Phil Collins on ‘In The Air Tonight’: “I have no idea what it’s about”

At the end of 1980, if you’d been looking for an artist to take British synth-pop into its darkest territories, you wouldn’t have glanced twice at Phil Collins, genial frontman of Genesis and drummer with jazz-fusioneers Brand X. Yet in January 1981, in those cold, confusing weeks following John Lennon’s murder, a singular piece of obsessive minimalism, climaxing in a cataclysm of drums, leapt from 36 to 4 in the UK charts. It was time to shift some paradigms.

Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” was only denied a UK No 1 place by Lennon’s posthumous chart-topper “Woman”. Intense and menacing, “In The Air…”, beloved of air-drummers and vocoder mimics, popularised a far-reaching new studio effect (“gated drum”, or “gated reverb”) discovered by engineer Hugh Padgham during 1979 sessions for Peter Gabriel’s third album in London.

“In The Air…” was to become an enduring favourite of classic rock radio programmers, NFL footballers, foul-mouthed rappers and chocolate-advertising gorillas. It has even cultivated its own urban myth. In the most popular version, Collins witnesses a real-life murder (“I was there and I saw what you did”), and later lures the unsuspecting killer to one of his concerts where he sings “In The Air…” while a spotlight is trained on the guilty man’s face.

PHIL COLLINS: During the 1978 Genesis world tour, my marriage broke up. I came back to a virtually empty house. I moved everything out of the master bedroom, put a studio in, and threw myself into home recording. I had a Brennell 8-track, an electric piano, a Prophet-5 synthesiser and a drum machine. I had no intention of making a record. I was just keeping myself busy.

One of the songs was a moody thing with a bit of an atmosphere. I found some chords for it, which I liked, and rather than over-arrange it I decided to put a vocal on next. I was trying to move away from the complicated Genesis stuff, go in a simpler direction. I didn’t have any lyrics prepared, but I started singing, and what came out is what you hear on “In The Air…”.

It’s wonderful that an urban myth has grown up around it, and that people on courses at universities have tried to decipher its meaning, because I can say with hand on heart that I have no idea what it’s about. Obviously, having my wife leave me, and losing my two little ones, there was anger, bitterness and hurt. Those emotions are in the song, but in an abstract way. I’ve no idea what “coming in the air tonight” means – apart from an impending darkness, possibly.

About a year later, I played my demoes to our manager Tony Smith and also Ahmet Ertegun [Genesis were signed to Atlantic in America]. To me they were still just doodles, but Ahmet said: “You’ve got to make a record.” I’d met Hugh Padgham when I played drums on Peter Gabriel’s album [“Intruder”, “No Self-Control”], and bonded with him straight away as someone who could make my drums sound huge.

The drum fill on “In The Air…” became a landmark, I suppose. I’ve been at traffic lights and seen guys in cars pounding along to it on their steering wheels. 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. It wasn’t my choice as single. When I did Top Of The Pops, it was No 36 in the charts. Dave Lee Travis said to me: “That’s going to be Top 3 next week.”

I thought: ‘Nah…’ It was the famous Top Of The Pops with the paint pot on the piano. Ironically, when I sang the original demo, and wrote down the words afterwards, I used a piece of decorator’s stationery. The decorator that my wife went off with. An interesting piece of memorabilia, there, should I ever wish to sell it.

HUGH PADGHAM (co-producer): The Townhouse was one of the first studios to have a Solid State Logic console. All consoles allow you to talk to people in the studio, but the SSL guys invented a button where you could hear back from the studio. It had a massive compressor, so if you hung a microphone in the studio, it could pick up people talking anywhere. One day when we were working on Peter Gabriel’s [third] album, Phil was playing drums and I opened the reverse talkback mic. We heard the most unbelievable, distorted, crunching sound. And another feature of that console was the noise gate, where you could go from the enormity of a compressed drum sound to the nothingness of a closed-off sound.

