How Phil Collins created his two favourite drum fills
The multi-talented performer Phil Collins was destined for excellence from a young age. Before his segue into music, the young creative took the stage as a West End actor, most prominently portraying the Artful Dodger in the Charles Dickens adaptation, Oliver. However, he realised his true calling in 1970 when he joined Genesis as the prog rock group’s drummer.
Throughout the 1970s, Genesis refined their quintessential prog-rock sound. With Gabriel’s 1975 exit, Collins took the helm as the band gradually traversed towards the pop-tinged work of the late 1970s and early ’80s.
In 1980, Collins began his popular solo catalogue with Face Value, which topped the UK Albums Chart for three weeks and reached number seven on the US Billboard 200. The LP was famed most for its lead single, ‘In The Air Tonight’, a song of deep anxiety and pent-up rage. “I wrote the lyrics spontaneously,” Collins said of the song in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone. “I’m not quite sure what the song is about, but there’s a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration.”
While the progression and eerie lyrics were essential to the song’s success, it will be remembered for decades to come for its influential drum fill. It has since become one of the most iconic solos of all time, its legacy sealed by a skilful gorilla in 2007.
Understandably, Collins is immensely proud of the song and his innovative fill. “Well, I gotta put ‘In the Air Tonight’ somewhere in there, I guess,” the drummer told John Edginton in a 2014 interview while picking his favourite fills. “You know, the ‘badam, badam, badam, bup bup, bup. […] You know, some songs don’t need that stuff – a lot of songs don’t need that stuff. I think it’s down to taste. When you feel you have to do something and resist.”
“The whole sound really was discovered when Phil was in playing drums on a song called ‘Intruder’,” producer Hugh Padgham once told Music Radar. “Phil was a guest player on [Peter Gabriel’s Melt], and he was mucking around with a drum sound. The Solid State Logic console was quite new then, and it had a compressor/noise gate on every single channel, which, before that, had never happened. [Before] you had external compressors or external noise gates, but you had to patch them in, whereas, with the SSL, it was in every single channel. All you had to do was press a button, and it was on.”
Continuing his conversation with Edgington, Collins explained how, once he had come up with such an iconic fill, it was important not to repeat himself. Discussing another personal favourite, Collins picked out ‘Easy Lover’, his 1984 collaboration with Philip Bailey from Earth, Wind & Fire. Instead of housing one climactic fill, this jaunty pop track was adorned with a series of improvised flourishes.
“‘Easy Lover’ was littered with lots of good drum fills on that,” Collins said. “That was just because we didn’t think about the tape rolling, we were just recording it. We were just about to finish, but we have been writing this song, and we just put a rough version down. So you don’t really care because you think you will do another version anyway. The next day, we came in, listened to it and liked it. So we kept it, but that’s the way to do it. You don’t tell a drummer you’re going for a take. Otherwise, you gonna get all this stuff thrown in. The best way to catch people is when they’re not expecting you.”
Listen to Phil Collins’ favourite isolated drum fills below.
