YouTube decided to feature a couple of overlong videos about the legendary drum fill in “In the Air Tonight.” (I’m not linking to them, because the same information is in its Wikipedia article, and just because YouTube pushes people to make 20-minute-long videos so it can cram in more advertisements that is not a good enough reason for people to pad their videos. Your time and mine is valuable.
Anyway, a bunch of killjoys said “It’s not even a drum solo, it’s just a drum fill. There are plenty of drummers much better than Phil Collins.” Yes, yes, and yes, but it’s unarguably iconic and legendary. It’s not those eleven tom-tom hits, it’s the sound, the build-up in the song, the engineering that make it so.
Beyond the drum fill
That drum fill doesn’t make Phil Collins a great drummer. What ensures his greatness is another song on Face Value, “Behind the Lines.” I knew and loved it for decades as the irrepressibly funky R&B workout with Phil Collins nailing that disco-ish hi-hat plus finger snaps backbeat, with some explosive yet bouncy fills.
Then I learned from a YouTube comment that it’s a remake of a Genesis song off their Duke albume. WTH?? The original is pop-prog-rock: energetic yet lugubrious, keyboard-centric. Still great drumming.
The fact that it’s THE SAME DRUMMER makes Phil Collins one of the all-time greats. The fills, the timing, the way in the instrumental bridge of the song he hits a drum just as he closes the hi-hat, they’re different in the two songs, and it’s all masterful.
Which Brand X?
I liked the Genesis singles in the 1980s and “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” in a beer ad, but I had a bad experience buying the Genesis album on the strength of the singles “That’s All” and the wistfully great “Taking It All Too Hard”; I was disappointed by the other songs, so I never bought Duke and most Genesis albums. Likewise I knew Phil Collins was in the well-reviewed 1970s jazz fusion band Brand X, but I never heard any of the songs on the radio and I certainly wasn’t going to take a chance buying an album.
Now that I can listen to almost any song for free, a few years ago I checked out Brand X’s albums, and some of the drumming is great, a third confident style from Phil Collins. But I can’t remember which songs I liked! They’re instrumentals so there’s nothing to tie them to a title. And when %$#@! YouTube Music shows me Brand X Top Songs or Brand X album tracks, it doesn’t indicate which ones I gave a thumbs up to which added them to my 1,872-song-long “Liked” auto-playlist.
Painfully liked music
I just viewed my “Liked Music” playlist and clicked 🡳 download… and the fans on this laptop quickly turned on YouTube Music seems to be downloading an image for every single song in that list. It’s been going for 25 minutes at 130% of my CPU! I think it’s actually downloading all the songs… somewhere. Eventually Firefox hung and I had to restart it. ??! I guess I’ll never know which Brand X songs I liked.
A Frank Zappa connection
One comment claimed that Chester Thompson’s repeated drum fill on Frank Zappa’s “More Trouble Every Day” on Roxy & Elsewhere was the inspiration for the “In the Air Tonight” fill. It certainly sounds similar but then another commenter said no, Phil Collins reused the drum fill on the live version of the Genesis song “Afterglow” (and the Wikipedia article agrees).
