Raw Animalistic Energy

The drum fill from Phil Collins' bleakest song is being sold back to us again, 45 years later, under a title that finally admits what it's for.

Phil Collins recorded "In the Air Tonight" while his first marriage was falling apart, and for years he wouldn't say much more than that. Didn't stop the internet from filling in the blanks: for decades the real story got buried under a stubborn urban legend that he'd written it after watching a man let someone drown, then called the guy out from a spotlit stage years later. None of it happened. Collins has spent interview after interview saying so — the song is just a divorce, "obviously written in anger," at his first wife Andrea.

The invented version outlived the real one almost as thoroughly as the drum fill outlived the marriage. In 2007, Cadbury put a gorilla behind a drum kit miming that exact fill to sell chocolate bars, with zero interest in what the song was actually about — one of the ad's own creators described the drum break simply as "raw animalistic energy." Dairy Milk sales went up 9% that year. The song, which never got a UK physical single release back in 1981, charted at No. 14 off the strength of an ad alone. It's since passed a billion streams. Two years later, Mike Tyson turned the same song into a completely different kind of punchline — his lip-sync scene in The Hangover is still one of the most quoted three minutes in the movie.

Forty-five years on, Rhino's new box set — out September 18, per Ultimate Classic Rock's coverage of the announcement — remasters the whole album at Abbey Road and adds a stripped-down 1981 "In the Air Tonight" with just Collins and Daryl Stuermer at the piano. It's called Face Value (Full Value), a title that isn't hiding what a song born out of real anger has spent four and a half decades becoming.