When David Frank got the call to fly over to the U.K. in 1984 and contribute to the new Phil Collins album, the post-Prog version of Genesis were making gold records and filling stadiums, while Collins was having hits of his own. Frank’s keyboard chops were getting a fair amount of attention at the time - both inside and outside of his electro soul outfit The System. So Frank found himself walking into West London’s Townhouse Studios where producer Hugh Padgham was shepherding what would be Collins third solo record.

“I walked in and they said ‘Can I help you?’ And I said ‘I’m David Frank.’ and they looked at me and said ‘We thought you were black!’”

Despite that initial speed bump, what no one who’d been assembled for the project knew at the time, was that they were about to help Collins career go supernova.

“They installed me in a programming room, while they were working in another studio. He had sent me the song and it had a Fender bass just going ‘dum dum dum dum dum…Su-ssudio…dum dum dum.’ Just kind of an eighth note thing. So I worked on a bunch of other songs, and then the last day I was there he said to me ‘We didn’t do anything with that song Sussudio, and I don’t really know if I want to do anything with it, but what the heck…let’s just do it.’”

Using a Minimoog that had been rented for the sessions, the part that Frank worked out for the bass line wound up getting beefed up at the last minute by the Model D.

“Hugh said to me ‘It doesn’t have enough bottom’, because I used a lot of resonance on the filter. So he said ‘Why don’t we just overdub the Minimoog and use a different sound.’ And I had never done that. So we just used a very bottom-y sound on another track and combined it with the other.”