The song Phil Collins calls the “landmark” moment of his career
From his early days of prog rock heroism to an illustrious career of pop smashes and Academy Awards, to call the career of Phil Collins multi-faceted would be a vast understatement. Out of all his accolades and musical successes, though, one particularly beloved track still stands out as an ultimate highlight.
There haven’t been many figures, since the dawn of pop music, who have managed to pull off the kind of sonic shift that Phil Collins did during the 1970s. It was, after all, during the high-brow age of progressive rock that he first made a name for himself, carving out the percussive stylings of Genesis and quickly establishing himself among the scene’s premier drummers. Pretty soon, though, the performer started to get ideas above his station.
By the time the mid-1970s rolled around, Collins had made the unimaginable leap from being behind the sticks to the lead singer role of Genesis, predicting his subsequent rise to pop stardom in a solo capacity. It wasn’t as though he conjured up only a handful of pop hits, either.
Throughout the pop age of the 1980s, Phil Collins quickly rose to the top of the commercial pile, amassing an unparalleled litany of hits, all the while checking off childhood dreams on an almost daily basis, playing drums with Led Zeppelin and earning his first Oscar nomination at various points over the course of the decade.
It is fair to say, then, that the 1980s were a particularly good decade for the Putney-born songwriter, not least because the decade contained arguably his most celebrated musical moment. Namely, the drum fill from his 1981 single ‘In the Air Tonight’. Endlessly parodied and still, to this day, a cultural touchstone known across the globe, Collins certainly set expectations high with his debut solo release.
Although, on paper, Collins’ achievements soon eclipsed that number-two single – kept off the top spot by none other than John Lennon – even the songwriter himself readily admits that his drumming on that single formed a colossal moment in his career. “The drum fill on ‘In The Air…’ became a landmark, I suppose,” he once told Uncut. “I’ve been at traffic lights and seen guys in cars pounding along to it on their steering wheels.”
From its earliest origins, in fact, it was clear that the songwriter had struck upon something special with the song. “When we started getting visitors down to the studio, people like Eric Clapton, we’d play ‘In The Air…’ to them – loud, obviously – and when the drums came in, they’d be flattened to the walls,” Collins remembered.
Nevertheless, Collins apparently wasn’t convinced that the song should even be released as a single. “It wasn’t my choice as single,” he admitted. “When I did Top Of The Pops, it was number 36 in the charts. Dave Lee Travis said to me: “That’s going to be top three next week. I thought, ‘Nah.’”
As it turns out, though, Travis was correct. Following that iconic appearance on Top of the Pops, the single jumped to number four in the charts and continued climbing for another two weeks, in doing so establishing Phil Collins as a pop tour-de-force in his own right, outside the prog realm of Genesis.
