Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  I manage to unpack, get my head together, remember that I’ve got a gig that night. At the appointed hour, we go down to the lobby and find Orianne waiting, still looking businesslike but smiling sweetly.

  Back in the car, on to the gig at the Patinoire de Malley arena, into the dressing room. Orianne hangs around because her job is to take care of me. It’s soon apparent that as well as being beautiful, she’s intelligent. It’s only in the far reaches of my silly, hopeful imagination that anything has happened, but already I’m riddled with the old Collins chestnut: guilt.

  Backstage it’s like a pebble has been dropped into a pond. The ripples are radiating outward. Our wardrobe lady, Carol, says to me, “Who on earth is that?” She’s floored by this vision of loveliness, too. Carol disappears for a few minutes and primps up her hair and make-up. There’s another woman backstage and she will not be outshone.

  John Giddings comes to the dressing room. “Who’s that?” he says, mouth agape.

  “She’s the lady that’s helping me out with my French. Hands off.” Andy Mackrill echoes Giddings’ stupefaction: “Who’s that?” Then all the guys in the band start taking an interest. Our trombone player, a true gentleman, wants her name and number. I can hear the others mumbling, “Man, she’s beautiful…”

  After soundcheck is when I brush up on my locally sourced stage patter. French, German, Italian, Japanese—everywhere we play, I prepare a little spiel in the native language, a little respect to, a little nod to the locals. I’ve always done it, just as Peter did it in Genesis.

  Carol says to me, “Do you want to do your French now?”

  I’m trying to be casual. “Ah, yeah, could you get Orianne?”

  “Yeah, she’s lovely, isn’t she?”

  Orianne comes in, sits opposite me and asks, “What would you like to say?”

  We go through some lines for the concert—“Bon soir…” And mais oui, perhaps that soir I put a bit more effort into learning some passages. Frankly, I want to drag it out. But finally I can’t detain her any longer. And at the end of it I say, “Have you got a boyfriend?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you got a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK…But I’d love to take you out for dinner.”

  She’s a little bit flustered, but seems to agree. Then, quickly, she’s on her feet and heading for the door. “But at least I said something,” I think, “made some sort of personal, non-work contact.” Just before she disappears, just to be sure, I say, “I’m going to see you afterward, right?”

  “Yes, I’ll take you back to the hotel.”

  We do the show, and I’ll hold my hands up: there is a little bit of pouting on my part. More so than normal. I’m trying to make it the best show possible. I may even have thrown a few more athletic shapes than is customary.

  Because this is a cavernous ice-hockey venue, there are several doors leading from the arena floor to the hot dog stands, bars and merchandise stalls. During the gig I see Orianne and a friend standing by one of the doors nearest the stage. She’s dancing a little bit, moving in time to the music, enjoying herself. I’m schoolboy-pleased.

  Show’s over and I’m backstage, getting changed. I ask Carol if she’s seen the translator girl. Carol, possibly with lips a little pursed, says she has no idea where she is. Danny comes in with the bags. Am I ready to go? Not really. Where’s that translator girl? Danny says he can’t find her but that we have to vacate the premises. Reluctantly, I head back to the hotel. It’s fair to say that my mood is somewhat crestfallen.

  Up in our adjoining rooms, at my relaxed-but-also-insistent request, Danny phones the back office at the venue. “Is that translator girl around? The promoter’s girl? Oh, she’s there?” It seems that Orianne had been waiting for us, but had missed us in the crush of 10,000-odd fans tipping out of the venue and a ten-strong band and thirty road crew scurrying about their post-show business.

  Danny hands me the phone so I can speak to Orianne directly. I ask for her number. After some hesitation she gives me her work number. “And can I have your home number?” Also: “What are you doing tomorrow? You’re working? What about after that? I’ve got a day off!”

  “Well, I’m supposed to…I don’t know. Call me tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

  I’m ecstatic. That’s enough for me.

  I call her the next day, and she’s not there. I’ll end up getting to know Les, her boss at Capital Ventures, very well. He tells me she’s out on assignment. I don’t have a nuanced understanding of the Swiss finance industry (or even of Swiss cheese or chocolate), but I gather her job is to go and charm money out of businessmen.

