It takes three minutes and forty seconds before the signature moment arrives.

A powerful cacophony of drums explodes out of the speakers, taking Phil Collins' ominous, seething opus In the Air Tonight to another level that has helped it endure for four decades.

The song's legacy is entwined in that epic drum fill, considered to be one of the all time great pieces of pop percussion.

But there's a lot more to Collins' smash hit than drums — there's the air of mystery, a production mistake that shaped the future of music, and an urban legend about a drowning that never happened.

Well, I remember

In 1979, Phil Collins was the drummer and reluctant vocalist for British fusion rock band Genesis, having stepped into the frontman role when Peter Gabriel left the group.

The band had just broken into the US on the back of the ninth studio album … And Then There Were Three … and hit single Follow You Follow Me, but a gruelling nine-month, 100-plus show tour contributed to Collins' divorce from his first wife Andrea Bertorelli and led to Collins taking time away from Genesis.

"I had a lot of time on my hands," Collins told the BBC's Classic Albums episode about writing Face Value, the debut solo record he ended up creating during that hiatus.

He said the "album is definitely autobiographical [and] triggered by" his divorce.

But before Collins could get to work on Face Value, Genesis reconvened to make their 10th album, Duke.

Among the songs Collins presented to his bandmates was a dark dirge called In the Air Tonight — a droning synth-driven track filled with barely contained anger he'd written in the wake of his divorce.

Genesis rejected the song, much to their later regret.

Collins tucked it way and made it the opening track and first single off Face Value.

I can feel it coming in the air tonight

Somewhere among all this, Collins found time to play drums on ex-bandmate Gabriel's third solo album, where a happy accident in the recording studio would shape the future of music.

A microphone used to communicate between the drummer in the studio and the producer in the control room was accidentally left turned on while Collins drummed on Gabriel's track Intruder.

Producer Hugh Padgham was impressed by the sound coming through the talkback mic capturing the echo — or reverb — of the drums in the room loudly before suddenly cutting off before the echo could fade away naturally.

Padgham and his engineers worked through the night to rewire the desk so the sound could be replicated to record Collins' drums the next day, and a technique known as "gated reverb" was born.

While Intruder was the first track to use the technique, In the Air Tonight was the song that made it famous.

Gated reverb, on the back of that dramatic, huge-sounding drum fill of In the Air Tonight, became the sound of drums in the 1980s.

It's on records of every big act of the era — Whitney Houston, Madonna, Kate Bush, Prince, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and more.

Producers and musicians heard In the Air Tonight and went "I want that sound".

Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne declared decades after its release "that drum fill is the best ever. It still sounds awesome".

While the drum sound fell out of fashion in the 1990s it has enjoyed a revival of late as artists and producers attempt to recapture the sounds of their childhoods and their parents' record collections, found on contemporary hits by Lorde, Taylor Swift, HAIM, and many more.

But I don't know if you know who I am

Australian producer Francois Tetaz, who won a Grammy for his work on Gotye's mega-hit Somebody That I Used to Know, remembers hearing In the Air Tonight for the first time on a jukebox at a fish and chip shop during a family holiday when he was 11 years old.

The song has been etched into his mind ever since, but his admiration for it extends beyond its studio trickery.

"It's a very primal song," Tetaz said.

He said the famed drum fill symbolises the moment when the narrator snaps, likening it to slamming a door or punching a wall.

"It's about being very, very angry about something," Tetaz said.

He said the song's minute-long fade-out is like the anger fading away after that moment of release.

"[The song has] such a good form. It actually mimics human behaviour really directly," Tetaz said.

He said that unique form is part of the song's genius.

"It's one of those huge pieces of expectation. In modern terms it's waiting for 'the drop'," Tetaz said.

"You've got this big build up where you go 'oh my god, he's so angry. Oh my god, what's going to happen?'

"And then all of a sudden, it delivers on this big expectation in the weirdest way — the biggest drums from all time.

"And then it's just, basically, it's one big chorus and outro, and that's it.

"That's very unusual in a song. Normally you're teased in different ways a little, and then you have something, and then you come back to it again.

"But In the Air Tonight's not like that. It's just like one big wave."

It's all been a pack of lies

Collins said he wrote "99.9 per cent of the lyrics" on the fly while recording the demo. He just let the pain of his divorce flow out of him in a monologue straight from his subconscious.

"I didn't know what I was singing about," he told the Classic Albums program.

Despite Collins' insistence there is no real meaning to the song beyond its emotion, a sinister urban legend sprang out of the intrigue buried within its lyrics and an overly-literal reading of them.

The myth goes that Collins wrote the song after witnessing an incident in which a friend drowned while a man refused to come to his aid.

According to fact-checking website Snopes, further versions of the story have Collins tracking down the person who let his friend drown, giving them front row tickets to the concert where he premiered In the Air Tonight, and then turning the spotlight on the person while he performed the song.

The legend has been referenced in a Family Guy episode, rapper Eminem mentions it in his track Stan, and Snopes lists about dozen variations of the same story — all supposedly detailing the real story behind In the Air Tonight.

Collins told the BBC the urban myth was popular in America and became increasingly annoying for the musician.

"Every time I go back to America the story gets Chinese whispers, it gets more and more elaborate," he said.

I've been waiting for this moment

The intrigue, the drum beat, the sound, and the passion within the song have all contributed to its longevity and helped make Collins one of the biggest stars of the '80s.

In The Air Tonight went top five in dozens of countries and has sold approximately five million copies globally, though it was kept off the number 1 spot in the UK by the posthumous John Lennon single Woman.

Over the next two decades he would have 28 top-50 singles in the UK, including three number 1s.

Simultaneously, his band Genesis also managed 22 top-50 singles in the UK.

Remarkably, In the Air Tonight has re-entered various charts around the world about a dozen times, most recently reaching number 9 on Billboard's Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart in the US last year on the back of a YouTube reaction video to the song.

But all this success, among other factors, helped lead a backlash that saw Collins fall out of favour and derided as so middle-of-the-road that his album covers should have had a white stripe on them instead of photos of his face.

Accusations of tax exile and slanging matches with Oasis' Gallagher brothers didn't help, and Collins' career became a punchline for all that seemed wrong about '80s music.

He's even used as an example in the movie American Psycho to illustrate serial killer Patrick Bateman's love of '80s superficiality over substance.

But in recent years, Collins' back catalogue has been re-evaluated.

Media outlets such as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Quietus have written lengthy pieces defending Collins or, in the case of sport and culture website The Ringer, asked the very loaded question "does this guy deserve to be hated?"

Collins' fans include Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and Lorde. He's held in high esteem in hip-hop circles where his music is regularly sampled. And his talents as a drummer and vocalist have been championed by diverse corners of the music industry.

Among all the ups and downs of Collins' career, In the Air Tonight has endured. 

It's a rare song that almost single-handedly pioneers the sound of an era, but it's an even rarer one that continues to have an impact 40 years on.

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