Description
"In the Air Tonight" is a song by Phil Collins which first appeared on his 1981 album, Face Value. It was also Collins' first ever single of his solo career.
IN THE AIR TONIGHT:
The song is notable for its atmospheric production, macabre theme (atypical of the subject
"In the Air Tonight" is a song by Phil Collins which first appeared on his 1981 album, Face Value. It was also Collins' first ever single of his solo career.
IN THE AIR TONIGHT:
The song is notable for its atmospheric production, macabre theme (atypical of the subject matter of his solo work, but broadly similar to that of Genesis), and as the subject of a persistent urban legend. It was an international hit, reaching the top 20 on the Billboard magazine pop singles chart and remains, alone among Collins' solo oeuvre, a popular selection on many classic rock radio stations. It is the song most often associated with Collins' solo career, and he has performed versions of it at many events, including Live Aid and The Secret Policeman's Other Ball.
The lyrics of the song take the form of a dark monologue directed towards an unnamed, possibly prominent person; the singer describes having witnessed an unspecified act perpetrated:
I was there and I saw what you did
saw it with my own two eyes
and anticipating an equally unspecified consequence:
I can feel it coming in the air tonight
I've been waiting for this moment for all my life
Musically the song consists of a series of ominous chords played over a simple drum machine pattern (a Roland CR-78); 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.
The song's popularity in the 1980s increased after a nearly complete recording of it was featured in the pilot episode of the American television show Miami Vice (Brother's Keeper), thus becoming one of the first pop/rock songs to be featured as part of a TV program in this manner. On the heels of this successful merging of media, Collins became associated with the show; other Collins tracks including Take Me Home were later featured and Collins himself also acted in an episode, Phil The Shill.
The song was remixed in 1988 by Ben Liebrand for his weekly appearance in the 'Curry & van Inkel' radio show on Dutch radio. The mix was completed and then taken by Ben to be part of a mix showcase at the DMC Mixing Championship Finals in London. When he played it there, he urged the other visiting DJ's to contact Virgin to make it an official release. It hit #4 in the UK charts.
DRUM SOUND:
"Musically, it's an extraordinarily striking record, because almost nothing happens in it ... It's the drum sound in particular that's amazing. You don't hear it at all for the first two minutes of the song ... then there's that great doo-dom doo-dom doo-dom comes in, and the drums come in half way through the song, setting the template for all the Eighties drum songs after that" - Stuart Maconie ”
The means by which Collins attained the much-praised sound of the plain radio on this recording was long a source of mystery. Clearly, some compressing or gating was used. The exact process was, as happens so often, a result of serendipity: an unintended use of studio technology giving unexpectedly useful results.
In this case, the Solid State Logic 4000 mixing board had a "reverse talk-back" circuit (labeled on the board as "Listen Mic"). Normal "talkback" is a button that the mixing engineer has to press in order to talk to the recording musicians (the recording and the mixing parts of a studio are completely sonically isolated otherwise). Reverse talkback is a circuit (also button-activated) for the engineer to listen to musicians in the studio. In order to compensate for sound level differences — people can be close to the reverse talkback microphone or far off — this circuit has a compressor on it, which minimizes the differences between loud and soft sounds. While recording "Intruder" for his ex-bandmate Peter Gabriel's solo album, at some point Collins started playing the drums while the reverse talkback was activated. The engineers and his friend Jefrey were amazed at the sound achieved. Overnight, they rewired the board so that the reverse talkback could be recorded in a more formal manner. Later models of the SSL 4000 allowed the listen mic to print to tape with the touch of a button.
When Collins' engineer Hugh Padgham was brought in to help develop Collins' demos that would become Face Value they recreated the "Intruder" sound using the reverse talkback microphone as well as heavily compressed and gated ambient mics. Hugh Padgham continued working with Genesis for Abacab later in 1981 and the same technique (generally referred to as Gated reverb) was used, and the powerful drum sound has become synonymous with later Genesis projects and Collins' solo career ever since.
