Ah, yes. I'm not sure whether this is somewhat of a conspiracy theory, or it's common knowledge among the drumming community. I don't intend for this thread to be an indictment of Phil Collins, he's a great musician. But he definitely borrowed the "In the Air Tonight" drum solo https://twitter.com/TheLukeMyers/status/1252829056418017282

If you ask Phil about this solo, he'll tell you that it was just a take that he happened to like. Fair enough. It's common for musicians to try different things while recording, ideas that are bouncing around in their head that could've come from anywhere.

Phil Collins once said in an interview that some of his drumming was influenced by, or even taken directly from the mind of Bernard Purdie.

You ask, who's Bernard Purdie? A drumming legend. His sense of time was so precise that his beats would be used to calibrate metronomes. Here's a clip of him laying down his iconic "Purdie Shuffle"

Now, one day I was listening to Steely Dan, as I do. "Deacon Blues", off the album Aja. If you know anything about Steely Dan, you know that they use dozens of session musicians to achieve the sound that they're looking for. For that song, it was Bernard Purdie on drums.

I was listening specifically to Purdie, because he's great. About six minutes into the song...wait a minute! That's...familiar

Aja was released in 1977. Phil Collins recorded Face Value (the album of "In the Air Tonight") in 1980.

My hunch is that Phil was in the studio recording the drums, and Purdie's fill from "Deacon Blues" popped into his head. Maybe he listened to the song while reading the paper that morning. Who knows? Regardless, it clearly worked out well for him

There are so many possibilities for musical expression that it is so rare that the same thing happens twice by coincidence. So in my mind, it's clear that the solo originated with Purdie. But who knows if we'll ever know for sure...