The 1981 song that frightens Phil Collins: “There’s obviously something going on”
There tends to be something supernatural going on whenever someone writes a song.
While many adopt the tried-and-true method of sitting down at a guitar or piano and coming out with a chord sequence that sounds nice, some of the best tunes in the world come from a different place whenever an artist is writing it, almost as if the material is being beamed into their head. It’s almost magical how it works out, but Phil Collins remembered being intimidated when he wrote the rough sketch of ‘In the Air Tonight’.
Part of what makes ‘In the Air Tonight’ endure is the sense that it feels emotionally untethered from traditional pop songwriting. Rather than sounding carefully constructed, the track unfolds like a private emotional outburst accidentally captured on tape.
Because, for all of his talents, Collins never saw himself as a songwriter at this stage in his career. He had helped finish a couple of tunes when working in Genesis and even sang the odd backing vocal behind Peter Gabriel, but just because he took over as the singer didn’t mean he had the chops to put together a sweeping ballad or anything.
But something changed once his wife left him when he returned from the road. It had been one thing to be dedicated to his work for so long, but the built-up tension led her to move to Vancouver to live with her parents. For the time being, Genesis was on life support while Collins worked on his marriage, but that didn’t mean his creativity had to stop.
“I’m quite proud of the fact that I sung 99% of those lyrics spontaneously. And people ask what is it really about, and I say I don’t know. I just made it up as I went along.”
Phil Collins
Since he admitted that he wouldn’t get anywhere with words, he felt that the best way to tell her how he felt was to write songs. While most of them would make up most of his solo album Face Value, ‘In the Air Tonight’ isn’t exactly the kind of song looking to make amends with someone.
Built around a drum machine loop, the cold keyboards make the whole track sound like the beginning of a horror movie. As opposed to the typical heartache songs that pop is built on, Collins is out for cold-blooded revenge, as if he met his old flame after years apart and saw all the mistakes she made that left him in shambles.
When he laid it down at first, Collins thought the raw emotion was far too much for him, telling Classic Albums, “The lyrics were what I wrote spontaneously with the feeling of that music at that time. This frightens me a bit because there’s obviously something going on in there that I don’t know about, but I’m quite proud of the fact that I sung 99% of those lyrics spontaneously. And people ask what is it really about, and I say I don’t know. I just made it up as I went along.”
That hasn’t stopped people from reading every line to see what Collins is getting at, including a theory that persisted for years that the drummer saw someone not helping a man from drowning and then cornered them at a concert. Even after over 40 years, most of the song feels more like an outlet for anger than telling a linear story from front to back.
If anything, the song is just about the build-up leading to one of the most kickass drum fills of all time in the break. And since Collins has even admitted to not knowing what the tune’s about, it almost doesn’t warrant any explanation. This song is about pure anger and revenge, and sometimes that’s enough for someone to relate to.
More than four decades later, ‘In the Air Tonight’ remains powerful precisely because of that emotional rawness. Collins may never have fully understood what he was channelling when he wrote it, but listeners immediately recognised something authentic within it.
