by Phil Collins
Copyright © 2016 by Philip Collins Limited
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownarchetype.com
Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in Great Britain by Century, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, London, in 2016.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781101907474
Ebook ISBN 9781101907498
Frontispiece: Aaron Rapoport/Corbis Premium Historical/Getty Images
Cover design by Christopher Brand
Cover photograph by Lorenzo Agius
Endpapers: Genesis Archive
v4.1
a
What you are about to read is my life, as seen through my eyes. It might not comply with the memories of others involved, but it’s the way I remember it.
I’ve held a lifelong belief that we all have our “camera shutter” moments, when we will all remember a scene differently, or we don’t remember a scene at all. Sometimes that memory can shape a person’s life, yet other people involved don’t even recollect it.
PC
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
1. Not Drowning but Waving
2. Traveling to the Beat of a Different Drum
3. “Drummer Seeks Band; Has Own Sticks”
4. The Ballad of All Things Must Pass
5. The Genesis of Genesis
Insert 1
6. From Blue Boar to Fox’s Head
7. Lamb Lies Down, Singer Flies Off
8. Family Man, Frontman
9. The Divorce That Roared
10. Ace Value
11. Hello, I Must Be Busy
Insert 2
12. Hello, I Must Be Busy II
13. Live Aid: My Part in Its Downfall
14. The Great Brain Robbery
15. But Seriously, Folks
16. Faxgate
17. Taxgate
18. Big Band, Big Apes, Big Love
19. Goodbye to All That
20. Turn It On Again, Turn It Off Again
21. Straitjacket Required
22. Not Dead Yet
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
About the Author
Endpapers
Or: Greatest hits and broken bits
I can’t hear a thing.
Much as I try to shake free the blockage, my right ear is unyielding. I attempt a little rummage with a cotton swab. I know this is never advised—the eardrum is sensitive, especially if it’s been subjected to a lifetime of drumming.
But I’m desperate. My right ear is kaput. And it’s my good ear, my left having been dicky for a decade. Is this it? Has music, at last, done me in? Am I finally deaf?
Picture the scene (and readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now): I’m in the shower. It’s March 2016 and I’m at home in Miami. This is the morning of a very special gig—my first time onstage in years and, more importantly still, my first proper public performance with one of my sons, fourteen-year-old Nicholas.
The kid will be drumming, the old man will be singing. That’s the plan anyway.
To rewind a little: 2014 saw the launch of Little Dreams USA, the American wing of the charity that my ex-wife Orianne and I founded in Switzerland in 2000. Little Dreams helps children with tuition, coaching and guidance in the fields of music, the arts and sport.
To get things rolling in the U.S., and to raise some cash, we had long planned a gala concert for December 2014. But in the interim I’d endured a pile-up of health issues. Come the day of the show, I wasn’t physically up to singing.
I had to call Orianne, mother of Nic and his brother Mathew, who’d just turned ten, and tell her that my voice was gone and that I couldn’t perform. I didn’t tell her that my confidence was gone, too: there’s only so much bad news you can put in one phone call to your ex-wife. Particularly, maybe, when she’s your third ex-wife.
Sixteen months later, I have some making up to do. But 2016 feels like not only a new year but a new me—I’m ready for this gig. I’m not ready to play a full show, though, so we need a cast of supporting artists.
But even with that musical help, I realize that this show is mostly going to be down to…me. This is a scenario familiar from forty years of back-to-back touring and three decades of one-after-the-other Genesis and solo albums: I’m being written back into a script that’s not entirely of my own making. But I can’t bail again. Not if I want to live to see my sixty-sixth birthday.
Some long-standing musician compadres join me for rehearsals in Miami, as does Nic. He knows we’re going to do “In the Air Tonight,” but once it’s clear just how good a drummer he’s become, I throw some more songs into the mix: “Take Me Home,” “Easy Lover” and “Against All Odds.”
The rehearsals are great; Nic has really done his homework. More than that—he’s better than I was at his age. As with all my children, I’m bursting with paternal pride.
Reassuringly for me, too, this time my voice feels and sounds strong. At one point guitarist Daryl Stuermer, a wingman of many years’ standing, says, “Can I have some vocals in the monitor?” That’s a good sign—nobody wants the singer in the monitor when he’s sounding crap.
The following morning, the day of the gala concert, I’m in the shower. That’s when the ear goes. And if I can’t hear, I certainly can’t sing.
I call the secretary of one of the many Miami medical experts that I by now have on speed-dial. An hour later I’m at a surgery, a hearing specialist applying his mining-grade suction apparatus to both ears. Instant relief. Not deaf yet.
Onstage that night at the Jackie Gleason Theater we play “Another Day in Paradise,” “Against All Odds,” “In the Air Tonight,” “Easy Lover” and “Take Me Home.” Nic, whose appearance onstage after the opening number gets a big whoop from the crowd, handles all of this brilliantly.
It’s a wild success, way better—and way more fun—than I thought it would be. Post-show, I end up alone in the dressing room. I sit there, soaking it all in, remembering the applause, thinking, “I’ve missed that.” And, “Yeah, Nic is really good. Really, really good.”
