Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  “Oh, she’s just an old girlfriend…”

  Meanwhile, I’m looking around to see if Jill has noticed all this. Of course she has. There may be trouble ahead.

  Lavinia and I talk a bit more, and I am very aware I am being watched. But she always was a physical girl, touchy and tactile, and I can’t help but reciprocate. Or, as Jill might interpret it, I can’t keep my hands off her. Left to my own devices, I might be glad of that personal caravan…But there are forty other people around, all of them, no doubt, thinking, “What’s going on here?” That magnetism, the aura, is powerful enough for everyone to sense.

  Eventually Lavinia goes, and it’s like two hands parting at the last possible second, Romeo and Juliet style. Funnily enough, when Franco Zeffirelli was directing his 1968 adaptation of Shakespeare’s great tragic romance, Lavinia was up for the female lead (she was a great friend of Olivia Hussey, who eventually landed the part). I was in the running for Romeo. Yes, really. It was a long time ago, OK?

  So we get in the limo to leave—Jill, her mum, Jane, and Lily. Jill states matter-of-factly, “That was that Lavinia.” She’s never met her, but she’s heard of her. She knows.

  “You never told me she was that beautiful.”

  I never knew she was that beautiful! I haven’t seen her for twenty years.

  The next day I call Vinny, ostensibly to say goodbye. Instead I say, “How can we see each other again?” I am already desperate to reconnect. Something has been rekindled. What happens now? I’m married, she’s married.

  She gives me her mum and dad’s number back in London. Shortly afterward Lavinia arrives in the U.K. to visit her parents. Jill and Lily are still in LA; Jill’s working on the restoration of the house that we’ve recently bought on Sunset Boulevard, the former residence of Cole Porter. I crowbar open that window of opportunity and get together with Lavinia a few times. An affair is born.

  Please don’t let me be misunderstood: it’s hard to explain just how much a school love affair can stay with you throughout your life. As much as I loved Jill and Lily, I adored Lavinia. She was attractive, sure, but there was something else that drew us together. So why did I sacrifice my personal life at this time? Unfinished business-of-the-heart, I suppose. To have one last try at something I felt should have gone all the way, all those years ago. I wasn’t able to resist the chance.

  My life suddenly revolves around trying to see Lavinia. I’ll call her at three or four in the morning. I’m perennially distracted, from the tour and my family. It’s awful. I’m awful.

  Things move very quickly: I’m going to leave Jill, Lavinia’s going to leave her Hudson brother, and we’ll run off into the hills together. Unknown to Jill, I have reached the point of no return. Before this I have never been unfaithful. But I class Lavinia as a genuine exception—I have good reason to do this in my misty eyes. She’s the love of a younger life, the one that got away.

  I’m back with my childhood sweetheart, the way it always should have been.

  Only three or four intense weeks after our first meeting, the We Can’t Dance tour reaches Scandinavia. I phone home to LA with the “Dear Jill…” call.

  Alas, from dizzying highs to nausea-inducing lows. The speed of this whirlwind romance—albeit one that was twenty-five years in the making—causes the wheels to clatter off. Lavinia comes back to me, having spoken to her husband, and says, “He’s not gonna kill me, but he’s gonna ruin my life: he’ll take the kids.”

  As quickly as it was all on, it’s all off. Of course the children have to take precedence. Jill and I stay together—kind of. I’m not sure things will ever be the same again between us. Sure, we’ll give it a try, but it won’t be easy. From going up the long ladder, I’ve gone down the long snake. And it hurts.

  Or: divorce my wife by fax? Of course I didn’t

  It’s the morning after the affair before.

  The emotional turbulence has left me hollow. It’s not the rejection that’s killing me. It’s the loss. Little wonder that my head isn’t wholly in the game by the time the We Can’t Dance tour finishes in Wolverhampton on November 17, 1992. The mammoth run of globetrotting shows may have finally ended, but I’m still all over the place—a feeling not helped by a surreal detour to Neverland.

