It was just after 11am on an Autumn morning in 2016 when I sat down opposite Phil Collins in an opulent bar deep inside London’s Royal Albert Hall. We’d barely exchanged a few pleasantries when a waiter arrived with a large glass of chilled white wine for the singer. Before we’d really got going, another one had arrived.
Granted it was a little early, but this was showbusiness after all, and booze is very much par for the course. But as his team hovered in the background exchanging what appeared to be nervous glances, it was obvious something wasn’t quite right.
The reason was right there on the table between us. We were there to talk about his new book which laid bare in pretty gruesome detail his battle with alcoholism, and how he was now three years sober.
Things had gotten so dark that he was once air-lifted from the Caribbean to a hospital in New York before being admitted into intensive care. Diagnosed with acute pancreatitis brought on by his binges, he later went to rehab, in Wiltshire.
But as he polished off the next glass, it was pretty clear the book was already out of date. As I politely inquired about his already lapsed sobriety, he told me matter-of-factly: “I am quite capable of having two or three glasses of wine, saying goodnight and walking away.”
Looking back a decade on, those words carry a very different weight. At the weekend Collins revealed he came within moments of death in 2024 after alcohol nearly killed him for a second time.
In a new interview with the Sunday Times, the now 75-year-old told how his five children were summoned to his bedside to say their goodbyes as doctors debated turning off his life support. “My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up,” he said. “People were coming to say goodbye. But I don’t remember them coming, I didn’t have no idea this was going on. They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.”
He says he spent seven months in hospital in total, with the result his pancreas is permanently scarred, while his kidneys barely function. Wine – as I’d seen that day – was his drink of choice rather than spirits.
“I’d have wine when I woke up. That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine,” he said. Intriguingly, the author says he was sober around the time of the book thanks to Antabuse, a drug prescribed to alcoholics to induce severe nausea and headaches if they so much as touch a drink. He can also no longer remember exactly when his drinking spiralled because, as he put it, “when I was drinking the calendar goes out the window.”
Looking back at my morning with the singer, he was perhaps already slipping.
I later learn his drinking had become a feature of that press tour. One BBC journalist admitted feeling “concern” when Phil “orders that glass of wine” while promoting a book extolling sobriety.
Following multiple spine and knee surgeries , he was markedly frail too with his back shot after all those years of sitting playing drums. I remember him wincing as he sat gingerly at my table, and thinking to myself maybe the wine was a good idea after all.
A few days after speaking to me, he also fell in his bathroom, and later posted a picture of himself with a painful-looking black eye.
While he was struggling physically, mentally, he was razor-sharp, and couldn’t have been more charming with a full-repertoire of fascinating stories at his disposal.
After all, he is arguably one of the world’s most successful stars with a staggering 100 million records sold from his time in both Genesis, and as a solo star. He also remains the only performer to play both the UK and US Live Aid shows.
I was in luck that day too, as he told me how despite forking out a reported £25million to second wife Orianne in his 2008 divorce, they were back together again. “She didn’t give me the money back. We never had that conversation,” he laughed.
Orianne was just 21 when she met Phil in 1994 during his tour of Switzerland, after being hired as his translator. He was in the middle of a bitter split from second wife Jill – mother of his actress daughter Lily Collins. He dumped her by fax after 12 years together.
Phil married Orianne in 1999 but they eventually split and she took their two children from Switzerland and moved to Miami in 2012 before reconciling. But their new-found bliss didn’t last long. Four years after telling me they were back together, she eloped to Vegas to secretly wed a lover.
Speaking at the weekend, Collins said: “She spent a lot of time in Las Vegas and bought a house there. And I was thinking it was for work. And I think some of it was, but some of it was definitely not. She’s not in my best books.”
Describing her actions as “kind of unpleasant, unethical and not very nice,” he said he couldn’t forgive her yet but were still in touch as co-parents. Heartbreakingly, he still carries a torch for her but admits: “I don’t think it’s a good idea right now. Just because I know what I’m like. I would probably fall again.”
As for what’s next, Collins says that alcohol is firmly off the cards. “I was very lucky to have come out of that. Needless to say, I haven’t had a drink since,” he says. Here’s hoping this really is the final chapter in his long battle with alcohol…
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