The feeling of a gig well done is not a sensation I ever expected to have again. When I retired from solo touring in 2005, from Genesis in 2007 and from my recording career in 2010, I was convinced that was it. By then I’d been at it—playing, writing, performing, entertaining—for half a century. Music had brought me more than I could ever have imagined, but it had also taken more from me than I could ever have feared. I was done.
And yet, here in Miami in March 2016, I find it doing the opposite of what it’s done for years. Instead of separating me from my kids, from Simon, Nic and Matt and their sisters Joely and Lily, music is connecting me with them.
If ever anything is going to blow off the cobwebs, it’s playing with your children. A billion-dollar-payday offer to re-form Genesis wouldn’t get me back on the road. A chance to perform with my boy might.
But before we go forward, we have to go back. How did I get here, and why did I get here?
This book is my truth about things. The stuff that happened, the stuff that didn’t happen. There are no scores settled, but there are some wrongs righted.
When I went back there, looking at my past, for sure there were surprises. How much I’d worked, for on
e thing. If you can remember the seventies, you clearly weren’t on as many Genesis tours as me, Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford. And if you can remember the eighties, I’m sorry about me and Live Aid.
It’s 2016 and we’ve lost many of my peers, so I’ve had cause to reflect on my mortality, my frailties. But also, courtesy of my children, I’ve had to think about my future.
Not deaf yet. Not dead yet.
That said, these aren’t new sensations. I was hit by death when my dad passed away just at the point when his hippie son’s decision to reject a life in insurance for a life in music started to bear fruit. I was further blindsided when, within two years of each other, Keith Moon and John Bonham died, both aged thirty-two. I worshipped them. I thought at the time, “These guys are supposed to be around forever. They’re indestructible. They’re drummers.”
—
My name is Phil Collins and I’m a drummer, and I know I’m not indestructible. This is my story.
Or: my beginnings, my childhood and how my
relationship with my dad was a bit tidal
We think mums and dads know it all. But in fact they’re making it up as they go along. Every day, busking it, winging it, putting on a brave—sometimes false—face. It’s something I suspect throughout my childhood, yet it’s only confirmed in adulthood, and only with a little help from the Other Side.
One gray autumn evening in 1977, I go to see a medium. She lives in Victoria, central London, round the insalubrious back of Buckingham Palace, in a flat near the top of a tower block. It’s no gypsy caravan, but I suppose it does mean she’s nearer the heavens.
I don’t have a particular affinity for spirits—that will come much, much later, and be less an affinity than an addiction—but my wife, Andy, is somewhat that way inclined. My mum, too, is no stranger to the Ouija board. At our family home on London’s suburban western edges, my mum, nana and auntie, along with my so-called uncles Reg and Len, enjoyed many a happy late-fifties and early-sixties evening summoning the dearly departed from beyond the veil. Better that than the meager monochrome offerings flickering from the newfangled television set.
The reason for my and Andy’s visit to this high-rise Madame Arcati: a naughty dog. Ben, our beautiful boxer, has a habit of dragging from under our bed a pile of electric blankets. We’re holding on to these for our kids—Joely, five, and Simon, one—for when they stop wetting the bed and need a bit of extra warmth. It has not dawned on me that the folded electric blankets promise more than a toasty bed—bent filaments can break and catch fire. Maybe Ben knows this.
Andy comes to the conclusion that there’s a supernatural element to Ben’s nightly ritual. He’s probably not clairvoyant but there’s clearly something we humans don’t know.
At this time I’m manically busy, touring with Genesis—we’ve released our album Wind & Wuthering and I have only recently taken over singing duties from Peter Gabriel. I am, accordingly, often an absent husband and father, so I feel perennially on the back foot when it comes to matters domestic and familial. I duly offer no opposition to this unorthodox course of action.
So off to a medium we go. Into bustling Victoria, up in the tower-block elevator, a ring on the doorbell, small talk with the husband, who’s watching Coronation Street. It couldn’t be any less spiritual. Finally he pulls himself away from the TV and gives me a nod: “She’ll see you now…”
She’s an ordinary-looking housewife, perched behind a small table. No sign of any other-worldly virtues. In fact she appears totally normal, in a matter-of-fact way. This completely throws and somewhat disappoints me, and my skepticism now comes with a topspin of confusion, and just a shade of grumpiness.
As Andy’s I Ching readings have informed her that it’s the spirits on my side of the family that are the dog-botherers, I draw the short straw and enter the chamber of the supernatural. Through gritted teeth I tell the medium about Ben’s nightly antics. She nods gravely, closes her eyes, waits for a meaningful length of time, then finally replies, “It’s your dad.”
“Pardon?”
“Yes, it’s your dad and he wants you to have a few things: his watch, his wallet, the family cricket bat. Do you want me to ask his spirit to speak through me? Then you could hear his voice. But sometimes the spirits don’t want to leave and that becomes a bit awkward.”
I splutter a no. Communication with my father wasn’t at its best when he was alive. Talking to him now, nearly five years after his death at Christmas 1972, via a middle-aged housewife in a disconcertingly drab domestic setting in a tower block in the heart of London, would just be weird.
