Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  Our introduction went like this: John has played with Eric and knows him well. One tiring day during the Grace & Danger sessions, he’s looking for something to, ah, brighten up his day and thinks Eric can help. So John calls and asks if the pair of us can come over to Eric’s house in Ewhurst, not far from Old Croft. Eric must have said no—John is the kind of chap who has a tendency to overstay his welcome, and here he’s suggesting popping down to score with me, a complete stranger.

  So we meet in a pub in Guildford. Eric doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, but I do remember sitting with a pint of Guinness opposite one of my heroes. Me, quaffing pints in the pub, with the guy I’d idolized at the Marquee…Unfortunately, for a while thereafter I fear that Eric assumes I’m just someone who hangs about with John when he’s shopping for drugs.

  But by the end of ’79, Eric and I are very close. The friendship is partly fostered after I’m introduced to Hurtwood Edge, Eric and his wife Pattie Boyd’s house in Ewhurst, by one of their friends, songwriter Stephen Bishop, whom I’d met in LA on a Genesis tour.

  In these post-Andy dog days of ’79, robbed of any Genesis distractions, I visit Hurtwood Edge most days, often staying into the night. I befriend all of Eric’s Ripley pals, friends from his teenage years. We often travel en masse up to London to see football matches at Tottenham and West Ham, though Eric is a diehard West Brom fan.

  One memorable Sunday after a long session in his local pub in Ripley, Eric is too loose to drive. I’ve gone with him in one of his prized Ferraris, and we have to get it home. He takes the passenger seat, I take the driver’s. I’ve never driven a Ferrari. Eric says he’ll change gears, and all I have to do is use the clutch, brake and accelerator, and steer. This would be a challenge, even if I wasn’t the chap forbidden from driving the Hillman Imp or Mini Traveller in Genesis. It’s chaos, and I start to feel sorry for the Ferrari’s precision-engineered gearbox. But somehow we get to his house, and both the car and I breathe out.

  Other times we play pool until the early hours, drinking and laughing, then laughing and drinking some more. We have blues nights at The Queen Victoria, which follow my blue days. It’s the start of a beautiful friendship, not to mention a short-term lifesaver for me, and Eric and I will come to play significant roles in each other’s lives, personally and professionally, for years to come.

  In a way I enjoy this unforeseen, unwanted freedom. I’ve never much before just “hung out” with fellow musos. My career hitherto has been about me joining a line-up—I’ve never formed a band with a bunch of mates. This larking about with pals is new to me, and I take to it like a duck to champagne.

  At Old Croft there is partying, of sorts, in that we do stay up all night, but mainly to endlessly watch Fawlty Towers. It’s just me and the Brand X guys, sitting around, awake till morning, in this house down a gravel lane in Surrey, where the nearest other resident—a retired army chap, General Ling—has a lovely cottage. You should have seen his flowerbeds. Picture postcard. There are fun and games, and toy gunfights, which must have been somewhat discomfiting to our war veteran neighbor.

  Brand X even do that on record—on Product, Robin is credited with “gunfire and chainsaw”—and onstage, where the boys play jazz cowboys and Indians. We do slightly crazed gigs that are very Python-esque, with bleating sheep and barking dog sound effects. Brand X do a good job of saving me from myself a bit, for a bit.

  But these high jinks, funny and indeed useful though they are, must eventually come to an end. I like working, making music, too much. So I knock their partying on the head, and the guys move out. And I set to writing…well, I don’t know what I’m writing. Not yet.

  —

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch: when Genesis were in Japan we were offered, gratis, the newest drum machines by Roland, straight off the conveyer belt. The CR-78 is at the forefront of the emerging music technology. I’m told this is the sound of tomorrow. To me it’s a step on from the cabaret/lounge-bar drum machine, but still very limited. Mike and Tony took one each. But I’m a drummer. Why would I want a drum machine, a future that would consign me to the past? I said, “Thanks but no thanks.”

  But back in England, all three of us have started thinking it would be beneficial to Genesis if we could each record our song ideas at home. It’s becoming a bit of a late-seventies “thing” to have your own studio environment.

