Andrew Norman Wilson

In The Air Tonight

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.”

For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement. As an urban legend, the ritual involves playing “In the Air Tonight” at a low volume while telling the story behind the song and synching the narrative climax with its infamous analog drum break. Wilson’s teenage friend loaded a Phil Collins greatest hits album in his Aiwa Stereo System, and began to describe a night in which Phil stood atop a seaside cliff and watched a man refuse to come to the aid of a drowning swimmer. While the mysterious stranger escaped him that night, the encounter inspired Phil to write what became his first breakout hit as a solo artist, a haunting soft rock masterpiece that propelled him into superstardom and helped shape an era of pop music.

Online, details of the story behind “In the Air Tonight” are scarce, so Wilson decided to flesh out the narrative in the form of an 11 minute video, titled In the Air Tonight, and share it with the Phil Collins fan community subreddit.