#3 – Phil Collins – “In the Air Tonight” – (1981)
I’m pretty sure this stands as the most famous and well known Phil Collins song. Musically, it’s pretty dark. There’s this kind of smoky atmosphere created by these long buzzing chords over that steady drum beat. Right before the final chorus, the drums explode with the very famous and much loved “doo-dom doo-dom doo-dom.” Everybody loves that part. Everybody waits for it. Then everybody starts banging on whatever is around them – steering wheel, desk top, etc. Lyrically it’s mostly uninteresting – just the same thing repeated over and over. There’s that myth that this song is about a drowning that Phil Collins witnessed. But even Phil doesn’t really know what this song’s about. He discovered a cool effect while messing around with some drums in a recording studio and wrote a song around it. This song was used in the first episode of Miami Vice – which cements its status as an 80s legend. Lately, it’s been popping up everywhere – which has to have something to do with its everlasting popularity. It was semi-annoyingly used in the movie The Hangover, where it was introduced to an entire new generation of fans more or less as a joke. But my favorite recent usage has to be in the Cadbury gorilla commercial. That commercial helped propel the song back onto the UK music charts – reaching #14 (and #1 in New Zealand). When you say “80s music,” this is generally the first song that comes to mind.