Phil Collins Says His Haunting 80s Classic With That Iconic Drum Fill Was “80 Percent Improvised”

Improvisation led to one of Phil Collins’ biggest hits. During an appearance on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years series, the singer discussed his songwriting process.

“I suppose a lot of my lyrics come from somewhere. I very rarely sit down and think, ‘What am I going to write about?’ I don’t ever do that,” Collins said. “… Something usually comes when I’m playing a piano. Something will develop if I’m lucky, and then what I’m going to sing kind of goes along with it or comes along very soon afterwards.”

“You only need a couple of lines, two or three lines, and you kind of know what it’s going to be about or what the feeling is,” he added. “A lot of the lyrics are kind of improvised.”

Collins went on to explain that a “classic example” of that phenomenon is his 1981 hit “In the Air Tonight.” In fact, Collins said, the song was “80 percent improvised.”

“I had this lovely sound, which is the sound you hear on the record,” he said of the piano on the recording. “It is the version of when I first kind of wrote it on the record. I might have done it once or twice, but I certainly didn’t labor on it.”

Phil Collins Explains How He Wrote “In the Air Tonight”

While Collins admitted that “it’s difficult to kind of understand,” he continued by trying to explain how he wound penning what would become his signature song.

“I was playing and looking at the meters on my console. It was only me. It was in the bedroom. So I’m trying to get the meters to move,” he said. “I played those chords. Of course, I had the drum machine. I programmed the drum machine, just to make an interesting pattern, and I played along with it.”

“That’s what happened,” Collins concluded. “And then when I’d done that, I sang along with what I had, just to get the sound of a voice in there, so it kept its own space. The words that came out on that first verse were improvised.”

As for how he got so lucky, Collins quipped, “Maybe it was that extra whiskey at lunch time. I don’t know.”

Whatever it was, the experience foretold Collins’ songwriting process for much of his 1981 album.

“That started the way I started writing. I mean, that was pretty early on in the writing process of what was to become Face Value,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, that works. That’s the way I can do it.’”

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