But the SSL had a reverse talkback button and there was a microphone hanging up in the studio already, a dedicated input into the reverse mic input on the console. To do that, you’d plug a microphone into a spare channel on the desk and listen to your musicians through that. “On a normal console, you have a button to press to talk to the musicians in the headphones, but you did not have a button to press for us to listen to the musicians. “It was also one of the first consoles to have reverse talkback,” Padgham continues. “But this was the first console where you didn’t have to say to the assistant, ‘Can you plug in a compressor please or a noise gate?’ You pressed a button and there it was. “Up until then, that had not been seen before and was deemed to be either unnecessary or an extravagance,” Padgham recalls. And it was working in Townhouse Studios’ Studio 2, recording Gabriel’s “Intruder,” that Padgham first stumbled on a new drum sound that was based around the capabilities of the studio’s brand-new SSL console - one of the first made - which had compressors and noise gates on every channel. Padgham had met Collins while engineering Peter Gabriel, which Steve Lillywhite produced. I’ve sort of sweated blood getting this far.’ So he said, ‘You tell me how I can help.’” Ertegun agreed that somehow Collins could work with the demos as masters and when Collins called engineer/producer Hugh Padgham into the project, he also agreed. You’ve got to record them,’” Collins recalls. “He said, ‘You’ve got to do this and I’ll help you any way I can. Later, while delivering Genesis’ Duke album to Ahmet Ertegun in London, Collins shared some of his solo demos with the Atlantic Records guru. I put a vocoder on my voice and all that was demo’d.” It wasn’t angry, there were no sound effects, just very cool drumming as a guide. It came in where the drums would have come in after the drum fill very straight-ahead. “I did have a drum kit in my studio at the time,” Collins continues, “but recording drums was always difficult because I’d hit the drum and then rush to the fader and then hit the drum and rush to the fader, so I did record some drums on it, but originally, there was no drum fill. I still have got the bit of paper it was written on, a piece of business paper from the decorator. I never wrote anything down and then afterward, I listened to it and wrote them down. The lyrics you hear for ‘In the Air Tonight,’ I just sang. I remember the first principle I had for making my record was that I would get a voice down very quickly so everything else would fit to the voice. I was coming from Genesis recording and rehearsing history where sometimes we didn’t know what the vocal was going to be doing when we recorded the track because lyrics were sometimes written after the track was recorded. “I probably added an acoustic Fender piano pretty early. I got the drum machine working, I got a nice sound on the Prophet 5, which was the sound of ‘In the Air,’ and I found some chords I liked and recorded them. I didn’t like manuals, I didn’t really know anything about electronic recording, so if I saw the meter moving, I was happy. “If I got it on tape, I was pretty lucky. “I had a Prophet 5 and an acoustic grand piano and a Fender Rhodes and that was really it,” he continues. You could eliminate certain sounds and program bass drums and snare drums, so I programmed a bass drum part into it, but basically the rest of it was already on there. ‘In the Air Tonight’ was just a drum machine pattern that I took off that CR78 drum machine.
Face Value was all written over a period of a year-and-a-half, and some songs were written overnight.
But when I got back to find that I had a lot of time on my hands because the family wasn’t there, I rang up and said, ‘Can I have my drum machine?’ because I had to start writing some of this music that was inside me. “But they bought a desk - an 8-track 1-inch machine - and I remember in Japan, they gave us the early Roland drum machines, but I said I didn’t want one. “Around the time of that tour, all the band bought home studios, although they were very primitive in those days,” Collins recalls. Like most great lyrics, “In the Air Tonight” - and much of his smash hit 1981 solo debut album, Face Value - was born from Collins’ personal pain: When he returned home from a tour with Genesis, with whom he had played drums for a decade, he found his marriage broken and his family gone. In fact, during his live concerts, Collins plays the song on piano and leaves the drum fills for the audience to play - in the air. If you see someone playing air drums in the car stopped beside you at the red light, there’s a decent chance they’re playing Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” The song is the quintessential air drum number.