If you see someone playing air drums in the car stopped beside you at the red light, there’s a decent chance they’re playing Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” The song is the quintessential air drum number. In fact, during his live concerts, Collins plays the song on piano and leaves the drum fills for the audience to play — in the air.
Like most great lyrics, “In the Air Tonight” — and much of his smash hit 1981 solo debut album, Face Value — was born from Collins’ personal pain: When he returned home from a tour with Genesis, with whom he had played drums for a decade, he found his marriage broken and his family gone.
The Hooks
If you told Phil Collins in 1980 that in twenty seven years time, one of the songs on his newly finished debut solo project would be sent racing up the charts by a drumming gorilla, I wonder how he’d react. At a time when it was seen as sacrilegious to lend one’s music to any commercial venture (other than to promote one’s own, of course), he would have most likely scoffed and perhaps suggested you venture forth and procreate. But, it has come to pass – thanks to an absurdly entertaining Cadbury’s Dairy Milk TV advertisement, Collins’ best-known song is back in the Top 20 of the singles chart, with his greatest hits album also seeing abig sales boost as a side-effect.
In The Air Tonight was, and remains, what may bocalled a “tnood song . Ccniparablc to songs like The Beatles’ A Day In The Life, Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, and Ultravox’s Vienna, the whole is inexplicably greater than the sum of the parts.
The song has hooks on so many levels that it’s very difficult to objectively isolate any one or a few as the song’s strongest.
The chorus refrain is simple both melodically and lyrically and is, crucially, instantly memorable. Hear it once and you re-call it.
The verses, too, have plenty going on to hold our attention. A combination of mysterious lyrics, a bending and weaving meiody, and a sprinkling of production trickery all help to keep ours ears glued to the speakers. Worth mentioning is the fact that there’s a surprising amount of melodie variation between the song’s two verses. Collins doesn’t allow the melodie structure set up in the first verse to curtail the elevated dynamics of the second. An admirable and daring move pulled off in style.
No discussion of In The Air Tonight is complete without a mention of that drum track which kicks in at 3:41, almost three quarters of the way into the song. If one was to compile a list of the defining musical moments of the 1980’s, this just has to figure near the top. Expertly played, engineered and mixed, these drums sound more alive than anything before or since. Aside from the textbook-perfect (yet innovative) production values, it could be argued that the drum track’s jaw-dropping impact is related to the judicious use of contrast: the dark, low-key vibe is shattered to oblivion by the thunderous, almost violent kick, snare and tom-toms. Also worth noting is the deceptive simplicity of the playing itself -Collins’ refusal to touch neither the hi-hats nor the cymbals is a stroke of genius. This barebones approach allows the drum track to breathe, lending added impetus to the lat’s most powerful weapon combo; the kick and the snare. Sometimes, what you Ieave out of a track is more important than what you put in.
The Lyric
The meaning of In The Air Tonight became a pervasive urban legend, with more “readings” than you could shake a stick at.
Many believed the lyrics were based on a tragic event Collins witnessed – a drowning in which a man could have helped the victim but didn’t. The final verse, some argued, sees Collins inviting the man to a show and sings the song to him as a way of letting him know that he knows his dark secret: “I remember don’t worry … I know the reason why you keep this silence up, no you don’t fooi me.”
There have been countless variations on this reading, the vast majority based on very flimsy or made-up evidence.
Disappointingly, none of these theories are accurate. Years after the song’s initial release, in a BBC World Service interview Collins admitted he didn’t know what the song was about. He was, in fact, exceptionally vague about the lyrie’s meaning and went only as far as to say that it was written “in anger”.
While it would be so much more exciting to believe some of the more outlandish readings (it really is worth looking some of them up, and then re-listening to the song!),, the truth, although admittedly more hum-drum, is still fascinating from a songwriter’s point of view. Collins claims he wrote “99%” of the lyrics on die spot, the dark chords and vibe of the track summoning the similarly moody lyrics. There was no pre-designated theme or structure, as such. What we have, it could be argued, is simply what some have called stream-of-consciousness writing: words simply present themselves from no obvious source or influence. This kind of writing has been well documented by many masters of the craft – John Lennon, for example, claimed that the lyrics to many of his greatest works just came from nowhere, and the only conscious act of writing lyrics was to merely fiü in the gaps and try to make some sense of the initial outpouring.
What the lyric to In The Air Tonight teaches is us is that, quite perversely, it often doesn’t matter what a song’s lyric actually means. Despite what you may have heard or read, the truth is there really are no rutes in lyric writing. It doesn’t even have to make perfect sense. If a lyric sounds like it works, then it does work. Period. Just ask Phil.
Song or Track?
In The Air Tonight is the rarest of beasts: a classic “song” in its own right, yet simultaneously mseparable from its accompanying production.
It is, in many ways, an exemplary marriage of song and track. Skilful and subtle use of vocoder, double-tracking, reverb and delay bring out the best in an already strong meiody, vocal performance and musical arrangement. Few of the numerous cover versions come close to the quality of the original, further suggesting how intimately linked the “song” and “track” are in Collins’ version.
It’s always good to see a classic song re-visiting the charts, even if it does involve the assistance of something as un-rock’n’roll and tacky as a comedy chocolate advert.
