The ‘In the Air Tonight’ effect: how a drum solo made Phil Collins hip again

When Bret Easton Ellis was looking for a way to communicate the moral hollowness of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer protagonist of his bestselling novel American Psycho, the obvious solution was to make Bateman a Phil Collins fan.

“In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism,” Bateman gushes of the Collins-fronted 1986 Genesis LP, Invisible Touch. “Phil Collins’s solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like ‘In the Air Tonight’ and ‘Against All Odds’. ‘Sussudio’? A great, great song, a personal favourite.”

American Psycho was published in 1991. At the time, it was perfectly logical for Easton Ellis to portray Collins as an artist whom only a soulless sociopath could appreciate. Collins was an avatar of naff, a symbol of the shiny, shallow 1980s – the pop equivalent of moral bankruptcy.

Thirty years later, however, all is changed. Collins has been reclaimed as one of the greats of his era, and this week he returned triumphantly to the stage with Genesis for what they say will be their farewell tour. To paraphrase ‘Sussudio’, he has been utterly re-rehabilitated. So dramatic is the turnabout in Collins’s reputation, academics have now coined a term for it: “reconsecration”. Or, if you prefer, the “Phil Collins Effect”.

From Billy Joel to Enya (not to mention The Bee Gees), many pop stars who came of age musically in the 1970s and 1980s but were derided in the 1990s are now once again surfing waves of acclaim. “The ‘Phil Collins Effect’ suggests that popular artists go through a period of critical and commercial success and peer recognition,” wrote a research team led by André Spicer, Professor of Behaviour at City, University of London, in The Conversation.

“This can be followed by a period of commercial and critical decline and rejection… Revival, or ‘reconsecration’, involves reappraisal and rediscovery, both by critics and often a new generation of fans and artistic peers.”

Researchers plotted Collins’s rise, fall and redemption with an N-shaped graph. The Genesis leader shot to the top as a solo performer in the 1980s only to go into steep decline in the 1990s – that age of grunge and Britpop, in which “selling out” was perceived as the worst of all artistic sins.

To an entire generation, Collins will forever be the toe-curling showman crooning You Can’t Hurry Love on Top of the Pops, or the cheeky chap mugging in the poster for the movie Buster, in which he portrayed Great Train Robber Buster Edwards as a lovable scamp.

But then came a new century, and a breathtaking comeback. Kanye West, Lorde and The 1975 are among the leading contemporary musicians who have praised Collins as an experimental maverick.

The case for Collins’s genius inevitably centres on his 1981 debut solo single, ‘In the Air Tonight’ – and the searing drum fill that arrives three minutes in. In the 1980s and 1990s, this was just another drum solo, no more remarkable than the one on Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer’ or Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’. But it has since grown in stature, helped by a 2006 Cadbury ad in which a man dressed as a gorilla mimed to it from behind a drum kit.

It was the drum fill and Gen Z’s ecstatic embrace of it that led the University of London to diagnose of the ‘Phil Collins Effect’. Their research was prompted by a viral YouTube video by Indiana twins Tim and Fred Williams. from last year, in which the siblings’ jaws drop as they experience the song for the first time.

“I ain’t never seen anyone drop a beat three minutes into a song,” says Fred of Collins’s drumming, in a video that has clocked up nine million views. When the song finishes, he adds: “You killed it, Phil!””

“Killed it” has come to be the consensus around Collins and ‘In the Air Tonight’. “The song’s cavernous, brooding atmospherics somehow encapsulated and suffused the 1980s,” wrote Charles Aaron in The New York Times. “Druggy mania and comedown; sex laced with fear and death; capitalism tickling your fancy and burying you up to your neck… It was sublimely disorienting, a mirror image of the times.”

That’s quite a claim for a track that lasted for less than five minutes and didn’t even reach number one. Nonetheless, an undeniable mystique surrounded ‘In the Air Tonight’; even in the days when Collins was generally perceived as a pop star comprised of 90 per cent cheese and 10 per cent shameless ambition. This had a lot to do with its pioneering use of “gated reverb” – a studio trick that steeped the recording in a spooky, ghost-train effect.

“Gated reverb” was created by accident by producer Hugh Padgham when Collins was playing drums on the 1980 single ‘Intruder’, by his old Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel. A microphone used to communicate between Collins in the studio and Padgham in the control booth was accidentally left on as Collins drummed. It captured the reverb effect of the drums in the room before suddenly cutting off before the echo could naturally fade away.

The effect was disembodied and alienating. And so it was the perfect conduit for the lyrics of ‘In the Air Tonight’. A stream of consciousness expression of rage and fear, the words flowed from the break-up of Collins’s first marriage, to Andrea Bertorelli. Collins has stated that he came up with the lyrics on the fly as he sang, only writing them down later. What he couldn’t have foreseen was that the weird imagery conjured with lines such as “Well, if you told me you were drowning / I would not lend a hand” would spawn one of the most fascinating urban legends in pop.

The whisperings were that Collins wrote ‘In the Air Tonight’ after witnessing a man drowning as another man, watching on, refused to help. Collins then tracked down the bystander, gave him front-row tickets to a concert and arranged for the spotlight to be turned on him as he played ‘In the Air Tonight’ for the first time. He would have looked straight into the guilty party’s eyes as he intoned, “I’ve seen your face before my friend / But I don’t know if you know who I am”.

In another version of the story, Collins is the one declining to intervene as the man drowns. That’s because he had previously kidnapped Collins’s family and raped his wife. Needless to say, none of it was true – yet these tall tales spoke to the menace in which ‘In the Air Tonight’ is drenched.

One person unimpressed by either the song or the urban mythology was Collin’s ex-wife, Bertorelli. She was especially irritated with Collins’s own claim to have written ‘In the Air Tonight’ in a funk after she had “run off with the painter-decorator”. Collins, she said, was in no position to shame her for infidelity.

“I was hearing about his affairs long before I had one. He’s made a lot of money singing about the break-up of our marriage and his heartbreak – approximately $115 million– and he’s never stopped to consider my feelings or those of our children. All these years on, he’s still playing the victim, and I think it’s time he stopped.”

“The Phil Collins Effect” has been felt far and wide. In some cases, the redemption is so complete it’s slightly jarring to think that the artists were previously regarded as beyond the pale. Kate Bush and David Bowie, for instance, were both in the 1990s seen as embarrassing fogeys – a mumsy weirdo in the case of Bush, and a hipster grandad desperate for relevance in that of Bowie.

Today, both figures are virtual deities. Imagine claiming Kate Bush was naff in 2021? You’d be strung up. Bowie himself acknowledged how far he had come from the 1980s, describing the fall-out from the success of Let’s Dance as his “Phil Collins years”.

Collins was said to be deeply wounded by Bowie’s comments, made in 2002. But as a new generation of performers line up to praise him, and he makes a triumphant return to the stage, he might conclude that he’s had the final chuckle. He’s been waiting for this moment all his life, and it’s finally here – cue that drum solo.