  That December I’m in LA to present the Billboard Awards, which is not something I’ve ever done before. The big winner on the night will be Michael Jackson. He’s swept the board with Dangerous. On top of that, it’s the tenth anniversary of Thriller and Billboard wants to honor its ever-more-astronomical sales figures.

  Unfortunately Jackson is off on tour the day after the awards, so the plan is to pre-record my presenting him with the trophies at his Neverland ranch in Santa Barbara.

  The opportunity to meet the man properly, and see what Neverland is really like (are there monkey butlers?), is hugely exciting. Even getting there is exciting, if by “exciting” you understand that I mean “alarming”: the helicopter ferrying Jill, Lily and me gets lost in fog en route, we have to make an unforeseen landing several miles shy of the ranch, and are then limousined the rest of the way.

  When we eventually de-limo, we’re met by a pair of greeters dressed in Disney-esque uniforms. There’s Muzak tinkling in the gardens, and children running around in the on-site amusement park.

  We’re led into the house and parked in his living room to wait for the maestro to come downstairs. There are photos on the wall of him in his Thriller-era pomp, and various family portraits. There’s also a huge oil painting of Jackson surrounded by animals and birds, the King of Pop giving it some St. Francis of Assisi.

  Eventually Michael descends and introduces himself. He’s very sweet and friendly. All thoughts of the weird things I’ve heard disappear in an instant, and I don’t bat an eyelid when he invites Lily and Jill to play upstairs in his toy room. He and I go to his studio complex, where the camera crews are setting up—in addition to the Billboard Awards team, there’s his own team who film for his archives everything he does.

  While we wait we make small talk, and he apologizes for his pale make-up. It’s for a skin condition, he tells me. I get the impression he feels safe with me—and not just because, as the LA Times later notes in its report on the telecast, I’m an “English paleface.”

  After we finish filming the somewhat stilted awards presentation—he has to pretend he didn’t know about the second award—we walk back to the house and Michael says his goodbyes.

  It’s only a brief encounter, but I’m left with the feeling that Michael Jackson, though clearly not the same as us mortals, is not the weirdo we’ve been led to expect. A brilliant musician and a nice guy who’s had to live an extraordinary life from the age of five. But, even though I have no direct knowledge of the murkier side of Michael’s life, I have to say that there’s probably no smoke without some kind of fire.

  In January 1993 I’m at home in Lakers Lodge, considering my next moves. Genesis have never been bigger, yet I’ve never felt smaller. The confusion is rattling around in my brain just like the trains rattling around the rapidly expanding model railway set-up that I built for Simon (and for myself) downstairs in the cellar.

  I’ve apologized profusely to Jill, explained that Lavinia was a bolt-from-the-past aberration, and promised to be a better, truer husband.

  In my studio at the top of the house, as I contemplate the beginnings of the songs that might make up my next solo album, I’m having different, darker thoughts. If it was anybody other than Lavinia, I’d be able to put it out of the way, to banish the thoughts and bury the ache. But this is Lavinia. She’s something special. The painful truth? I’m deeply confused. Might the first love of my life still be the last?

  I write a lot in my little room, with calming views of our newly renovated barn. Just me and my twelve-track Akai recorder. I sit on my stool, and I sing spontaneously. I sing out, and I sing loud, without using headphones, just using the speakers. The words, the music and the emotions pour out of me at once. I write
“Can’t Turn Back the Years” (“the perfect love was all you wanted from me / but I cannot turn back the years…”) and “I’ve Forgotten Everything” (“I’ve forgotten everything about you till someone says your name…”). That’s my version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and it’s a song that I create and record so fast I don’t even write it down.

  I write “Both Sides of the Story,” and its bold appeal for understanding all the circumstances surrounding a scenario gives me the title for the album: Both Sides.

  The emotions that are firing these new songs are similar to the ones that gave Face Value its power, impact and, ultimately I hope, resonance. They’re me, laid open and laid bare. On my first solo album, and on this, my fifth, I put it all out there. In the long run this is why Face Value and Both Sides are my two favorite albums, and why No Jacket Required doesn’t come close for me.

  Specifically, on Both Sides the rage and hurt of Face Value is replaced by the pang of regret, heartache and nostalgia. Lyrically, to my mind, I hit some of those emotions pretty perfectly on the head. I love the simplicity and the purity of the songs.