  That evening I call her at home. Her dad, Jean-François, answers, a lovely Swiss man who barely speaks English. So he puts on her Thai mum, Orawan. “Who is it? Phil? Phil Collins!” She’s flustered. “Orianne told me you may call. She’s not here.”

  Orawan goes off to get a number for her. Only later do I find out that in her hurry to find me the number, she’s left the dinner cooking on the stove. The dinner burns, and the kitchen catches fire. Dad, not unreasonably, loses his rag. One minute the phone’s ringing, the next minute the fire alarm’s ringing. “It’s OK,” toots Orawan through the din, smoke and flames, “I have Phil Collins on the phone!”

  She gives me the number for Christophe, Orianne’s best mate, whom she’s currently out with. I call, and Christophe passes the phone to her.

  “Can I meet you for dinner tonight?”

  “I can’t. I have to see my boyfriend.”

  “OK. How about afterward?”

  “Maybe. I’ll call you at your hotel later.”

  I appreciate that in the cold light of the printed page, this might all come over a little, well, stalker-ish. What can I say? She already had me by the heart.

  Danny and I book a great table in our hotel’s well-regarded restaurant, and immediately order a lovely bottle of wine. We sit and sip and wait. And we wait. The waiter hovers. “Another bottle of wine, sirs?” I’m feeling chipper, and not just because of the Chateau Orianne.

  Another waiter comes up. “Monsieur Collins, there’s a phone call for you.”

  It’s Orianne. She says she can’t come. Why not?

  “Because my boyfriend heard about you and he hit me.”

  I later find out that she’d been in the process of breaking up with him. But right now’s he’s punched her in the face and she has a fat lip. I express my outrage and my sympathy, and I’ve a good mind to dispatch Danny to sort out this fucker. I tell her I don’t mind how she looks—she should just come to the restaurant.

  “Maybe later.”

  Danny and I have something to eat, then go up to our adjoining rooms. Eventually the phone rings. Orianne is in the lobby, with Christophe. He’s a lovely big guy who I will grow very close to. He wants to make sure that his best friend is OK, that she’s not messing around with some jerk, especially after the evening she’s had. Maybe he’s already heard about the Ceveys’ kitchen going up in flames, too.

  The four of us rendezvous for a drink in my room, and eventually Christophe looks at me and says, “Phil. You’re a nice guy. I’ll leave you alone. But I’ll be waiting in the car.”

  For the next couple of days, I’m like a dog with two tails. But at the same time: I’m about to go to Paris. And in Paris I’m due to meet my wife and our five-year-old daughter, who are flying in from London.

  What have I done? Well, I know what I’ve done. I’ve betrayed my wife and child. Again. And I’ve set sail for perilously uncharted waters. “Meet Phil Collins’ new mystery girlfriend. She’s young enough to be his daughter.” Ticks all the midlife-crisis boxes.

  My dalliance with Lavinia has already pulled the carpet from underneath my marriage, and I was really kidding myself if I thought I could make things right again with Jill after that. This doesn’t make the guilt any easier to deal with, and it won’t make it any easier to deal with for years and years a
fter. My love life is a cauldron of conflictions of which I am far from proud.

  In Paris, from the window of my hotel room, I watch Jill and Lily get out of the limo. I feel like a complete shit.

  If my marriage to Jill wasn’t over with the Lavinia episode, it is now. With my actions in Los Angeles and Lausanne, I’ve made sure of that.

  Considering I’ve been on the road pretty much my whole life, up until Lavinia I’d never been unfaithful. Why now? I don’t buy the “midlife crisis” thing. Maybe Jill and me being a couple had run its course?

  Separations are chaotic and difficult at the best of times, but they’re much more complicated here. I’m barely a month into a mammoth tour that will last for another year. It’s not an option to cancel a leg, or even rearrange a run of shows, so that I can return to the U.K. and sort through the legal and logistical mess of my matrimonial breakdown. This is of no comfort to my wife—in fact it worsens things—but I have professional obligations coming out of my ears and I have to look at the bigger picture. These are huge shows, employing dozens and dozens of people, performing to hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. The juggernaut must go on.

