Listen to Phil Collins’ isolated drums on the 1980 hit ‘In The Air Tonight’
Phil Collins began his illustrious career in 1970 as he joined Genesis alongside guitarist Steve Hackett, who was brought in to replace founding member Anthony Philips. “Genesis seemed to be dying a death around our second album [Trespass],” co-founding member Peter Gabriel told Q Magazine in 2011. With the addition of Collins and Hackett, Genesis entered a commercial and critical upswing following the disappointment of Trespass.
“My only knowledge of Genesis was through seeing the ads for their gigs. It seemed like they were constantly working. I thought, ‘At least I’m going to be working if I get the gig’,” Collins reflected on his audition of August 1970 via Genesis: Chapter and Verse.
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 hit number seven on the US Billboard 200. The LP was buoyed most of all by 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.”
“I was just fooling around,” he told Dave Thompson on another occasion via Turn It On Again: Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, and Genesis. “I got these chords that I liked, so I turned the mic on and started singing. The lyrics you hear are what I wrote spontaneously. That frightens me a bit, but I’m quite proud of the fact that I sang 99.9 per cent of those lyrics spontaneously”.
The tension built by the improvised lyrics and near-inaudible drum line makes way for the explosive drum solo in the fourth minute of the track. The thunderous solo has since inspired countless drummers, and it remains Collins’ signature track to this day. Allegedly, Collins’ Genesis bandmates declined to record the song after it was first demoed; however, Tony Banks has since denied this would-be unspeakable folly.
“The whole sound really was discovered when Phil was in playing drums on a song called ‘Intruder’,” producer Hugh Padgham once reflected on Collins’ unique drumming sound in conversation with Music Radar. “Phil was a guest player on [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.”
Listen to the fantastic isolated drum tracks from Phil Collins’ song ‘In The Air Tonight’ below.