“Well, he says to give your mum some flowers, and to tell her he’s sorry.”
Of course, being a fairly rational twenty-six-year-old who likes things to be down-to-earth and regimented—I am a drummer, after all—I should have discounted this as mumbo-jumbo con-artistry. But I agree that our dog habitually dragging electric blankets from beneath our bed is behavior possibly not of the mortal plain. On top of that, Madame Arcati has said some things about my dad that she couldn’t possibly have known, not least that stuff about the cricket bat. That cricket bat has been part of the Collins clan’s meager sports equipment for as long as I can remember. Outside the family, no one would know about it. I wouldn’t say I’m convinced, but I am intrigued. Andy and I depart the anteroom of the afterlife and re-enter the real world. Back on terra firma I tell her the news. She replies with a look understood on both sides of the veil: “I told you so.”
The next day I phone my mum and relate the previous evening’s events. She is blithely spirited, and unsurprised by both the message and the medium.
“I bet he wants to give me flowers,” she says, half laughing, half harrumphing.
This is when she tells me everything. My dad, Greville Philip Austin Collins, was not a faithful husband to my mum, June Winifred Collins (née Strange). Having been recruited at the age of nineteen, he was a lifelong employee, like his father before him, of the London Assurance Company in the City of London. “Grev” had used his quotidian, bowler-hatted, nine-to-five suburban commuter’s existence to maintain a secret life with an office girlfriend.
Dad was not a particularly obvious heart-throb or lady’s man. He was a little tubby round the middle, and his RAF mustache topped off his patchy head of hair. I got all my looks from my mum, clearly.
But it seems that behind that mild-mannered insurance-man exterior lurked something more Lothario-shaped. Mum tells me about a particular incident. Alma Cole was a lovely lady who worked with my mum in the toyshop she managed on behalf of a family friend. Alma was from the north of England and there was always a conspiratorial tone to whatever she said.
She and my mum were close, and one day a slightly miffed Alma sniffed, “I saw you with Grev in the car on Saturday and you didn’t wave back to me.”
“I wasn’t in the car with him on Saturday!” The passenger, patently, was Dad’s lady friend, being taken for a romantic spin in our black Austin A35.
Now, nearly five years after Dad’s passing, while I find it wonderful that my mum is confiding in me in this manner, hearing these revelations makes me simultaneously mad and sad. I now know that my parents’ marriage didn’t so much dissolve as fizzle out, partly due to my dad being, shall we say, distracted elsewhere. His infidelity was very much news to me.
But why wouldn’t it be? I was a very young boy back then and, to me, my parents seemed deliriously happy. Life at home had appeared normal and quite calm. Straightforward, simple. To my mind, Mum and Dad were happily in love for all their long married life.
But I am very much the baby of the family, almost seven years younger than my sister, Carole, and nine years younger than my brother, Clive. Certain, grown-up aspects of home life would have gone straight over my head. Now, when I consider the facts before me this evening in 1977, I think I can divine an undercurrent of unrest in the house, something to which I was completely oblivious at the time. That said
, perhaps I felt it in my water: I was a chronic bed-wetter to an embarrassingly old age.
When I later relay this earth-shattering news to Clive, he gives it to me straight. All those sudden long walks I was taken on by my siblings? Those lazy, hazy strolls past the post-war prefab housing on Hounslow Heath with my brother and sister? Not the cheerfully nondescript norm of a simple late-fifties and early-sixties suburban English childhood. In fact I was being unwittingly complicit in the papering over of cracks.
My father acting a little fast and loose with his marriage vows is something I still have trouble coming to terms with. His disregard for my mum’s feelings is beyond me. And before anyone steps forward to state, “That’s a bit rich coming from you, Collins,” let the record show: I hear what you’re saying.
I am disappointed that I have been married three times. I’m even more disappointed that I have been divorced three times. I am considerably less bothered by the fact that these resulted in settlements with my ex-wives to the order of £42 million. Nor am I fussed that those sums were widely reported and are widely known. In this day and age, nothing is private anymore. The internet has seen to that. Additionally, while three divorces might seem to suggest a casual attitude toward the whole idea of marriage, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m a romantic who believes, hopes, that the union of marriage is something to cherish and last.
Yet certainly that trio of divorces demonstrates a failure to coexist happily and to understand my partners. It suggests a failure to become, and to stay, a family. It shows failure, full stop. Over the decades I’ve done my diligent best to make every aspect of my life, personal and professional, work like clockwork—although too often, I have to acknowledge that my “best” just hasn’t been good enough.
Still, I know what “normal” is—it’s in my DNA; I grew up with it, or at least the semblance thereof, in the London suburbs—and that’s what I strove for while trying to make a living playing music.
I have endeavored to be honest with all my children about my personal history. It involves them. It affects them. They live with the consequences of my actions, inactions and reactions every day of their lives. I try to be as straight and forthright as it’s possible to be. I will do the same throughout this story, even in the parts where I don’t exactly come out smelling of roses. As a drummer I’m used to giving it some stick. I’ve had to become used to taking some stick, too.