  One of our long-serving crew, tech/studio boffin Geoff Callingham, investigates the best home-recording kit, and we all buy a set-up. And lo, suddenly I do want one of those CR-78s. I decide that the master bedroom—what would have been my marital bedroom—is going to be my studio. That feels like an appropriate change of use.

  I move my great-auntie Daisy’s 1820 vintage, straight-strung Collard & Collard piano up there. I also have a Fender Rhodes piano and a Prophet-5 synthesizer. Handily, the previous owner of Old Croft was an old navy chap, a captain of not inconsiderable girth. I bump into him in The Queen Victoria one night (he’s only moved down the lane), and he mentions that he’d had the joists strengthened upstairs. For him it was about accommodating his sizeable bath; for me it’s about supporting the weight of Daisy’s piano, and of my future, in whatever form that may take.

  I also have a drum kit, jostling for space alongside that drum machine I said I didn’t want. But soon that old faithful kit is cast aside as I grow to like the CR-78. Maybe this coming technology won’t put me on the employment scrapheap after all.

  In my ad hoc studio in my empty, echoey, house-is-not-a-home gaff in leafy Surrey, I’m just playing, in every sense of the term. Tinkering. My ambitions are low. My technical knowledge stops just before I open the instruction manual. If I see the desk meters moving, and I can hear something play back, I’m happy. It means I’ve actually managed to record something. At this stage it doesn’t really matter what.

  I program some pretty simple drum-machine parts, and I mess about on the eight-track. Come back from the pub at lunchtime—after two pints of bitter, max—and mess about some more. Over a year these doodles of mine slowly take shape. But they are doodles. Nothing is really prepared, or finished.

  Yet nonetheless, gradually, without me even noticing really, doodles become sketches become outlines become mini-portraits. Become songs.

  The words? They just come out of me unbidden. This is true stuff. This is like jazz. I improvise, the lyrics coming off the cuff when I record the guide vocal. Sounds roll around in my mouth, become syllables, become words, become clauses, become sentences.

  One day, from out of the ether, I get together a nice chord sequence. It’s the opposite end of the scale to “The Battle of Epping Forest.” As I feel my way around my new studio, fiddle about with the sounds emerging in my head, the memories of early Genesis songs like that, and like those on The Lamb, are bleating in my head—music that was written with no idea of what would go on top, so it was all a bit busy.

  There was never too much “space” in Genesis music. Whereas I covet space. For sure the songs I might eventually record will have room to breathe. This embryonic number, built round this nice chord sequence, is the perfect example of the space I’m looking for. Without even thinking about it, I soon have a working title based on the lyrics I’ve sung: “In the Air Tonight.”

  This still-tentative song is the classic example of where I’m “at” as a fairly wet-behind-the-chords songwriter. What’s it about? I have no idea, because with the exception of maybe one or two lines or words, it’s totally improvised. I still have the sheet of paper with the original scribblings, with the letterhead of the decorator—not that one; the original one, Robin Martin, who hired the undercoating cuckolder—at the top. I’d write down what I’d just sung.

  “In the Air Tonight” is 99.9 percent sung spontaneously, the words dreamt up from out of nowhere.

  “If you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand”: that comes from a place of resentment and frustration, I know that much. That is what was going on. “Wipe off that grin,
I know where you’ve been, it’s all been a pack of lies”: I’m firing back, refusing to take it lying down, giving it as good as I’ve got.

  This is a message to Andy. Whenever I call to speak to her in Vancouver, I have difficulty getting through, literally and figuratively. I don’t seem to be reaching her.

  So I communicate in song. When Andy hears these words, she will realize how fucking hurt I am, and how much I love her, and how much I miss my kids, then she’ll understand. Then it’ll be OK.

  And there’s more where that came from: “Please Don’t Ask” and “Against All Odds” are also among the songs written at this time.

  Then again: I have also just told her that if she was drowning, I wouldn’t lend a hand. These are up and down times. What I write is dependent on the phone conversations we’ve just been having, or trying to have.