  Two weeks after Paris, in mid-May 1994, I’m on the other side of the Atlantic. I’m starting the North American leg with four nights at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes, a fantastic, 26,000-capacity circular dome built for the 1968 Olympics. It’s a phenomenal venue in which to start an intense, three-month run of shows. I’ve never played Mexico before, neither solo nor with Genesis, so there’s huge anticipation. The concerts become something of a national event. For 100,000 Mexican fans—some of the most enthusiastic music-lovers in the world—I have to keep one set of emotions in check, while giving full vent to another. I’ve let down my family. I don’t want to let down the fans, too.

  The Both Sides of the World tour rolls on, as it must. My schedule is, often literally, up in the air, and we’re now also contending with tricky and ever-changing time differences between the U.S. and the U.K. So there are few times when I can sit down in peace and quiet and make the difficult phone calls home. I want to speak to Jill, I want to speak to Lily. I also want to speak to Simon and Joely and explain the situation to them, but that means going through Andy, which is a whole other world of pain.

  But on the rare occasions when I can call Jill, it’s difficult to get through. That said, Jill still occasionally joins me on tour in the U.S.—Lily wants to see me. Bless her, she’s trying to snow-plow through it all and, in her young heart, thinking that whatever’s wrong will soon be all right. On more than one occasion I’ll be standing center stage, singing “Separate Lives,” which is obviously a hugely emotional moment in the show. And whenever Jill is in the audience, she makes a point of walking down the side aisle and standing by the stage, staring at me.

  Three weeks into the North American leg, six weeks after Paris, I handwrite a four- or five-page letter in which I try to outline the way I feel about us, about the future. The most reliable and quickest way to get this letter to her is to fax rather than post it. So that’s what I do. But it doesn’t help. Things are still messy and complicated, communication lines still fractured.

  The situation doesn’t improve when the tour comes back to Europe at the start of September. In fact, by the end of that month, when we reach Frankfurt, they’re worse. Jill is rattling around a big house in the English countryside, single-handedly parenting our daughter. Meanwhile, her faithless husband is out and about in the world, playing giant shows to adoring fans, living the high life—and, I suppose she presumes, taking his pretty young girlfriend along for the ride. The truth is that only occasionally does Orianne join me; most of the time she’s working in Geneva. Still, that’s bad enough.

  Now, in Frankfurt, we’re playing three nights at the 100-year-old Festhalle. I’m in one place for seventy-two hours, and there’s only an hour’s time difference between Germany and Britain. So I figure this is an opportune moment to catch up with Jill and sort out a few things. But I can’t get through. I never seem to be able to get through. Thinking I have no other option, I fax her again at Lakers Lodge.

  By this point on the European leg of the Both Sides tour, whenever I have the odd day off I’m jetting to Switzerland, where I stay in a little hotel down the road from Orianne’s parents’ house. Early one morning I’m woken up in this hotel by the phone. It’s Annie Callingham, my secretary. “What’s going on, Phil? You’re all over the front page of The Sun.”

  “What is?”

  “The fax.”

  “What fax?”

  “The fax you sent Jill.”

  “How did that happen?”

  All hell has broken loose. Somehow Britain’s biggest-selling tabloid has got hold of the fax I sent from my dressing room in Frankfurt. What The Sun has edited and used from what I actually wrote has given them the headline “I’M FAXING FURIOUS,” and the story that I was faxing for a divorce.

  More all hell breaks loose. The press queue up outside Orianne’s parents’ house. Her father is dying of cancer, and this is the last thing they need.

  Reporters doorstep my mum, my brother, my sister. Anyone who knows me is contacted for comment, and the story becomes a national talking point. Actually, scratch that—an international talking point. I become used to never entering a hotel via the front door, lest I’m ambushed by the paparazzi.

  The recently installed twenty-nine-year-old editor of another tabloid, News of the World, gets in touch. Piers Morgan oozes oily blandishments: it’s my chance to tell my side of the story, I’ll have copy approval, I can be reassured that this will set the record straight, in a grown-up manner, blah blah. Of course, it still comes out News of the World–ish. Oily Piers pours some of that oil on the flames.

