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“In The Air Tonight” is BACK!

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Number 2 song on itunes, thanks to youtube twins’ “react to…” channel.

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    • It’s a great album. I think Collins was the first to use Gated Drum on Peter Gabriel’s third solo album but for better or worse, smashed it out the park on ‘In the Air …’

        • Nope you are correct. Bowie, Visconti and possibly Eno “invented the 80s” with that LP.

          Drum sound courtesy of the Eventide Harmoniser, which “fucks with the fabric of time,” according to TV.

        • Well, in the interest of pedantry the following from ‘Recordingology’ regarding Bowie’s Low:

          Distortion / Gating –
          The snare sound in this tune is unique, not only in the spectral modification brought about through pitch shifting (see above), but also in that it sounds gated. True gated snare must wait until Peter Gabriel’s Intruder in 1980, but the dense spectral burst of Sound and Vision’s pitch shifted snare, starting the instant the snare is struck, and then ending abruptly — unnaturally abruptly — almost certainly motivated the search that led to gated snare.
          The Eventide H910 Harmonizer is one of the first digital processors available for the recording studio. It is an analog in, analog out, digital delay and pitch shifter. It has analog to digital converters, and digital to analog converters. The digital processor in between handles delay and pitch shifting, while compression, expansion and filtering are in the analog domain before and after the digital signal processing block. Metering was limited. A hot input into the H910 causes wild distortion. There are opportunities for overdriving the analog inputs, hitting the analog dynamics processors hard, as well as clipping the converters. The harmonic distortion is so strong — a combination of analog overdrive plus over compression plus hard clipping at the converters — that when the amplitude of the decaying snare waveform falls back below the threshold of distortion, the harmonics of distortion stop, and it sounds as if the snare sound stopped. The burst of heavy clipping snapping on and off with each hit makes the snare sound as if it had been gated.

          … So we are all correct …

  2. What a wonderful situation to be in. Imagine never having heard Phil Collins ‘sing’ In The Air Tonight. Imagine being able to keep it that way! Ahh…. paradise.

  3. Don’t dislike it but don’t need to click on something to hear it again. Don’t much care about young black kids’ reactions to it either. Other things to do.

      • These reaction videos are very wholesome, I love them a lot. Add quite considerably to the net joy of the world, and generally involve young people who couldn’t give a toss about what’s credible in the eyes of their dads and grandads, finding huge amounts of pleasure in stuff that is amazing to anyone whose ears aren’t blocked by 40 years of genre prejudice. It’s lovely seeing people really love music as music, rather than only being prepared to accept it if it has the correct contextual baggage.

        I feel like that’s one of the best bits about young people’s consumption of music. Tribes and eras and their associated cred (or lack-of) mean ball-all. I think they’re much better at listening with their ears than my generation ever were.

        • I’m sure we’re all guilty of not liking something because it’s not cool but in this case it’s the awful nasal whining that I hate. I’ve no real idea whether I’d like the music because I’ve never got past the vocals. Phil Collins’ version of Can’t Hurry Love is pretty much the same arrangement as the original so what’s not to like there…. but then there’s the fingernails down the blackboard whining.

          • Cool is a bit of a strange consideration for a bunch of men in our fifties!

            I wasn’t particularly referring to PC himself, fair enough if people don’t like his voice or any other part of his music. But it’s hard to deny that there are a lot of people roughly our age who enthusiastically shun mega-selling artists (purely coincidentally the same ones who were given hard kickings by the inkies at the time). It’s also hard to deny that kids today don’t seem to really give a toss about cred and really rate a huge range of music from yesteryear, some of which would’ve been Gen X NME-approved and much of which wouldn’t.

          • Whatever you think of his music (I like this track and a couple of Genesis efforts), I would imagine by any standards his vocals are pretty decent.

            • I’m not suggesting he can’t hold a note, I’m just saying, to my ears, it sounds bloody awful. I’d put a load of classically trained, and presumably very talented opera singers in the same boat.

      • I may be completely wrong here and if so I’ll take my criticism, but the reaction clips that I’ve seen all show black people reacting (invariably positively) to what is generally regarded to be white-people music.
        Makes me wonder if the intention is “See, Black People like our music, so it must be cool after all!”

          • Almost certainly the black participants are the ones who are originating the clips, with the aim of monetising their YouTube accounts. And why not.
            I suspect they are targeting a predominantly white audience with the music they use, with at least a partial intention to exploit their audience’s bias and prejudices.

      • I will bravely try to explain!!

        A “gate” is an electronic doo-dah you pass a sound through, and it cuts everything below a certain volume and allows through everything about a certain volume. So if you say “HELLO HELLO hello hello” through a gate, and set it at the correct level, you will hear HELLO HELLO but not the hello hello bit.

        With me so far?

        So….

        A snare drum in real life, if you listen to the actual sound, goes TICK-PHOOOOOooooooooo. (can’t come up with a better description). The TICK is the drum stick hitting the skin, and the PHOOOOOoooo is the skin resonating and dying off to silence (quite quick with a snare).

        SO…….

        A snare drum recorded and passed through a gate, with the level set correctly, will go TICK-PHOO and cut off suddenly. You won’t hear the ooooooo bit. And as you miss that natural resonance and tailing off of the sound, it sounds unnatural. If you combine that with mic-ing it and hitting it in the right way, you get that eighties DOOF DOOF sound.

        (I think to get the true eighties sound, you need a slight repeat echo as well, but that’s another story).

        Audio experts…. how did I do????

  6. I love the reaction videos by No Life Shaq on Youtube. He is such good fun, no idea if he’s authentic or not, but he seems to have some real enjoyment of music and isn’t beyond looking daft. He did seem to really get into metal for a while, don’t think that was fake.

  7. I’ve become quite fond of these two brothers & their reactions.
    What’s refreshing is they have absolutely no preconceptions & respond completely honestly whether it’s to Yazoo, Pavarotti or Nina Simone.
    The nice thing is, they like almost everything, & why not?

    • @KDH , I just had a look at the ACDC list. Bizarre and how is this for a comment:

      11. Ride On (1976)
      Regarded by many fans as the band’s most heartfelt song (and a favourite of Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch), this mournful blues has no hint of celebration.

      I mean who gives a fuck about what the guy from Belle and Sebastain thinks.

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