Riffiter’s review of the songIn the Air Tonight

In the Air Tonight is mostly a song about waiting. For over three minutes it's a cheap drum machine, a cold synth pad and Phil Collins sounding like he hasn't slept, and the tension never lets up. Then the toms come in, huge and cut off dead, and it still works on the hundredth listen. That sound came out of a talkback mic on Peter Gabriel's sessions a year earlier, but here it finally has a job: it's the release the whole track has been holding back. The lyric is vaguer than the legend people built around it, and the fade drags a little. The fill alone earns the score.