Not unlike the Right Said Fred hit "I'm Too Sexy," this song is a send-up of male models. "It's not about being unable to dance," Phil Collins told Rolling Stone. "It's about guys that look good but can't string a sentence together. Each verse is a piss-take at the scenario of a jeans commercial. It was good fun, but the audience thought, 'What does he mean that he can't dance?' They didn't see the humor, and it killed the fun."
Genesis wrote this song in the studio in one session. "Once we started we kept going 'til we finished it," Phil Collins said in the documentary Genesis: Sum of the Parts. "It didn't take a ridiculous time to write."
The lyrics are made up of bits that Phil Collins improvised in the studio. When they started working on it, they decided to just write spontaneously to keep from over-thinking it. This explains the rather disjointed story about a guy who can't dance and is "just standing here selling."
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