In the Air Tonight/Phil Collins/ROCK Cover by STATE of MINE Audio/ English Lyrics

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By 1978, he had been part of Genesis for nearly eight years, and had reluctantly accepted the role of front man following Peter Gabriel's departure.

For the band's album 'And Then There Were Free', they had taken on a more mainstream sound, with songs such as 'Follow You Follow Me', with Phil's vocals at the forefront. He had been planning to do a solo album for some time by 1981.Phil wrote the song during the grief he felt after divorcing his first wife Andrea Bertorelli in 1980. The divorce contributed to his 1979 hiatus from Genesis, until the band regrouped in October of that year to record the album Duke.

All of the original songs on the Face Value album, including follow-up hit 'I Missed Again', were intended to be "messages" to his first wife, in an attempt to lure her back to him.

Phil said in 2016: "I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. I'm not quite sure what the song is about, but there's a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration."
The story goes that Phil watched as a man who once attacked his wife drowned. Another version was that Phil wrote the song about a man who watched another man drown, and sang it to him at a concert.

Yet another version claims that when Phil was a young boy, he witnessed a man drowning someone but was too far away to help. Later, he hired a private detective to find the man, sent him a free ticket to his concert, and premiered the song that night with the spotlight on the man the whole time.

Of course, none of these stories are true.

The song is known for its atmospheric production and rather macabre theme, and was thought to have been influenced by the likes of Brian Eno and his ex-bandmate Peter Gabriel.

It consists of a series of ominous chords, played by a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 over a drum machine pattern (the Roland CR-78 Disco-2 pattern), processed electric guitar and vocoded vocals. The song builds up until an explosive burst of drums releases the tension.

Phil improvised the lyrics during a songwriting session in the studio. He said: "I was just fooling around. I got these chords that I liked, so I turned the mic 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 sang 99.9% of those lyrics spontaneously." @harithmusic