  There isn’t any distinct pattern to the song sketches that I slowly accumulate throughout 1979, just as the idea that I’m Making My First Solo Album remains abstract and remote. The emotions, and the intention, change from day to day. One day Andy might really piss me off by repeatedly slamming the phone down. Then, that night in the home studio, I’d be in full “fuck you” mood. But the next day I might write something like “You Know What I Mean.” Something more plaintive, heartfelt, broken, bereft.

  Out of raw emotion emerges instinctive truth. The lyrics and the message of “In the Air Tonight,” I later appreciate, are considerably greater than the sum of their parts. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life, oh Lord…” This is all subliminal, subconscious. Those words fit the music. The verses have a bit of a storyline, but there’s no link necessarily between them and the anger. And those words have been dissected by many, many people over and over again. Some guy gave me a thesis he’d done for his college degree; he’d analyzed how many times I’d used the word “the.” Other people suggest conspiracy theories about an actual drowning I seemingly once witnessed.

  What does “In the Air Tonight” mean? It means I’m getting on with my life, or trying to.

  Or: how some tunes knocked up in my bedroom shift a few copies

  What do Tony and Mike make of my DIY scribblings? Do I give them the option of using “In the Air Tonight” for the Genesis album that will become 1980’s Duke? Do I, in short, show my solo hand?

  The jury’s still out. My 1979 batch of writing is finished. These songs are by no means properly recorded, but the demos are done. And after this year of each of us recording on our own, Mike and Tony have finished their first solo projects, Smallcreep’s Day and A Curious Feeling respectively, and they’re raring to go with the next group project. Which is fine by me—at this time I’m still not thinking of this collection of newborn compositions as an “album.” But one thing I am clear on: these are the most personal songs I’ve ever written, created amid the emotional rubble of my wrecked marital home. The upshot is, by the time we begin work on Duke as the seventies bow out, I’m a little protective of these compositions.

  I have the idea of moving the writing sessions for this new Genesis album into the second master bedroom at Old Croft, a suggestion to which Tony and Mike agree without complaint. In terms of group songs, the cupboards are bare. Apart from a couple of bits, Mike and Tony have used up all their good material on their solo albums. That said, their solo-album period has been great for Genesis. A great relief, a great releasing of pressure. Previously when Tony came in with a piece that was already finished, he’d kind of steamroller it through: “This is a song I’ve written so this is what I want Genesis to do.” It wasn’t said as such, but it was implied.

  The three of us have a chat and come to an agreement that anything we’ve finished writing as an individual, we’ll keep to ourselves for future solo projects. Any incomplete but promising ideas, we’ll bring in and put to the band committee.

  Mike offers up a couple of songs that are really strong, “Man of Our Times” and “Alone Tonight,” as does Tony: “Cul-de-Sac” and “Heathaze.” I play them half a dozen demos, and they say, “These two are great—‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘Please Don’t Ask.’ ” In the former, they hear a kind of Beach Boys thing, which they like. The latter is a very personal song, my version of the conversational device David Ackles used in “Down River.” I thought that was an unlikely choice for the band—it’s so intimate, and very unlike anything Genesis have done before.

  But hand on heart, I do not remember not sharing “In the Air Tonight.” One reason I’m sure of this is that at this time I don’t view it as particularly special, as any kind of rare peach—my ’79 compositions are all peaches as far as I’m concerned. To be honest, I don’t really want to give any of them away, as I have quite strong ideas as to how they should sound. But at the same time, I’m still far from certain that I’m going to make a solo record, so this next Genesis album might well be my only shot at getting these songs out there.

  But what I also know is that I might never have this kind of in-song space again. Because once you put any song ideas to the band committee, Tony and Mike come in and add their ideas. And although we’re a million miles away from the fiddly, fussy days of “The Battle of Epping Forest,” we are not far enough away for me to say, “Do whatever you want to ‘In the Air Tonight.’ ”

  Still, just to reiterate, I have no memory at all of keeping it in my back pocket. I think I play them pretty much everything I have, apart maybe from “Against All Odds,” because for me that’s only a B-side. And based on that recollection, they choose not to choose “In the Air Tonight.” Mike has no memory either way, but Tony maintains he never heard it—otherwise he would have grabbed it for Duke.