  As I’m writing I come to a decision. With songs this personal, so close to home, no one else will be playing on or recording them. This is private, and I’m going to keep it that way for as long as possible. The irony, of course, being that, if I’ve done my job properly and written movingly from the heart, I’m fearful that as soon as Jill hears Both Sides, our marriage will implode.

  I suppose that, in keeping the creation and recording of these songs purely to myself, I’m trying to delay that moment for as long as I can.

  I play all the instruments myself, record the vocals and work up my home demos into an almost releasable state before taking them to The Farm to add the drums. There I will continue to keep them close to my chest by producing the album on my own, and doing so with some briskness. The musicianship is, you might say, amateurish. Or, better, intimate. But that works for these songs; that’s part of the charm.

  While I have an idea that writing these songs will have ramifications that are earth-shattering for my personal life, I have no clue that recording them in this manner will have an equally tumultuous impact on my professional life. That will come a little later. But for now, the album is finished.

  Then, some breathing room before I go public with Both Sides. In early 1993 the phone rings with an enticing invitation: a young Australian director, Stephan Elliott, has seen Miami Vice and wants me to play the lead in a film called Frauds, a black comedy about a perverse insurance inspector who terrorizes the lives of a couple he suspects of fraud.

  In the window between finishing recording Both Sides and its release, I travel to Sydney for the shoot. It’s great fun and a welcome change of headspace after the We Can’t Dance tour, and from what’s been happening at home. Hugo Weaving is my co-star, and soon he’ll rocket to fame in The Matrix series, while Elliott goes on to direct genius, ABBA-channeling musical The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

  In October 1993, “Both Sides of the Story” is released as the first single from Both Sides. It’s long, almost seven minutes on the album. Even edited for radio purposes it’s still five and a half minutes. The Americans want “Everyday” as the first single because “it’s more like what Phil Collins does.” I dig in my heels. I don’t care if this album isn’t as commercial as my four previous albums. It’s not meant to be. It’s a defiantly, proudly personal record, made entirely to my script and my specifications. It’s my heart on my sleeve, as ugly and messy as that must necessarily be.

  I don’t view Both Sides as a public statement that I have closed the doors on my second marriage. That’s certainly not the message intended for Jill. Rather it’s an honest account of the turmoil I’ve been experiencing. I’m just acknowledging what happened, and doing so the only way I know how.

  “Both Sides of the Story” is a hit—just. It’s the only hit single from the album. Both Sides still reaches number 1 in the U.K. but, broadly, the innermost thoughts and feelings of this haunted, guilty man are not clicking with the record-buying public, certainly not compared with the surreally huge sales of what has gone before. I don’t care. I’ve done what I set out to do.

  In any case, I have more pressing concerns. To be painfully honest, I’ve realized that my marriage to Jill is over. I’ve undermined everything, and I can’t see a way back. I’m so sad for Lily, who is trying to make sense of all this mess her dad has made. I will always be sorry for that. I know that confessing to these feelings will unmoor Jill and Lily’s lives, so I make the difficult decision to take the coward’s way out: I say nothing.

  —

  The Both Sides of the World tour starts in spring 1994, on April Fool’s Day. Given what soon unfolds, it’s an auspicious date on which to kick off a 169-show tour that will run for thirteen torrid months.

  The first three weeks of the tour are uneventful, other than the fact that the concept for the show is going down brilliantly with the fans. The gig is in two halves. The first half I title “Black & White,” featuring as it does songs from Both Sides and other, similarly reflective and/or downcast numbers: “One More Night,” “Another Day in Paradise,” “Separate Lives.” The second half, “Colours,” despite beginning with “In the Air Tonight,” is more upbeat and fun: “Easy Lover,” “Two Hearts,” “Sussudio.” The home straight.

