Top Track Music

“In The Air Tonight” By Phil Collins is a favorite 80′s tune of mine. It brings back memories of Miami Vice. How many peeps do you know do the air drums at the big breakdown?

“In the Air Tonight” is a song by Phil Collins which first appeared on his 1981 album, Face Value. It was the first single of Collins’ solo career, and remains one of his best-known hits. The music video, which is directed by Stuart Orme, was among those aired on the first broadcast day of MTV.

Musically the song consists of a series of ominous chords played over a simple drum machine pattern (the Roland CR-78 Disco-2 pattern, plus some programming); processed electric guitar sounds and vocoded vocals on key words add additional atmosphere. The mood is one of restrained anger until the final chorus when an explosive burst of drums releases the musical tension, and the instrumentation builds to a thundering final chorus.

Collins wrote the song in the wake of a failing relationship with his then-wife. Collins has described obtaining the drum machine specifically to deal with these personal issues through songwriting, telling Mix magazine: “I had to start writing some of this music that was inside me.”  Collins improvised the lyrics during a songwriting session in the studio: “I was just fooling around. I got these chords that I liked, so I turned the mike on and started singing. The lyrics you hear are what I wrote spontaneously. That frightens me a bit, but I’m quite proud of the fact that I sing 99.9 percent of those lyrics spontaneously.”