  So we’ll never know definitively.

  But one thing I do remember Tony saying quite often is that my songs only have three chords in them, and as such they are unworthy of being “Genesis-ized.” In that telling, without the drums and the ornaments, “In the Air Tonight” is just a drum-machine part and three chords. Accordingly, it’s quite probable that it just doesn’t register with him.

  From Old Croft we move, in late 1979, to Stockholm, to Polar Studios. The material we’ve come up with for Duke is really strong, and I’m on a massive learning curve as a songwriter. I only started writing “properly” a year previously. Yet apart from bringing in “Misunderstanding” and “Please Don’t Ask,” my role in Genesis is as it was before. Tony and Mike like these songs, but I feel I’m still regarded as primarily the band’s arranger. I am gaining in confidence, though, gently pushing forward.

  Mike has this slow guitar riff in a funny time signature, 13/8, and I suggest speeding it up. That becomes “Turn It On Again.” I use the CR-78 on “Duchess,” which is the first time we use that drum machine in the studio. I’ve used it on my demos, and after a year in my bedroom with it, I know what it can and can’t do. It’s incredibly limited, but it works really well on “Duchess.”

  At one point “Behind the Lines,” “Duchess,” “Guide Vocal,” “Turn It On Again,” “Duke’s Travels” and “Duke’s End” are tenuously joined as one thirty-minute track about this character named Albert. He’s the figure in the album cover art by French illustrator Lionel Koechlin. But we know a single piece of that length is only going to be compared to “Supper’s Ready,” so we opt not to go there again. It’s a new decade and maybe “suites” that take up a whole side of an album won’t be indulged quite so readily anymore. A clean sweep is called for.

  Duke is the band’s commercial breakthrough, particularly in Germany. It starts Genesis mania there, which leads into Phil Collins mania. It will sell hugely in Britain, too, but gets a terrible review in Melody Maker, and on a couple of occasions I’m anointed “Wally of the Week” in the music press.

  Why? There’s the old saw that the “inkies” (as Melody Maker, NME and Sounds are collectively known) are automatically suspicious of anything that becomes hugely popular—the perception is that something has been dumbed down so as to appeal to the masses. Equally
, “prog” is fast becoming genre non grata at the indie-, post-punk- and New Wave–loving music papers. As frontman with Genesis, I am a target for such ire. Equally, I will hold my hands up and admit that, with all the success, it’s quite possible that I have been giving off an unintentional smugness.

  By the time the album is released, on March 28, 1980, we’ve already started the Duke tour. That particular day is the middle of three nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, which is when Eric Clapton—who attends at Pattie’s suggestion—finally realizes I’m more than a pool-playing drinking pal and mangler of Ferrari gearboxes. He actually sees that I’m a fellow musician, a revelation about which I later hear he’s a little surprised. The tour runs the length and breadth of the U.K. until early May, pauses for a week, then resumes in Canada for a North American leg that runs until the end of June.

  The third Canadian show is in Vancouver, and when I’m there I take the opportunity to call on Andy. Though the divorce is trundling on I’m still holding a candle for her, and desperately missing my kids. I’m thinking, “This could be the time we fix things.” The band have around three days in the city, and I stay with her mother. We’ve always been close, and I love Mrs. B. with or without her daughter.

  In a final, optimistic attempt to woo back my wife, I book into Vancouver’s Delta Inn for a night, invite Andy over, put on my compilation tape of irresistible songs—Chris Rea’s “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” and all of the other deathless torch songs that I know—and crack open the champagne and roses. The romantic in me thinks, “This is bound to work.” If nothing else, who can deny the power of these all-time great songs of love and loss?

  It doesn’t budge her at all.

  —

  Home in the U.K. that summer of 1980, I turn my attention back to the songs I wrote the year before. Time to put my recordings where my heart is.