In this song, Phil Collins takes out his frustrations over his divorce from his first wife, Andrea Bertorelli. His first solo album was Face Value released in 1981 shortly after their split. Some of the tracks on that album, notably "In The Air Tonight" and "If Leaving Me Is Easy," find him expressing the misery he felt going through the ordeal. For his next album, Hello, I Must Be Going!, he took a different tack. "I was getting letters from lawyers asking for unbelievable things," Collins told Rolling Stone. This made him bitter and resigned to put it behind him (he had already begun dating Jill Tavelman, who would become his second wife), and in this song, he makes it clear that even though he's being dragged through the mud, he doesn't care anymore.
Collins repeats "no more" 17 times in the outro to this song, making it seem like he's trying a little too hard to convince us that he really doesn't care.
Collins' first wife Andrea couldn't stand it when her ex-husband released songs like this one laying bare their troubles. Her side of the story is that Collins had a "short fuse and preference for arguing," and that he left to tour right after their second child was in 1976, choosing his career over his family. Speaking with the Daily Mail in 2015, she said, "When I asked him to stop talking and writing songs about our relationship he said he had 'the artistic licence to write about whatever he wanted.' Basically he was making too much money out of his divorce to worry about my feelings or his children's feelings."
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