Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight might be best-remembered for that drum fill, but Daryl Stuermer’s guitar parts are also pretty notable.
Stuermer was one of Collins’ key sidemen - both on his solo projects and, from 1978 onwards, as part of the Genesis live band - and recently sat down with Vertex Effects to discuss some of his most successful recordings with the drummer and frontman, starting with that strikingly odd 1981 single.
“In The Air Tonight was kind of unique,” says Stuermer. “He [Collins] had done the keyboards and drum machine at his house.”
Stuermer says that he first heard an embryonic version of the song in Collins’ car when he gave him a lift home from a Genesis rehearsal.
“So I get in his car and he says ‘I wanted to play you something,’” he recalls. “And he puts on this cassette of this song, In The Air Tonight, and at that time it was before it had the big drum fill, but it was very moody, and I’m listening to it and that’s the first time that I knew that Phil ever kind of wrote a song all by himself. I thought, ‘wow, this is fantastic, this would be great with Genesis, you know.”
Stuermer says that he was unaware at the time that Collins was planning a solo project - “I don’t think he knew,” he suggests - but that he started to work on the album that would become Face Value in December 1980, at the end of the Genesis tour.
“I lived in Santa Monica, California, at that time, and I went over to the studio where [Collins] was starting to record a solo album. That song already had everything but the drums on it - or should I say just synth chords and drum machine - and then he put on this drum fill, which changed everything.”
Stuermer’s guitar parts were recorded on a Suntech guitar running through Marshall’s The Guv’nor overdrive pedal, but he admits that, to begin with, he struggled with In The Air Tonight’s timing - specifically, how to locate the first beat of the bar for his opening, sustained guitar chord.
“It was confusing to me, even when I did the record,” he says. “I didn’t know that I was playing it in the wrong place.”
Collins told him that he wanted “kind of an electric razor sound” - “Phil would go like this, point at me,” says Stuermer, explaining that, even though the drum machine pattern starts on the one beat, because it starts with a hi-hat and there’s no kick, it sounds like it doesn’t.
It was fine to get this kind of guidance in the studio, of course, but on stage, Collins was busy performing, so Stuermer says that he had to listen very carefully - and watch for the moment that Collins triggered the drum machine from a foot pedal - to make sure that he came in at the right moment.
“A lot of us had this problem,” he says. “Even our keyboard player, Brad Cole, said, ‘where’s one?’ So what I would do is, I would always look over at Phil to see where he’s getting close to that pedal, because I was thrown off by this whole thing for probably a whole tour.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Stuermer discusses In The Air Tonight’s famous gated reverb drum sound, which Collins came up with alongside Peter Gabriel and producer Hugh Padgham. And, of course, he also touches on that iconic drum fill, pointing out that there’s one part of it that listeners often miss.
“That kick drum is the thing that people don’t really hear,” he says, “but it’s there as part of the feel and it’s there - if you really listen hard you can hear it.”
Commenting on the fill’s impact and legacy, Stuermer adds: “Only Phil could come up with that… it’s iconic. I mean, everybody loves that fill. And I’ll tell you this for a fact: that is my favourite song to play.”
