phil collins

Phil Collins, the balding British everyman whose drumsticks once thundered across stadiums like low-yield artillery, has become an unlikely barometer of planetary decline. While the man himself now shuffles on titanium hips through a quiet life in Switzerland—tax-efficiently close to his Geneva vault—his back-catalogue has metastasised into a global lingua franca of resignation. From Manila malls to Murmuzik playlists, “In the Air Tonight” drifts out of tinny speakers like carbon monoxide: invisible, omnipresent, faintly fatal.

Consider the geopolitics. When NATO defence ministers need a sonic metaphor for looming catastrophe, they cue up that gated-drum avalanche at 3:19; it’s cheaper than commissioning Hans Zimmer and already cleared for use at black-site mixers. In Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un reportedly plays the song on repeat while inspecting missile silos—part motivational soundtrack, part veiled threat. Meanwhile, in Brussels, exhausted bureaucrats negotiating the 27th revision of EU fiscal rules unwind by humming “Another Day in Paradise,” a song about homelessness that became the unofficial anthem of late-stage capitalism. The irony is so thick you could spread it on subsidised French butter.

Collins’s imperial phase coincided with Pax Americana’s cocaine-fuelled senescence. “Sussudio” dropped in ’85, the same year the Plaza Accord realigned world currencies and hastened Japan’s bubble; causation is unproven, but traders still swear the yen wobbled every time Phil scatted that nonsense syllable. His soundtrack to Disney’s Tarzan (1999) arrived just as the Washington Consensus was swinging, vine-like, into the Global South—privatising rainforests with the same ruthless efficiency Collins applied to divorces. Today, Ecuadorian kids who’ve never seen a drum kit know every word of “You’ll Be in My Heart,” proof that soft power can be softer than a pensioner’s hi-hat.

The man retired twice, because once wasn’t enough to satiate the gods of spectacle. Each time, world markets wobbled: in 2011, the day he announced his first farewell, Greek bond yields spiked; analysts blamed the ECB, but conspiracy theorists noted the timing. His comeback tours resemble IMF austerity programs—technically voluntary, excruciating to endure, and ultimately profitable for promoters in Singapore. When Collins played Mexico City in 2019, ticket prices surpassed the monthly minimum wage; scalpers quoted pesos in scientific notation. The crowd still sang every lyric, proving that economic despair and Phil Collins are a co-dependent couple, like Boris and Brexit.

Technology, ever helpful, has ensured his immortality. An algorithm trained on climate data recently generated a new Collins ballad titled “I Wish It Would Stop Raining (Acid),” which charted in seventeen countries before anyone realised it wasn’t human. Deepfake Phil fronts holographic residencies in Vegas, Macau, and—because nothing matters—Riyadh. The Saudis paid him a modest kingdom’s ransom to appear posthumously at a 2030 Vision gala; Collins attended via Zoom from his living room, wearing compression socks and a look that said, “I’ve seen the future, and it’s beige.”

At the outer rim of the former empire, his influence mutates. In Lagos, Afrobeats producers sample “Easy Lover” like archaeologists looting a sarcophagus; in Seoul, K-pop trainees practise his stick work under the delusion that perfect paradiddles will reunite the two Koreas. Even the Taliban, no fans of Western decadence, reportedly blast “Against All Odds” in captured Humvees—proof that occupying armies and insurgencies share the same tragic mixtape.

So what does it mean, this planetary Phil-ic embrace? Perhaps that in an age of fractured narratives and evaporating certainties, we cleave to a balding prophet who warned us, back in ’81, that he could feel it coming in the air tonight. He was talking about heartbreak, but heartbreak scales nicely to civilizational collapse. Collins gave us the soundtrack; we supplied the apocalypse. And like the final cymbal crash in “In the Air Tonight,” it hangs unresolved—decaying slowly, forever, over a darkening world stage.