I drove down to Phil’s house on a really nice day, with my car roof down, and we listened to his demoes and played Frisbee in his garden. He was there on his own; the wife had gone. He was very proud of these demoes and I think I endeared myself to him by saying, “Look, let’s copy the bits that we want to keep, and then we’ll just re-do the vocals and overdub drums in the studio.” That’s how we proceeded to record the whole album.

I can’t remember how the idea germinated to have the drums come in at the end of “In The Air…”. You were cutting on to vinyl in those days, so what you didn’t want was to have the drums sounding so loud that the bits before sounded too quiet, if you see what I mean. We deliberated for ages. But I guess we did a reasonable job at the end of the day.

Then we had to record some extra drums for the version that came out as a single, because Ahmet Ertegun, when we were mastering the album in New York, said: “If this is going to be a single, you have to make it clear to people where the beat is.” We thought, well, if the great Ahmet Ertegun wants us to do this, we better do it. So we went down to Strawberry Studios in Dorking and Phil overdubbed a backbeat on a tom. That was only for the single release. In the original version, the real version, it’s a Roland drum machine.

It’s not really a pop song, but you know, we weren’t interested in pop songs. We were much more interested in getting cool musicians on the record and making them sound good. Generally, in those days, you used to make an album and then someone would choose a single at the end of it. You made the album for the album’s sake. Today, unless they hear a single, they won’t even let you in the studio.

DARYL STUERMER (guitar): Phil played me the demo of “In The Air…” when we were driving back to London from a Genesis rehearsal somewhere in Surrey. I didn’t even know he was a songwriter. It was a really moody piece, just him and a drum machine, and I didn’t know whether the lyric was complete or not. It was very train-of-thought. I remember thinking: ‘Wow, good song, Phil, you’ve got a nice little career ahead of you there.’

My guitar part was done much later, in a studio in LA. I sat in the control room with Phil, and my amp was out in the studio, as loud as I could get it. I hit this chord, which Phil described as the sound of an electric razor. Rrrrzzzzzzzz. People write me emails about that chord, asking what it is. The song’s in the key of D minor, but the chord itself has no minor notes. It’s a low A, and a D, and another A and a D. But it depends how you play it; it has to have that overdriven, distorted sound from the amp. It’s a distant sound, but a distant powerful sound. It’s a sound you imagine being deafeningly loud a mile away.

I suppose “I Missed Again” would have been the obvious commercial choice as a single, but “In The Air…” had something totally different. That recording session was like magic. The more layers we added, the better and better it sounded.

SIMON DRAPER (Virgin Records A&R executive): It was a pivotal time in Virgin’s history. We’d had our first phase, releasing mainly European prog music by people like Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream, and then we’d reinvented ourselves with the Sex Pistols. But none of the punk stuff had sold much outside the UK. By the end of the ’70s, we were in trouble and desperately needed some chart action. Hugh Padgham told me about this track Phil Collins was recording at the Townhouse. I thought: “Drummer from Genesis… won’t sell much.” But I went down, listened, and it was fantastic. We pitched heavily to sign him. His advance was steep for the time, and the royalty [rate] was something we’d never paid before. “In The Air…” was absolutely the stand-out, even though it was very long. Phil was very hip at that time. Later, of course, he became the epitome of MOR and was much reviled. But the success of that record really saved Virgin’s bacon.

FACT FILE
Written by: Phil Collins
Performers: Phil Collins (vocals, synthesiser, drum machine, electric piano, drums), Daryl Stuermer (guitar), John Giblin (bass), L Shankar (violin)
Produced by: Phil Collins, Hugh Padgham
Recorded at: Collins’ house, Surrey; Townhouse Studios, London; Village Recorder, Los Angeles
Released as a single: January 1981 (UK), May 1981 (US)
Highest UK chart position: 2
Highest US chart position: 19

This article was originally published in Uncut’s June 2008 issue (Take 133).