This song deals with an abusive father. The lyrics came from Phil Collins, who explained on the radio show Rockline: "The chorus of the song came from improvisation while we were writing the music. I took the notion of my lyrical idea and just wrote a story around it. The story is sort of self-explanatory. It's a household of abuse. The father is being sort of the monster of the family - he's either abusing the son or the mother. I'm not quite sure who, and that's deliberately left open. But it's happening everywhere behind closed doors, and a lot of people I've found that have heard the song have sort of reacted as if it was written for them. It's extraordinary, you just write something that comes about by accident, but in fact it all ends up being something that reaches a lot of people."
This was the first single off We Can't Dance, the last Genesis studio album with Phil Collins.
Tony Banks built the track for this song using a device called an emulator, which allowed him to sample a guitar part Mike Rutherford played. Slowing down the sample, Banks got a sound he related to the trumpeting of an elephant. Rutherford didn't know he was being recorded when Banks grabbed the sample: He would record random bits of what was going on in the studio and see what he could do with them.
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