I can feel it coming in the air tonight - Phil Collins is cool

Picture: YouTube

"No he's not!". "He never will be!". I can hear the tea being spat out from here. Phil Collins is, was and can never be cool. Everyone knows that. The problem is, no one really knows why, or bothers to find out why he shouldn't be. But let's come to that later, because the big news this week, along with the usual apocalyptic yada-yada about COVID-19, Britain being hotter than Hades and the worst recession in human history, is that Phil Collins has returned to the charts thanks to a viral video of 22-year-old American twins Tim and Fred Williams listening to his debut solo single, In The Air Tonight, for the first time.

ICYMI, the twins host a YouTube show, Twins React, in which they review videos of songs they've never heard before. Their reactions are the show's chief selling point but it has evolved into something more cultish, as the brothers from Gary, Indiana (the city on the shores of Lake Michigan where pop's Jackson family came from) explore a wider world of music. At first they focused on rap, with which they were more familiar, but then they were turned on to Frank Sinatra's I've Got You Under My Skin (Tim had, apparently, never even heard of Sinatra) and things like Radiohead's Creep. A review of Dolly Parton's Jolene received two million views, prompting a Twitter response from La Parton herself: "No point in begging. Jolene already stole these two."

My original copy of In The Air Tonight - bought from MJM Records in New Malden in January 1981

So, back to the twins' encounter with Collins' solo debut: pressing play, they are at first mildly intrigued by the opening hiss of a Roland CR-78 drum machine's hi-hat. It was this noise that arrested my interest at the beginning of January 1981 when, browsing in my local record shop, looking for something to spend my Christmas money on, I, too, heard In The Air Tonight for the first time. I was pulled in by those first couple of bars of synthetic beats followed by the three-chord minor key motif from a Prophet-5 synth. Then comes the haunting, echoey vocal: "I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord". In their YouTube review, the Williams twins start nodding and trading comments about the song's overall vibe as it begins, unsure as to whether they're listening to rock music or, due to the drum machine, early hip hop. Halfway through, Collins sings: "Well, the hurt doesn't show, but the pain still grows - it's no stranger to you and me" followed by the thunderous break of live tom-toms struck in quick succession - "duh-DUFF-duh-DUFF-dah-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF!". "I have never seen nobody drop a beat three minutes into the song!" Fred exclaims. “That was cold, that was cold how he did that," his brother adds. "I ain’t gonna lie, Phil, you got me on that". As of Tuesday this week, the twins' video had been viewed more than four million times. Their subscriber base has also gone from 40,000 in early July to 400,000 today. Moreover, their review of In The Air Tonight has sent the song back into the charts. At the beginning of this week it sat at No.3 on the iTunes chart and was the fourth biggest selling song in the US in the week ending last Saturday.

The Williams' fêting of Collins might sound kitsch, like Glastonbury somewhat patronising a Barry Manilow or Lionel Richie with the 'legend' slot, but the now-69-year-old has form in this area: hip-hop artists have long been fans, even putting together a tribute album in 2001, Urban Renewal, that featured the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Dane Bowers, Lil' Kim, Kelis, Pharrell and Montell Jordan covering some of Collins’ biggest hits. They weren’t, though, being ironic.

Here’s where we get into the complicated DNA of Phil Collins' appeal. Up until In The Air Tonight, and its accompanying album, Face Value, Collins had been the drummer in Genesis who, when Peter Gabriel moved on, took over as lead singer. But in the 11 years between joining Genesis, fifty years ago this month, and the recording of his solo debut in 1980, he’d built a deserved reputation as a truly gifted drummer, something his critics frequently forget or ignore. Although Genesis were often derided, particularly by the music press during the punk era (which they survived) for being proto-prog, Collins' own musical sensibilities were often glossed over, despite coming from a musical background that included The Beatles, Motown, Stax and R’n’B, and branching into jazz fusion with the noodle-mungous Brand X and hanging out with members of Weather Report. Collins may never have been considered hip, but he was a highly respected musician, respected across the musical spectrum for his truly inventive, melodic drumming in particular. A case in point is Turn It On Again, the Genesis chart hit. Drum nerds might note that it is in 13/8 time. Who knew?

In The Air Tonight was either a turning point, or even the turning point. Some argue that Collins never bettered it, but that would be unfair. It does, though, stand out in his solo career, a point not lost by the fact that it was the first song on the first of eight studio albums, several of which generated enormous chart hits on both sides of the Atlantic and turned Collins into a global superstar. In The Air Tonight was a defining statement for an artist who'd been, until Genesis had its first chart hit three years before, relatively unknown. It was also unique as a pop song; like Ultravox's Vienna (released five days later), Collins' single was relatively long at over five minutes. Both songs were also divided by tempo changes more than halfway through. Both, too, had a similarly dystopian feel. It was, though, the album that ITAT appeared on that set in train one of the most dominant musical careers of the 1980s and early 1990s. Because, after the opening track, with its added bombast halfway through, enhanced by the so-called "gated reverb" Collins had accidentally invented with producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham while working on Peter Gabriel's third album, the album Face Value took an eclectic and meandering path through Collins' personal style palette. Track 2, It Must Be Love, was the kind of saccharine-sweet love song that Collins haters deflected the most. Track 3, a cover of the Collins-penned Genesis song Behind The Lines featured the Phenix Horns, the Earth, Wind & Fire brass section.

