After original singer Peter Gabriel left to pursue his own musical path, Collins stepped up to fill his role as the band’s singer, as well as play the drums.

For both iterations of the band, they established Genesis as one of the foremost progressive rock players.

But there came a time when he needed to chase ambitions of his own, outside of the Genesis unit.

For Phil Collins, the impetus to make such a drastic career change was a devastating heartbreak that encouraged him to leave Genesis and go solo.

The catalyst for Collins’ pursuit of pop superstardom was in fact his wife, Andrea Bertolucci, who divorced him having cheated on him prior, inspiring a song that’d change everything for Phil.

The song he poured his heartbreak into? ‘In The Air Tonight’, which then evolved into his debut solo album, Face Value.

In his 2016 memoir, Not Dead Yet, Collins revealed how the devastating situation pushed him to try something new.

“I never thought of myself as a songwriter,” he said. “So in my instance, it took a divorce to kickstart [songwriting].”

Angry and distressed about his ex-wife Andrea divorcing him, the drummer departed Genesis briefly to get his head straight.

Finding himself in a unique position creatively, Collins penned most of the songs that would form Face Value as “messages” to Andrea in an attempt to win her back.

Obviously, the most famous of these would become ‘In The Air Tonight’, a song which literally points to the fact his negative feelings were “in the air”, impacting him, his broken marriage, and his family.

Collins explained to Mix magazine: “I got back to find that I had a lot of time on my hands because the family wasn’t there, I rang up and said, ‘Can I have my drum machine?'”

“Because I had to start writing some of this music that was inside me.”

“The lyrics you hear for ‘In The Air Tonight,’ I just sang. I opened my mouth and they came out. I never wrote anything down and then afterwards, I listened to it and wrote them down.”

The song’s brooding menace, slick twilight aesthetic, and iconic drum sequence ensured ‘In The Air Tonight’ was an enormous hit for the newly anointed solo star.

Featuring in the opening episode of the cultural phenomenon-come-cop series Miami Vice boosted the song’s appeal further, propelling it to number two in the UK charts, as becoming a top five hit around the world.

The success of ‘In The Air Tonight’ even convinced Genesis to change tack and shift to a poppier direction.

It could’ve been a hit for Genesis with Collins claiming to have offered it to his bandmates first, though he said it was rejected for “being too simple”, a claim Tony Banks denied.