1981 · Behind the Songs
The bitter divorce song that Phil Collins rewrote to make himself laugh — with Earth, Wind & Fire’s horns in tow.
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When Phil Collins sat down to write his first solo album, he was not in a good place. His marriage to Andrea Bertorelli was collapsing, and the songs that poured out — most of Face Value — were raw dispatches from a man watching his life come apart. “In the Air Tonight” turned that pain into brooding atmosphere. But “I Missed Again,” released as the album’s lead single in America on February 27, 1981, took a different approach. It is a divorce song you can dance to, a kiss-off with a horn section, and Collins later admitted he had deliberately rewritten it to be funnier and lighter than the bitter first draft.
The original demo was called “I Miss You, Babe,” and by Collins’s own account it was a dirge — slow, self-pitying, and far too on the nose. He reworked the lyrics, picked up the tempo, and retitled it “I Missed Again,” a pun that turned heartbreak into a wry shrug. The new version kept the emotional core — a man frustrated by a woman who has left him — but framed it with a grin. It was a canny move. Where “In the Air Tonight” asked listeners to sit with Collins in the dark, “I Missed Again” invited them to laugh with him at the absurdity of it all, even as the hurt bled through the jokes.
What elevates the track from clever to classic is the brass. Collins recruited the Phenix Horns — Earth, Wind & Fire’s legendary horn section, featuring Don Myrick on tenor sax, Louis Satterfield on trombone, and Rahmlee Michael Davis and Michael Harris on trumpets — to give the song its punchy, syncopated drive. The horns don’t just decorate the track; they argue with the vocal, punctuating Collins’s complaints with bright, stabbing figures that suggest a man trying to keep his spirits up. It was, as one contemporary reviewer noted, the funkiest thing Collins had recorded to date, and it pointed the way toward the R&B-inflected pop that would define his eighties output.
The Ronnie Scott connection
For the song’s tenor saxophone solo, Collins reached even further into pop history. He hired Ronnie Scott — the revered British jazz saxophonist and club owner, whose playing had graced the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” back in 1968. Scott’s solo on “I Missed Again” is a highlight: tough, bluesy, and perfectly judged, it gives the track a jazz credibility that few pop singles of the era could claim. That Collins, a pop drummer turned frontman, could attract musicians of this caliber spoke to the respect he commanded among players, even before his solo career had properly begun.
Behind the glass, Collins co-produced with Hugh Padgham, the engineer who had helped invent the gated-reverb drum sound on “In the Air Tonight.” For “I Missed Again,” Padgham applied a different kind of studio wizardry, notably — in Collins’s memorable phrase — compressing the piano “to death” to give it a percussive, almost claustrophobic punch. The result is a record that sounds simultaneously live and hyper-real, with every instrument fighting for space in the mix. It is a long way from the spacious gloom of “In the Air Tonight,” and that was the point: Face Value was an album of moods, and this was its most extroverted.
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Charts, video, and afterlife
“I Missed Again” peaked at number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1981 and reached number 14 in the UK, solid numbers for a debut solo single that was never intended to be the album’s centerpiece. (That honor belonged to “In the Air Tonight,” which had already established Collins as a solo artist in Britain.) The B-side was “I’m Not Moving,” another Face Value track that continued the divorce theme in a darker vein. The single’s music video — Collins and his band miming against a stark white background — earned a Grammy nomination for Best Video, Short Form, an early sign that Collins understood the visual medium as well as the musical one.
The song has enjoyed a strange and wonderful afterlife. Its instantly recognizable horn riff has been used in contexts Collins could never have imagined, from a well-known American commercial for a basketball bloopers video to a BBC montage celebrating a dramatic snooker final. American football fans may know it best from NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which used the track to soundtrack a montage of a missed field goal. There is a pleasing symmetry in that: a song about missing your shot, used to illustrate an actual missed shot. Collins, who has always had a self-deprecating streak, would surely appreciate the joke.
What to listen for
Focus first on the interplay between Collins’s vocal and the horns. He sings the verses with a kind of exasperated cheerfulness, and the Phenix Horns answer him like a Greek chorus, egging him on. Then wait for the Ronnie Scott solo — it arrives like a guest who immediately takes over the party, all honking confidence. Notice, too, the drumming. Collins plays with a lightness he rarely showed in Genesis, all snap and swing, as if the act of hitting things is itself a form of therapy. And listen to the end, where the band vamps and Collins ad-libs; you can hear a man who has decided that if he has to sing about his divorce, he might as well enjoy himself.
Face Value itself was a landmark debut. Recorded in 1980 while Collins was still Genesis’s drummer, the album turned personal crisis into art and became one of the biggest-selling debuts of the decade, topping the UK chart and going multi-platinum in America. “I Missed Again” showed the record’s lighter side — proof that even at his lowest, Collins could find the funny bone in heartbreak.
Collins often wrote that way, building songs from drum patterns and improvised melodies before finding the words — the same instinct that produced the half-understood lyric of “Don’t Lose My Number” years later. It was a drummer’s approach to songwriting: rhythm first, meaning second, emotion always.