“A lot of people think this song is about going home but, in fact, it’s a very much darker song. The way I see it is more like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” It’s about a mental asylum.”Phil Collins (154)

“The idea is…you think you’ve dealt with something and you just happen to walk down the street one day and then suddenly you bump into someone and suddenly that can of worms that you thought you’d dealt with gets opened up again.”Phil Collins (154)

“The lyric is all about this guy who has a schoolboy crush on this girl at school. “Sussudio” is a made up word I used when writing the song and it became the name of the girl in the song.”Phil Collins (154)

“My dad died eighteen years ago and I regret that I don’t have as many memories of him as I would like to have.”Phil Collins (638)

“Sometimes I write because things like this are bothering me [not having enough memories of his father – Ed,] but at other times the songs just creep up behind me and write themselves. ‘Another Day In Paradise’ wrote itself. I didn’t have to sit down and say, ‘Let’s write a song about the homeless.’ I sat down at the piano, started singing and those words came out.”Phil Collins (638)

“This is one I got a lot of flak for because I’m a multimillionaire. It was inspired by an incident in Washington, D.C. We were driving around in a limo and I saw all these boxes on Capitol Hill. It was snowing, and I said, “What’s going on here? Is there some sort of demonstration?” Someone said, “No, that’s where these people live.” I just thought, “This is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. How can this happen?” It put a bee in my bonnet.”Phil Collins (1169)

“Actually, ‘Both Sides’ (released Nov 1993) was a more intensely personal album than ‘Face Value’ [written after the break up of his first marriage to Andrea – Ed]. I’d come off the most personal thing of my life [breaking up with his second wife, Jill Tavelman – Ed] with ‘Both Sides’. ‘Face Value’, well, by the time that album came out I’d met someone else [Jill -Ed], so it was a coming out of the darkness into the sunshine album, whereas ‘Both Sides’ is a very, very blue album. I had played every instrument on it, did everything myself, and I didn’t know if I could go back to compromising and discussing things again. That’s what sealed my departure from Genesis.”Phil Collins (639)

“[It was widely interpreted as being about his own broken marriage – Ed]. Not so, it sprang to life during a discussion in the studio about the general state of the institution of marriage. We were thinking about all of our friends who had split with their partners in 1984. We started counting and the list was incredible – about two dozen people.”Phil Collins (640)

“I had a wife, two children and two dogs, the next day I didn’t have anything. So a lot of these songs were written because at the time I was going through all these emotional changes. I didn’t know what I was singing about. Obviously when you’re going through a divorce, all kinds of things go through your mind: there’s anger, there’s bitterness, there’s hurt and all that stuff was in ‘In The Air Tonight’, menace, losing your temper at the end when the drums come in.”Phil Collins (1128)

“It was always going to be a song about the South and Frontiersmen, guys that are out in the middle of nowhere, in a shack, when winter comes you’re there for months. The wife gets pregnant and has her own baby. Someone from next door, 30 miles down the road, comes and gives you a hand.”Phil Collins (1128)

“This was me entering the next stage of my life so it isn’t the downer album or the sad album that a lot of people think it is. By the time it was being recorded, and certainly by the time it came out, I was in another relationship so this a very optimistic song.”Phil Collins (1128)

“If my first album [Face Value – Ed] was “I’m divorced and I’m miserable,” my next one was “I’m going to kick this fucker to bits.” By this point, I was getting letters from lawyers asking for unbelievable things. I never sat down and wrote, “You’re a bitch.” I went to school with my wife. I have a huge amount of affection for her.”Phil Collins (1169)