Key Points
- Phil Collins reflected on health struggles and his long musical hiatus.
- “Everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong with me,” Collins said.
- He hopes to return to music, considering unfinished projects and new possibilities.
It’s been a long couple of decades for Phil Collins fans. Beloved as both a member of Genesis and a highly prolific solo artist, the eight-time Grammy winner has been keeping a low profile due to serious health issues in recent years. In fact, he hasn’t released any new music since the 2003 soundtrack for the Disney movie Brother Bear.
But in a recent interview with Zoe Ball for a BBC Two podcast special honoring Collins’ upcoming 75th birthday, the music icon seemed hopeful about the possibility of getting back to his career after a “difficult, interesting, frustrating last few years.”
As Collins explained, he’s endured multiple knee surgeries, calling his condition “an ongoing thing,” according to Stereogum.
“I have a 24-hour live-in nurse to make sure I take my medication, as I should do. I’ve had challenges with my knee,” Collins said. “Everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong with me. I got COVID in hospital. My kidneys started to back up. Everything seemed to converge at the same time. I had five operations on my knee. Now, I’ve got a knee that works, and I can walk, albeit with assistance, crutches or whatever.”
Collins went on to say that he’d “probably been drinking too much, so my kidneys were messed up.”
“I enjoyed coming off tour. Coming off the road, but I thought, right, I’m gonna do all those things that I couldn’t do,” he said. “So I stopped drinking at six o’clock in the evening. I wasn’t one of those guys that stayed up all night drinking. I’d drink during the day, but I guess I had too much of it. I was never drunk, although I fell over a couple of times. But it is just one of those things that happened, and it all caught up with me, and I spent months in hospital.”
Now that things are “all right,” Collins is starting to think about making music again.
“The things that are ahead for me would be, apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy, is maybe go in there and have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music,” he said. “You tend to sort of feel, ‘That’s it, I’ve done that.’ But you’ve gotta start doing it to see if you can do it. Otherwise, you don’t do it. So that is something on my horizon…I’ve got some things that are half-formed or were never finished, and a couple of things that were finished, which I like. So maybe life in the old dog. You’ll see.”
The fifth and final episode of BBC Eras: Phil Collins, featuring the interview with Collins and Ball, will be released on Jan. 26.
About the author
Jacqueline Burt Cote has been writing about entertainment (and much more) since the days when print newspapers and magazines reigned supreme, with bylines in a wide range of publications including The celebrity.land, Time Out New York, The Huffington Post, Salon, Details, Parents, Bon Appetit, XoJane, and many others.
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