The Real Meaning of ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins

By Oliver Tearle

‘I have no idea what it’s about.’ Phil Collins’s words about what is perhaps his most famous – and certainly his most talked-about – song don’t exactly sound like a promising starting-point on our journey to discover what the lyrics of ‘In the Air Tonight’ actually mean.

But then Coleridge didn’t seem to know what ‘Kubla Khan’ meant, and that hasn’t stopped critics from busily constructing potential interpretations around those stately pleasure domes and measureless caverns (though the ‘thick pants’ are perhaps no more than a bit of extra protection against the ravages of the cold in the winter months). And just because an artist isn’t sure what his work means, that doesn’t mean it is meaningless … if you get what I mean.

Still, the urban legend that the song is about someone drowning refuses to die. But it is just that: an urban legend. Collins put the story to rest in a 2016 interview, describing how he ‘wrote the lyrics spontaneously’ and isn’t ‘quite sure what the song is about, but there’s a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration’.

These emotions come through on many of the other tracks on Collins’s 1981 debut album, Face Value: not only on ‘In the Air Tonight’ (with its surprising drum solo bursting out of nowhere) but on another song, ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy’ (with its surprising high note bursting out of nowhere, a falsetto eruption which always used to threaten the longevity of my speakers whenever I played the LP too loudly as a teenager).

Collins’s divorce from his first wife Andrea Bertorelli in 1980 – often said to have been occasioned by her affair with a painter and decorator, a story spread by Collins himself when he performed ‘If Leaving Me Is Easy’ on Top of the Pops with a pot of paint sitting on the piano he was playing – was an important source of emotion for the singer’s debut album. (In fact, he had a paint-pot and brush nearby when he performed ‘In the Air Tonight’ on the show, too.) Face Value is about the singer working through his grief at the end of his marriage, and many of the songs seem either to be about Andrea or even directly addressed to her.

But what of the widely held belief that the song is about Collins witnessing some terrible tragedy? The urban legend states that the song is about a drowning incident in which someone who was close enough to save the victim refused to help them, while Collins, who was too far away to help, looked on and watched this not-so-daring non-rescue take place.

There’s no truth to this rumour. It’s all, to quote from the song itself, a pack of lies – refuted by Collins himself – but the legend persists in people’s minds, and in dark corners of the internet, and in Eminem’s early classic ‘Stan’, which directly references the myth.

This hasn’t stopped people from asking the singer whether ‘In the Air Tonight’ is really about someone witnessing someone else drowning, even though the song itself clearly casts the (hypothetical) drowning in the subjunctive mood (‘If you told me …’). Mind you, I’m hardly one to talk, as for years I laboured under the misapprehension that Collins was singing ‘if you told me you were driving’, and with this mondegreen in mind I always thought it endlessly sensible not to lend someone a hand, since a crash might well ensue.

At any rate, the drowning is clearly suggested in the song as an extreme example of the lengths a person wouldn’t go to in order to save this other person, although admittedly there’s some confusion over who has done what (or what has been done to whom, and what would not be done to them, and so on).

But one reason the story continues to be told – and believed – is that Collins himself can’t say what ‘In the Air Tonight’ is actually about: the lyrics were written in a state of heightened emotion, and we humans – being imperfectly evolved primates who like to bash everything complex or ambiguous and elliptical into a shape and pattern our poor brains can recognise – are always seeking reduce everything to a nice (or nasty) little narrative.

There’s even a version of the myth which posits that, when Collins was a young boy, he witnessed someone being drowned by someone else but was too far away to come to their rescue and fight off their killer. Later (this already improbable story goes), he hired a private detective to find the guilty person, before sending the murderer a free ticket to his concert, to which the man duly turned up in order to be unmasked as a criminal in front of the shocked crowd. Again, there’s not a shred of evidence to support such a fanciful story.

But the themes of the song are clear enough: anger, despair, and frustration (the three emotions Collins himself cited as inspiration for the song), to which we might also add a healthy dollop of distrust. These are natural emotions for someone to be experiencing when going through a messy divorce, so the ‘drowning’ is probably just a symptom of this extreme emotion. It’s symbolic, suggestive of someone being overwhelmed by grief and negative emotion during a difficult time.

The video for the song is dominated by Collins’s face surrounded by darkness as it sings the song at us, using what were presumably cutting-edge video-editing techniques in 1981 but which would now shame a ten-year-old playing about with the visual effects on his parents’ superannuated camcorder purchased circa 1998.

Combined with the song itself, with its cryptic meaning, the faintly religious flavour to some of its lyrics, and its explosive crescendo towards the end, this video helps to make ‘In the Air Tonight’ the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ of the 1980s, only without a fandango or bismillah in sight.