  This scrutiny is hard enough for me to take, especially as the crux of the story is untrue; for Orianne, however, a twenty-one-year-old suddenly enmeshed in a world of which she has no experience or comprehension, it’s hellish. She has to look behind her wherever she goes.

  In timing that’s so perfect it’s painful, just as “Faxgate” hits I’m booked to perform an MTV Unplugged show at Wembley TV studios in London, to promote the U.K. leg of the tour. I’m contractually obligated; otherwise it would be the last thing I’d do right now. Walking onstage in Birmingham, a few days later, I’m still thinking this is the worst possible moment to be starting a tour at home. I’ve gone from being Mr. Really, Really Nice Guy (Albeit a Bit Ubiquitous and Annoying) to Mr. Bastard.

  As I mentioned before, the show opens with rubbish on the floor: corrugated iron, bins, scrunched-up newspapers. Having played the drum duet with Ricky, the first number is “I Don’t Care Anymore,” from the Hello, I Must Be Going! album. That song was written about my first failed marriage, when Andy and I were going through the legals. The lyrics, accordingly, are caustic, and I perform it appropriately moodily, scuffing my way through the rubbish scattered on the stage.

  But now everything takes on added resonance. The lyrics are nothing to do with Jill or our marriage. But when I kick those newspapers, I’m apparently kicking the tabloids.

  After that opening song, I sit on the edge of the stage at Birmingham’s NEC and say to the audience, “Listen, this is all very embarrassing, but you mustn’t believe everything you read in the papers…” I don’t know if that sets anybody at ease, maybe not even me. I was always told in the theater: “Never make apologies to the audience. Just get on with it.” But I like to think there was a little bit of a sigh of relief. “Thank God we got that out of the way.”

  But then, introducing “I Wish It Would Rain Down,” from …But Seriously, I do my take on a skit by politically incorrect, intense (and intensely funny) comedian Sam Kinison (a friend, who’d died two years previously). It’s about a couple in a car, arguing about an old girlfriend of the husband’s they’ve just seen. My thinking: it’s me, doing a bit of acting, talking up my love of comedians, segueing into a song in a characterful manner. In my ignorance, I
don’t see that this is a bit too close to the bone for some. That it might look like I’m dancing on the grave of my marriage. I’m just desperate to make the audience laugh, or defuse the tension that I feel is there. To my shame, I don’t understand that, in the circumstances, it’s in poor taste.

  The European leg, and 1994, ends with eight nights at Wembley Arena. Sounds impressive, and on lots of levels it is. But a London crowd are a crowd apart; at the best of times there will be a bit of that “so impress me” vibe. But now, every night there’s a portion of the crowd for whom I’m a villain.

  In spring 1995 I resume the tour, in South Africa. This final leg is called The Far Side of the World, and it will also take in Asia and South America. Professionally things are going great. I play football stadiums, and I play places I’ve never been to: Indonesia, the Philippines, Puerto Rico. Here on the far side of the world there’s relief, too, from the endless barracking I’ve been getting in the U.K. press. Back home it feels like Faxgate is the scandal that will not die.

  Orianne joins me whenever she can arrange a few days off from Capital Ventures. She flies in, seemingly impervious to jet lag, and we stay up all night, just talking and catching up. These are moments, hours, of bliss in the maelstrom of a thirteen-month world tour and the hurricane of a collapsing marriage.

  There are no winners in this situation. I’m fortunate enough to be able to bury myself in my work. Unfortunately my work necessitates being out front and center, in front of thousands of people who are reading all this terrible stuff about my terrible private life.

  Night after night, peering into the gloom beyond the stage lights, I don’t see the tens of thousands enjoying themselves. I see the odd huddle who are having the intense conversations: “I used to like him. But now he’s left his wife for this young girlfriend, and she’s a bimbo, who he’s trying to mold into what he wants. But he’s not getting our money for nothing—we’re still going to the concert! Let’s see how far he’s fallen! Oh, I like this song. But what a bastard. Oh, this is a good one too…but it’s about his first marriage! Another ex-! Can’t faxing Phil Collins sort himself out?”