  They’re long and demanding sets, taxing from the opening moments. I enter the stage through a fake door, hang up my coat and sit down at what looks like a pile of rubbish but which has drums hidden inside. Drummer Ricky Lawson, in the band for the first time, enters playing a kit of pads hidden inside his waistcoat. There’s a call-and-response drum piece, and seamlessly we segue into “I Don’t Care Anymore.” And we’re off. I’m enjoying throwing myself into the performances. The distraction, certainly, and the expelling of energy and emotion, are welcome. Receiving rapturous responses night after night can’t fail to cheer me up.

  On April 26 I fly into Geneva. I have a show tonight in Lausanne, Switzerland’s fourth biggest city, located on the shores of Lac Léman. I’m in Lyon the day after tomorrow, and three days from now the tour reaches Paris. There I’m booked for three shows at the Palais Omnisports arena, playing to 20,000 people each night.

  Tony Smith, booking agent John Giddings, tour manager Andy Mackrill, Danny Gillen (still by my side seven years after joining me during the making of Buster) and I land at Geneva, at the Global Jet Aviation hangar, the private part of the airport.

  As at every other airport at which we land, we’re met by cars driven straight onto the tarmac, usually containing a local record company employee or some such.

  So we deplane, and split into two groups. There waiting, as scheduled, are two Renault Espace vans with drivers…and this very attractive woman. Girl, really.

  She’s very smart, formally dressed in a gray skirt suit, and very beautiful. She introduces herself as Orianne—an unusual name, I think to myself—and says she’s been hired by the local Swiss concert promoter, Michael Driberg, to translate during our stay in Lausanne. She has an Asian look (her mother is Thai, I later learn) and speaks great English with a French accent.

  We climb into the back of the van and settle in for the forty-minute drive from Geneva airport to Lausanne. I’m reading the book that accompanied the documentary Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. I love Quincy’s big-band stuff, and am mulling over the idea of having my own big band, so I’m hoovering up anything I can find on the man and his music.

  Well, I say I’m reading Quincy’s book. I’m holding Quincy’s book. Really, I’m drinking in this incredible young woman in the front seat. I nudge Danny and raise my eyebrows. He gives me the look: “Yeah, I know.” I ask her name again—Oriel? Orion? I’m not messing, I really can’t remember her name.

  She’s not a translator by profession, even though everyone will come to describe her that way. Orianne is twenty-one and works i
n the Geneva offices of Capital Ventures, an investment company. But because Driberg knows her, and knows she speaks excellent English, he asked if she would get me from the airport, take me to the hotel, escort me to the show, then deliver me back home again, all the while meeting my linguistic needs.

  And I’m not lying or exaggerating: on the way from Geneva airport to Lausanne’s Beau-Rivage Hotel, I become besotted with Orianne Cevey. There is no flirting, in part because I’ve never been any good at flirting. She’s giving me no signals. I’m not even talking to her. Stupid, really.

  Obviously in real, practical terms I’m thinking, “This isn’t going to go anywhere.” Yet at the same time: I would love this to. This feeling reminds my forty-three-year-old self of being a teenager. With light-speed certainty and blood-rush irrationality, I know I want to take this further. And this is not just about sex. It isn’t even the conversation, or any intimacy, because no one’s speaking, and she’s in the front, and I’m in the back, with big lump Danny and big hero Quincy. This stranger’s presence, in this crowded car, for forty quick minutes, is enough. As I later learn in French, it’s a coup de foudre.

  We arrive at the extremely elegant Beau-Rivage. Get out, check in, and I now take the opportunity to appreciate the full splendor of this young woman. Half my age, half Asian, half a whole world away. But numbers don’t mean a thing.

  I have an hour or so before soundcheck, so Orianne arranges to come back with the driver and collect me for the gig. Danny and I go upstairs and, for the first and only time in our entire history of touring, we have connecting rooms. We open the doors between the suites and excitedly chat.

  “Did you see her, Danny?”

  “Yeah. Lovely girl, lovely girl.”

  “Wow.”

  Frankly, I can’t think about much else. An armchair therapist might suggest that right now I’m predisposed to a reaction like this, given the emotional turmoil I’ve been experiencing (and yes, of course, I brought all that on myself). But I’d tell the armchair therapist to take a running jump. This woman seems special, and so are my feelings.