Music producer and session musician Rick Beato recently named Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” the greatest drum fill of all time in his popular “Top 20 Drum Fills of All Time” video.
“I've already done the top 20 acoustic intros, electric intros, drum intros, bass intros, keyboard intros, but now we're getting into the interior of the songs,” Beato said.
Before revealing his No. 1 pick, Beato admitted the project became one of the most difficult videos he had ever produced because every fill had to be reconstructed with the surrounding instruments and arrangements.
“When I thought of making this video, I didn't realize, well, drum fills are actually in the middle of songs, so you have to actually create everything that's around it.”
“When I was thinking about making this video, this is actually the first drum fill that popped into my mind,” he said before unveiling “In the Air Tonight” as his top choice.
“One day I was working on a piece in D-minor, the saddest [key] of all,” Collins recalled. “I just wrote a sequence, and it sounded nice. I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. I’m not quite sure what the song is about, but there’s a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration.”
Musically, the song built tension unlike almost anything else on pop radio at the time. For more than three minutes, Collins restrained the arrangement to eerie keyboards, drum machine pulses and simmering vocals before unleashing the now-iconic drum fill that completely changes the energy of the song.
The song’s influence has only grown with time. “In the Air Tonight” has appeared in films and television shows ranging from Miami Vice to The Hangover, inspired countless covers and remixes and repeatedly surged back into the charts thanks to viral internet moments and commercials.
Despite those struggles, the singer’s musical legacy continues to resonate across generations. Collins will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist later this year after finally receiving his first individual nomination decades after entering the Hall with Genesis in 2010.
“There’s no way Phil Collins wasn’t gonna be #1 in a Top 20 Drum Phils video,” one viewer joked.
“Man, you can tell that everyone was having a blast putting this together,” another fan commented.
“One thing I love about your presentations is that you explain things briefly enough to not condescend the musos while managing to explain enough for non musicians to know what's going on,” one viewer wrote.
Related: Amid Health Struggles, Phil Collins Finally Nominated for Rock Hall as Odds Favor 2026 Induction
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