Songfacts®:

• When Phil Collins left Genesis, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks replaced him on vocals with Ray Wilson and released one last album, Calling All Stations, in 1997. "One Man's Fool, written by Banks and Rutherford, is the last track on that album. Running 8:58, the song was inspired by the June 15, 1996 truck bombing in Manchester, England by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which resulted in no fatalities but caused widespread damage.
• In a 2018 Songfacts interview with Tony Banks, he called this one of the most prescient Genesis songs. "If anybody hears it now, they would assume that that lyric was referring to the bombing of the Twin Towers, but it wasn't," he said. "It was written four years before, and yet it sounds like we were recalling that. I was actually writing about a bomb attack in Manchester, in England, which was done by the IRA at the time, and the idea that people carry out these attacks and did they really believe that, all the destruction, that it really is worth it? But, it still works, unfortunately, because we have this kind of terrorism still out there."