Phil Collins 1996 Interview: Where “In the Air Tonight” Came From

In this 1996 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Phil Collins, the voice behind “In the Air Tonight” and Genesis, sits down with Dini Petty freshly out of the band and, for the first time in years, happy. It was an interview he liked enough to ask for a copy of, and it shows: he is relaxed, funny and content, talking about happiness like a man who had just found it.

The center of the conversation is where his two most famous songs actually came from. Neither story is the one fans assume, and what he says about “In the Air Tonight” changes how you hear it. He is just as candid about the years he wanted to vanish. At the worst of the tabloid storm around his divorce, he says, he wished he could be a different person entirely. Then he explains what pulled him out of it.

He also talks through why he walked away from Genesis, and about writing songs for Disney. And there are his children: a twenty-year-old drummer, a daughter already on television, and a seven-year-old girl he jokes will end up a nuclear physicist. Her name is Lily Collins. He closes on what he believes his kids needed to see from him.

Collins had already spoken to Dini in 1993, days before Both Sides; this is a different conversation, three years and one band later. Unseen since its original 1996 CTV broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.