Hardcore Genesis fans, who’d barely adjusted to four-minute love songs replacing 22-minute epics, were horrified (worse came with the next Genesis album, 1981’s Abacab, which featured the Horns again). There was a plaintive dustbowl song, The Roof Is Leaking, and more brass-infused R&B in I Missed Again and Thunder And Lightning, and the album closed with a brave, technically brilliant cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, with a production that pointed much of Collins' later studio work back to what George Martin had pioneered with the Fabs to begin with. The trouble was, the albums that followed could be accused of repeating the pattern. Hello, I Must Be Going opened with a slowed down drum pattern reminiscent of In The Air Tonight's drum fill, while also providing a substantial hit with Collins' cheeky cover of You Can't Hurry Love. No Jacket Required included the clearly Prince-influenced Sussudio, and was, arguably, the album with the most hits and the biggest establishment of Collins as one of the 80s' biggest pop stars. But Seriously brought with it a similar array of hits and big productions, including I Wish It Would Rain Down with new chum Eric Clapton, Something Happened On The Way To Heaven and That's Just The Way It Is, though it was Another Day In Paradise that would endure, negatively, as another stick to beat Collins with, being a song sung by a multi-millionaire rock star about homelessness.

Collins' solo career started to spill over into his Genesis work, as the band moved further away from the prog epics about Giant Hogweed, and into becoming MTV darlings with their ‘wacky’ videos for songs like Illegal Alien and Invisible Touch. Collins took the blame for all this, without anyone bothering to know that it was as much the desired direction of Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks to go into a more pop direction. Collectively, though, Collins became an overwhelming fixture of the era. In some ways, he was the '80s. In The Air Tonight had featured heavily in the pilot of Miami Vice, in a scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs cruising down, fittingly, Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, in their Ferrari Daytona. Collins would later appear in the show, playing a shister game show host called ‘Phil the Shill’ (a somewhat notorious part, as the character used the word “wanker” on prime-time US TV at a time when a) it wouldn’t have been allowed on British television and b) most Americans wouldn’t have recognised the word, anyway).

At Live Aid, Collins appeared twice - first at Wembley and then later, courtesy of Concorde, in Philadelphia. Why? “Because they asked me.” Not even he realised how omnipresent he’d become: “I was always there,” Collins told The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey in 2016 when publicising his autobiography, Not Dead Yet. “I was always in your face. People were always talking about me, usually not in a nice way. There was definitely too much of me.” Peak zeitgeist was probably reached when Bret Easton Ellis wrote his novel American Psycho - later made into a film with Christian Bale - in which the principle character, murderous ‘80s investment banker Patrick Bateman, expounds on Collins’ music: “His solo efforts seem to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying in a narrower way,” he comments in the film adaptation while telling a couple of prostitutes to act out his sick fantasies. This, probably, was at odds with the ‘Nice Guy Phil’ persona that been built up by first being a decidedly un-rock-and-roll rock star, and then developing a solo career around music that, well, your granny would like. But it didn’t stop him selling millions more records, working on Disney musicals like Tarzan, and being the go-to drummer for every Prince’s Trust celebathon (he was a trustee of the charity).

In some respects, there are two, possibly three Phil Collins. There is the gifted drummer who played more of a role in Genesis’s early phase than many would acknowledge, and still kept them interesting when he took over as singer in 1975; then there is the global pop superstar, whose hundreds of millions of record sales, at one point, sat behind only Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s respective totals, whose tempestuous love life just seemed to fuel more albums of ballads and self reflection; and then there is a third Collins, vilified for divorcing his second wife by fax (he didn’t) and voting Tory (he didn’t, in 1992, as was reported - he’d told Piers Morgan, then editor of The Sun’s Bizarre column, that he’d consider going abroad if the incoming Blair government raised taxes, which became seen as a hardline Conservative position). But then he met and married his third wife, the Swiss national Orianne Cevey, and moved to the Swiss Riviera. For the tabloids, the story wrote itself.

More recently, though, Collins has been less uncool as unfortunate. Twenty years ago he temporarily lost his hearing, the start of a chain of health issues that have led to, today, him being unable to drum, walking with a stick, and performing from a chair on stage. We can assume that the Genesis reunion tour - now rescheduled to next year - will not see the once impish Collins leap about the stage and perform the elaborate tambourine ‘tarantella’ during the song I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe). Certainly there will be no mesmerising drum duets with second drummer Chester Thompson. Here, then, lay the core of what it was that I liked about Collins in the beginning.

However, this doesn’t address the issue of whether Collins can ever be considered cool, even if his reputation in the music industry - and not just the hip-hop community - is mostly intact. The Tory/tax exile mythology may have skewed views, notably Noel Gallagher’s (and even Bowie once cruelly referred to his ’80s pop spell as “my Phil Collins years”), but for those prepared to wade through the syrup of his ballads - brilliantly lampooned by Spitting Image with a profusely blubbing Collins singing Hello, You Must Be Going - go back to the period of Collins’ history which counts the most for me, as a member of Genesis in their most creative, musically contrarian phase, before the videos and US Top 40 assault.

Even when Collins was ‘just’ the drummer, sat behind the increasingly outrageous Gabriel, guitarists Rutherford and Steve Hackett hunched over 12-string guitars to the right, and keyboard player Banks adopting an equally slumped posture to the left, he applied techniques that made most other rock drummers look decidedly pedestrian (which is why he ended up doing side work for Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, John Cale and other contemporary luminaries). When he stepped up to the lead singer’s microphone, he brought an everyman appeal that contrasted with Gabriel’s previous aloofness. That’s the era I’d point to and say, you know what? Phil Collins was pretty cool. He still is, to be honest, but just don’t let that get in the way of established media lore.