The 1981 song Phil Collins said “will be on my gravestone”
Phil Collins didn’t really need to keep making music if he didn’t want to pass the late 1980s.
He had already pulled off one of the greatest second acts as a solo artist, and even though he became more than a little bit insufferable around the giants of the industry, it wasn’t like he was making subpar pop music or anything. His pop hits still hit like a sledgehammer every single time that they came on the radio, and there was no way that anyone was ignoring what he was doing at the time, either.
It’s hard for anyone to compete with someone that has sold 100 million records twice with two different acts, and considering how many hits that Collins had, it’s no surprise why he received that kind of accolade. In fact, for all of the advancements that he made while he was in Genesis, there are plenty of moments throughout his solo career that are actually more impactful on pop music than the prog giants.
The purists might still like the moments where he was behind the kit during the days of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but when you listen to his work with Peter Gabriel on his solo material, he practically pioneered what the 1980s drum sound was supposed to be. There was no one else making music that sounded like that, and when everyone heard Face Value, they got a better look at what Collins could really do when he had the right people to work off of.
Making an entire record about his divorce from his ex wasn’t exactly the first thing on his mind when he got started, but it’s not like Collins was going to hide his emotions. He needed to get a lot of things off his chest, and while the ballads were a bit soft for some people, there was never anyone arguing with ‘In the Air Tonight’ whenever it came on the radio. Collins was still proving that he was a drummer before anything else, and that drum fill is still one of the greatest moments in modern drumming.
It’s one thing to talk about the part everyone has airdrummed, but it’s also about how the entire song builds to that one moment. There’s hardly anything going on with the rest of the track other than the synthesiser pads and Collins’s vocals, but when you listen to the way that the entire track crescendos right in time for his moment behind the drumkit, it’s like listening to all of that built-up anger finally getting unleashed at the end of the tune.
Collins didn’t intend to make the greatest air drumming song of all time, but he felt that he was proud to have that song as the one everyone will remember him for, saying, “I thought it was a good one. That’s why we kept it! It will be on my gravestone, you know: Da-da da-da da-da… It just seemed natural to me to do that. I had no idea that it would be as recognized. Yeah, it took me by surprise.”
There are certainly other bands that have been able to make more inventive drum fills, but even in Collins’s solo career, he never seemed to repeat that same kind of power again. The closest is probably in ‘I Don’t Care Anymore’, but given the fact that those are two separate drum tracks playing off each other for an entire song, it’s really a testament to the original that Collins needed two drums to do what he did with one the first time around.
So while Collins is proud to have it last as one of the most enduring rock and roll drum songs of all time, the fact that it’s endured just goes to show you that not every musician knows what they have on their hands sometimes. There could be genius lurking in between the classic moments, but every so often a track needs that little push to put it into classic territory.
