SOMETHING IN THE AIR SERIES
SOMETHING IN THE AIR FREE

The verse and chorus have a great melody. You know itвЂ™s right, the time is now it is in the air. It talks about handing out ammo to all the instigators because the revolution is here. This song is a little more insidious than other protest songs. The impetus behind the protest at the time was the Vietnam war. I said, 'The drums come in in a minute.' 'Yeah, you know that and I know that, but the kids don't know that you've got to put the drums on earlier.' So we added some drums to the mix and put it out as a single.What happened to all the great protest music? Thunderclap Newman was a one-hit wonder, but what a hit they had in вЂњSomething in the AirвЂќ! In 1969, there was something in the air, and they were feeling revolution. 'And he was saying, 'Where's the down beat, where's the backbeat?'.

The drums don't come in until the end but Ahmet didn't know that at this point, because on the demo the drums hadn't come in at all it was only drum machine all the way Phil said: 'Ahmet came down to the final mix in the cutting room in New York. These were added after it was suggested to do so by Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun. The original single version of the song features extra drums that play underneath the song until the signature drum crash. It originally didn't have a drum beat before the 'magic break'.Engineer Hugh Padgham was impressed at the sound, and so they rewired the board so that the reverse talkback could be recorded more easily. While recording 'Intruder' for Peter Gabriel's third album, Phil started playing the drums while the reverse talkback was activated. In order to compensate for sound level differences, this circuit has a compressor on it, which can minimize the differences between loud and soft sounds. Whereas, reverse talkback is a button-operated circuit for the engineer to listen to musicians in the studio. Normal 'talkback' is a button that the mixing engineer presses in order to talk to the musicians. His Solid State Logic 4000 mixing board had a 'reverse talk-back' circuit. Phil's use of the song's drum beat came via an unintended use of studio technology.

That frightens me a bit, but I'm quite proud of the fact that I sang 99.9% of those lyrics spontaneously.' The lyrics you hear are what I wrote spontaneously. I got these chords that I liked, so I turned the mic on and started singing. Phil improvised the lyrics during a songwriting session in the studio.

The song builds up until an explosive burst of drums releases the tension.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR SERIES

It consists of a series of ominous chords, played by a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 over a drum machine pattern (the Roland CR-78 Disco-2 pattern), processed electric guitar and vocoded vocals. The song is known for its atmospheric production and rather macabre theme, and was thought to have been influenced by the likes of Brian Eno and his ex-bandmate Peter Gabriel. Of course, none of these stories are true.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR FREE

Later, he hired a private detective to find the man, sent him a free ticket to his concert, and premiered the song that night with the spotlight on the man the whole time. Yet another version claims that when Phil was a young boy, he witnessed a man drowning someone but was too far away to help. Another version was that Phil wrote the song about a man who watched another man drown, and sang it to him at a concert. The story goes that Phil watched as a man who once attacked his wife drowned.

I'm not quite sure what the song is about, but there's a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration.' Phil said in 2016: 'I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. The divorce contributed to his 1979 hiatus from Genesis, until the band regrouped in October of that year to record the album Duke.ДЄll of the original songs on the Face Value album, including follow-up hit 'I Missed Again', were intended to be 'messages' to his first wife, in an attempt to lure her back to him. Phil wrote the song during the grief he felt after divorcing his first wife Andrea Bertorelli in 1980. The album, when it does come out, will have a lot of different styles on it.' Phil said at the time: 'One ambition is to do my own album which will have a lot of variety. Read more: This performance of 'In the Air Tonight' by Phil Collins is incredible He had been planning to do a solo album for some time by 1981. What a way to start! By 1978, he had been part of Genesis for nearly eight years, and had reluctantly accepted the role of frontman following Peter Gabriel's departure.ДЇor the band's album 'And Then There Were Free', they had taken on a more mainstream sound, with songs such as 'Follow You Follow Me', with Phil's vocals at the forefront.

Something in the air