Phil Collins has rounded up his best-known ballads for "Love Songs: A Compilation ... Old and New,".. The double-disc, 25-song set also features a handful of live recordings and previously unreleased cuts.

Following the phenomenal success of THE PLATINUM COLLECTION (over 200k sales to date), Virgin Catalogue announces the forthcoming release of a special double-disc collection from Phil Collins, entitled LOVE SONGS: A COMPILATION… OLD AND NEW. Spanning more than two decades, the set gathers Collins’s signature ballads together with personal favourites, rarities, and previously unreleased live performances.

“This is a collection of love songs that I’ve either written or co-written and that I consider to be amongst my best work,” says Collins, “in addition to songs that have been written and admired by me from a distance, whilst secretly wishing that I had written them! There are also some songs here that I feel extremely close to, but were missed the first time around because of circumstances beyond their control.”

LOVE SONGS is highlighted by such top-charting hits as One More Night, Against All Odds, A Groovy Kind Of Love, Two Hearts, Do You Remember?, Can’t Stop Loving You and a live version of Separate Lives. The set also includes You’ll Be In My Heart (from the Walt Disney film, Tarzan), which earned Collins the triple crown of an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy.

This 25-song collection features Collins’s moving renditions of standards by other composers, including his version of Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim’s Somewhere from West Side Story, a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s I’ve Been Trying, live performances of the Temptations’ My Girl, Irving Berlin’s Always, the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields classic, The Way You Look Tonight and a sound check recording of True Colours.

Among the other highlights is the previously unreleased Tearing And Breaking, co-written by Scottish singer/songwriter John Martyn and Collins and originally recorded in 2001 during the sessions for the TESTIFY album. LOVE SONGS also gives fans the opportunity to revisit some perhaps less famous but certainly no less favored moments – among them such gems as This Must Be Love, If Leaving Me Is Easy (both from Collins’s first solo album, 1981’s FACE VALUE), Don’t Let Him Steal Your Heart Away, Can’t Turn Back The Years, I’ve Forgotten Everything, and Testify.

The career of Phil Collins is one that, by any measure, stands among some of the most prolific in modern music history due to his talents as drummer, singer, composer and producer. From art rock beginnings to huge pop stardom and from big band leader to soundtrack master it has been an exceptional musical life spanning over three decades, some 100 million solo albums, (250 million if you count his work with Genesis), seven Grammy Awards and an enviable string of hits.