Chart entered : 17 January 1981
Chart peak : 2 ( 4 in a re-mix in 1988, 26 as a credited sample on Lil Kim's "In The Air Tonite" in 2001; 14 on reissue in 2007 )
Number of hits : 32
So we move into 1981. After a bumper year in 1980 we'll move quite speedily through this one as there are relatively few hellos and some of those are established artists beginning solo careers like this one...
We know where Phil came from. The impetus behind his first solo project was his first wife leaving him for an interior decorator in 1979 and him retreating to his 8 track studio to write some songs in response. Both Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks had already released solo albums by this point so there was no problem with Phil doing likewise and some of the spare material went on Genesis albums from Duke onwards. I don't think they were quite prepared for how well it was going to do though.
"In The Air Tonight" was the extraordinary first single from the resultant Face Value album. It's sparse, edgy feel and use of electronic effects distanced the single from its creator's prog-rock background and chimed well with the despondent pre-Falklands national mood. Although the lyrics appear to be directed towards the intruder in his wife's bed Phil says they were written spontaneously in a mood of generalised anger and have no specific meaning. Mind you he also says that the paint pot which appeared by the keyboards when he performed the singles from the album on Top of the Pops was just a stage prop to emphasise the D.I.Y. nature of the recordings so we can be a bit sceptical of these claims. Phil is entitled to be dismissive of the urban legends about him witnessing an actual drowning which gained enough currency to be referenced in Eminem's Stan.
The song of course is most famous for the big drum break that crashes in at 3:15 after the line "It's all been a pack of lies " which is actually even more dramatic on the album version because Ahmed Ertegun at Phil's American label Atlantic insisted on him playing underneath the spartan drum machine for it to be released as a single. It introduced Hugh Padgham's "gated reverb" effect to big hit singles which would be much abused over the next decade but it would be unfair to blame Phil for that.
With one or two exceptions it was mostly downhill from here as far as appreciating Phil's solo stuff went for me particularly his hamfisted attempts to do "black music", but this is still a great record as its chart record would indicate.
I do agree with the "hamfisted" point, but it could be because of our Englishness. I'm sure you're aware of the huge appreciation of his work in the US hip-hop and modern R&B scene. Baffling, I know, though perhaps a lot of it could be due to the sound of the beats making them easier to sample.
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