URBAN LEGEND:
An urban legend has arisen around "In the Air Tonight" and its lyrical reference to drowning. Some popular variations are:
Collins saw a man drowning but was too far away to do anything, but a man nearby who could have saved him did nothing. (Other versions of this rumor claim that the drowning was not an accident, but murder.)
While vacationing together, Collins' best friend went for a swim. He began to struggle in the water but Collins, having never learned to swim, could not help. Collins stopped and asked a passing jogger for help; the man refused and Collins' friend died.
While at camp as a child, Collins awoke to find his counselor missing. Looking outside, he saw the counselor standing by the lake doing nothing to help a drowning boy. (In some versions, the counselor is intentionally letting the boy drown.) Years later, Collins bought the man a front row ticket to one of his shows, put a spotlight on him and sang the song to him before the audience. Alternately, he was performing and noticed the man was in attendance, and then began performing the song and ordered the man to be spotlit. Again, depending on the version, either Collins had the man arrested, or the man was filled with guilt and committed suicide.
Collins witnessed the rape of his wife and, years later, saw the man drowning but refused to help him.
A young Collins and his best friend were at a lake when a man asked them if they wanted to go sailing. Collins had to eat dinner but promised to come back; when he did, his friend was missing and was never seen again. Years later, Collins invited the man to a concert and sang the song to him as above.
Collins, while on a pier with his wife, went down the pier for a brief moment, leaving his wife at the other end. When he returned, he saw that his wife was drowning, but before he could do anything, his wife had died. Collins realized next that there was a man that had stood at the end of the pier and watched the woman drown. The man could have nothing held against him, having no obligation to save the woman. The stranger also neglected to notice the husband of the woman was Phil Collins. Collins became obsessed with the man, spying on him and watching him at home. Collins sent the man a free front row ticket to his concert and the man, thinking it was strange, but seeing no reason to turn down a great seat to a great concert, attended anyway. Collins played a few songs into the concert, paying no notice to the man. Then all of the lights went off, as Collins seemed to be preparing for another song. Then two spotlights appeared, one pointing on Collins, who was sitting on a stool off of the stage now in front of a man (the stranger) who had the other spotlight trained on him. Collins proceeded to perform a new song, entitled "In The Air Tonight" seeming to direct it right at the anonymous man. At the point in the song where the drums kick in and the song becomes louder, Collins supposedly threw the stool onto the ground and all the lights went on. It is presumed that the man left after this song, realizing whose wife it had been that he had watched drowning, while the rest of the audience had no idea what the whole situation had been about, only suspecting the man had done something to anger Collins to a great degree.
Years later, Collins commented on the legends about the song in a BBC World Service interview:
“I don't know what this song is about. When I was writing this I was going through a divorce. And the only thing I can say about it is that it's obviously in anger. It's the angry side, or the bitter side of a separation. So what makes it even more comical is when I hear these stories which started many years ago, particularly in America, of someone come up to me and say, 'Did you really see someone drowning?' I said, 'No, wrong'. And then every time I go back to America the story gets Chinese whispers, it gets more and more elaborate. It's so frustrating, 'cos this is one song out of all the songs probably that I've ever written that I really don't know what it's about, you know.
THE MUSIC VIDEO:
The music video for "In the Air Tonight" was directed by Stuart Orme. Similarly to the song itself, the stark, atmospheric style of the video stood in contrast to the typically frenetic style used in many contemporaneous productions. The video opens on a tight shot of Phil Collins singing directly to the camera; his face only appears in black and white, a style modeled after the Face Value's album sleeve. Later in the video, Collins is seen on a chair in a small room with a door on one side of the room and a window on the other. As the song progresses a white figure intermittently appears in the window. The figure later is revealed to be something of a reflection of Collins himself. Before the final chorus, Collins gets out of the chair to open a door on one side of the room, where he is engulfed by a bright white light; this is coupled with scenes of him in a blue corridor.
The video uses the "remix" version of the song, which adds slightly more percussive effects from the beginning until Collins' live drums kick in.
It was the twenty-first video played upon MTV's launch on August 1, 1981.
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