, he encouraged the homeless with the traditional cry of the uncomprehending multi-millionaire: jolly well pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and get a job, you layabouts!

Then, in the run-up to the 1997 General Election, Phil cast his vote for a much-reviled breakaway political party, the Magical Paul Daniels Disappearing Militant Tory Tendency. If New Labour gained power, Phil growled, he was joining the pesky prestidigitator in abandoning Blighty.

As we know, Phil does live outwith the UK these days, although in the wake of his wedding last summer to his 28-year-old Swiss former interpreter, Orianne, he has claimed that he resides abroad not for base and ignoble tax-avoidance reasons, but purely for the sake of his wife's marketing consultancy business. ''If she came from Hull, I'd be in Hull,'' he said in a

wantonly Humberside-ist slur.

Let's hope that his current marriage has a happer duration than his previous two. Marital break-up No 1 at least served to invest an air of pain to Phil's breakthrough first solo album, Face Values. Marital break-up No 2, in 1994, underpinned the bleak tone of another album, Both Sides, and was undertaken with brutal intemperance by fax. This led to Phil being denounced by his

former champions, the tabloids.

They were equally unimpressed when he fell for a woman ages with his eldest daughter, Joely, a TV soap star in her Canadian domicile. Malicious tabloid joy was likewise unconfined when Joely later bitterly cautioned her dad against having further children with Orianne on account of his patent and long-standing inability to cope with the three he'd already got (Joely, plus putative pop star Simon, 22, and 10-year-old Lily).

Happily, while peace has still to break out between Phil and the British press, everything subsequently became sweetness and light within the extended transcontinental Collins family. Joely and Lily both attended dad's wedding, and Phil has assisted Simon's music career in a suitably non-proprietorial way.

But why do journos fail to respond to Phil Collins? Some seem suspicious of his thespian childhood background as a professional chirpy Cockney geezer, although he was born some way outside the sound of Bow Bells in Chiswick. In his youth, you see, Phil acted upon the London West End stage as the Artful Dodger in Oliver, and was an extra in The Beatles' Hard Day's Night.

Why else has he been so disliked by music writers? Well, in gradually having emerged from behind his drumkit to replace the genuinely charismatic Peter Gabriel in quirkily original art-rockers Genesis, Phil Collins has been repeatedly accused of miring the band in mainstream blandness. At the same time, Phil Collins was committing a further crime against the critical consensus - he was piloting Brand X, purveyors of the most hellish hybrid known to purblind music scribes: jazz-rock!

In addition, some critics have been irked by his ubiquity and capacity for work. Quantity is incompatible with quality, some feel. Nor is anyone's outlaw rock'n'roll credibility enhanced by a crest which says ''By Royal Appointment''.

During the justly-maligned eighties, for instance, nary a week seemed to go by without Phil Collins performing a regally-sanctioned charity gig for the Prince Of Wales Rock Trust. Assisted by Concorde on July 13, 1985, he also managed to play in both the London and Philadelphia legs of Live Aid. Since then, the all-star charidee bash has become seen as a self-congratulatory indulgence.

Principally, media antipathy to Phil Collins is down to his music, though. His mid-career trilogy of jocularly-monickered albums - Hello, I Must Be Going; No Jacket Required; But Seriously . . . - are no laughing matter. They sound watery and weedy, offering blurred photo-copies of more groundbreaking songs by more fearless artists. It's pastiche that's on offer, not raw invention.

Does no critic have a favourable

verdict on Phil Collins?

The compilers of Rolling Stone magazine's Album Guide do. They reckon that Phil's light yet soulful voice and pleasant tunes make him the perfect mainstream rock star. They also think he's far more subtle than the accessib-ility of his songs would suggest, and that it's the inescapability of his songs on mass-market radio that has him an obvious target for elitist critics.

Then again, speaking as an elitist critic myself, I'd opine that he who deals in facile mince should be buried in it.

David Belcher