We continue the discussion of 80s music videos about making music videos with Phil Collins’ Don’t Lose My Number. The song peaked at #4 in September 1985, but was never released as a single in the UK.

If the song’s Wikipedia entry is to believed, this is truly a meta video. Supposedly, “Collins did not know what he would use as a video theme for ‘Don’t Lose My Number’, so he decided to create a video showing his decision process in selecting a theme for it.” In the video, Collins interviews several “directors” who offer parodies of other music videos, including You Might Think, which I covered last month. In lieu of a tidy ending, the video ends with the spoken line, “So how does it end?” So very, very meta!

Earlier, in Easy Lover, Collins shared MTV’s award for Best Overall Performance in a Video with Philip Bailey. That beat out another video about making videos, and that’s the one I’ll use to wrap up this theme next week.