Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  Some people—Stewart Copeland of The Police, for example—wear gloves. I could never do that. I need to feel the stick.

  So fundamentally, there’s no way round it. You just have to develop strength and resilience. On early tours, back in my hotel room, I’d play on pillows in front of the TV, endlessly, into the night, to strengthen my wrists. With the blisters, you have to push through. The blister breaks, then you get a blood blister, then that breaks and you’re working with increasingly butchered flesh.

  You have no option but to do it in the raw, in real time, onstage. Even if you’ve rehearsed—seven, eight, nine, ten hours a day—you won’t get there. You won’t find the angst, the nerves or the tension of playing a show. So the fingers won’t get toughened either.

  You could use New-Skin, a product like a thick nail varnish that’s daubed on a piece of flayed epidermis desperate for some protection. You paint it on and it stings and it stinks. But once it dries, the nauseous medical pong fades, as does the pain, and you’re armed with another layer of insulation. Then, when that comes off, it rips off another layer of real skin. You start all over again.

  Although all of this may sound overdramatic, it’s a reality that drummers live with. You play, and you play on, and on. You might, in desperation, stick on plasters, but the sweat makes them come off during the show, so you hope that you have bits of hard skin developing. If not, the salty sweat will make your cracked, bleeding digits feel like they’re on fire.

  Eventually—eventually—you’ve passed the worst. Now you have Tour Fingers.

  So while as a drummer you might be mentally enfeebled, you’re physically robust. Even when I became a singer first and foremost, I maintained that mindset, and that fitness. And after A Trip into the Light, with the nightly laps of honor around our huge, round stage, I feel in great shape. There’s none of this personal-trainer malarkey. There’s no gym addiction, as seems to be the way of the preening, peacocking modern pop star.

  The voice, however, is a different beast. You can’t put a sticking plaster on iffy vocal cords. So you have to try to transcend via other means.

  Mercifully, while I never suffered from nodules on any of the giant Genesis or solo tours in the eighties or nineties, I did have a doctor in every port. I very rarely canceled shows, because I knew when it was time to pull the emergency cord and go for the injection of prednisone, a corticosteroid.

  Your vocal cords are very small, like two tiny coins that rub together. If they become swollen, or abused, they won’t meet to enable you to sing a note. Then you’re in trouble. If you keep up the abuse, in their engorged state they eventually become nodules. But a quick steroid injection reduces the swelling and you’re right as rain. In the short term, anyway.

  I was forced to seek this recourse on a number of occasions throughout my singing life.

  The conversation usually went something like this:

  “Doctor, I can’t sing.”

  “OK. When are you working next?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “A 40,000-seater stadium.”

  “Ah…”

  So you’re given a shot of prednisone, injected into your bum. The steroid will get you through the show, but once you’re on it, you’re on it for ten days. It will also get you a lovely cacophony of side effects: psychotic mood swings, water retention, moon face.

  This happened in Fremantle in Australia, on the mammoth Invisible Touch tour of 1986 and 1987. Touring Australia is a huge undertaking—different time zones, major internal flights, upside down and back to front at the bottom of the world.

  This is the tour where we bump into Elton John. My old percussionist friend Ray Cooper is a member of his band. We go to see him because we’re playing the same venue soon after. Ray says, “Hey, man, you been working out?” Of course, I haven’t. “You look great, you look great…” he adds hurriedly, protesting just a bit too much.

  When I get back to the hotel, I check myself in the mirror. “I look OK,” I think, at least to me.

  However, I’ve picked up an injury on this tour. One night, at the end of “Domino,” I jumped in the air and came down on the edge of my foot. The pain was excruciating, but it was just a sprain and I pushed through. Something—adrenaline, cortisone, insurance premiums, the threat of ruinous cancellation fees—helped me keep the tour ticking on.

  Some months later, I see pictures of myself from the tour, and I realize what Ray was not saying. I look like David Crosby at the height/depth of his drug woes. No, I look like I’ve eaten David Crosby. Courtesy of the cortisone, I was taking on water like a blue whale sieving plankton. I’ve blimped out and no one had said a word.

  Those pictures scared me stiff. I had not heeded the warning: “Do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence.” And the machinery doesn’t come much heavier than a Genesis stadium tour.

  When I meet Ray a short while after that, at a show at the Royal Albert Hall, he admits that the only “working out” going through his mind in Australia was him trying to work out why his old mate Phil looked so “fucking terrible.”

  And it wasn’t just that tour. As already recounted, the eye-wateringly long and climactic We Can’t Dance tour was almost derailed at the very start when my voice went in Tampa. The audiences on this tour were giant ones, and they knew the words better than me. I couldn’t let them down. But on that occasion, even the needle couldn’t save the show.

  By this stage, I’d been dancing around the high notes for a while. This didn’t happen so much on my solo tours since my music was written for me to sing. But portions of the Genesis set were written for Peter’s voice. And for all the uncanny similarities between our voices, some songs were just difficult for my range. But even if Peter had been singing them, they would have been high even for him at this point in both our lives.

  You could lower the key in certain songs, but that risked losing the magic. “Mama,” for example: take that down too low and it really has no magic at all. It’s all about the key it’s written in, the place on the guitar where you play the chords, the resonance of certain keyboard sounds.

  There were certain songs in the Genesis set-list that I’d be dreading coming down the pipe. “Home by the Sea” has a lot of lyrics. I had to make sure I remembered the starts of the lines as a crucial aide-mémoire. Tony Banks wrote that melody, and those words, but he’d never thought about how it would sound; he’d never sung it out loud. So to get through the show I had to gently weave my way round some of the accident black spots.

  Tony always noticed. “Having a bit of trouble tonight?” he’d say after a gig, not unkindly. “Noticed you missed a few of my best notes…”

  Even “I Can’t Dance,” a stupidly simple song, got tough. That opening high burst of the first chorus line—ouch. The reason I wrote that little bit was as a nod to Fine Young Cannibals’ Roland Gift, who has a terrific soul voice. But singing that every night, I’d find myself skipping around the note. Otherwise the game would have been up. Shot myself in the vocal cord with that one.

  Then there’s “In the Air Tonight.” If I sang that cold, it would sometimes be an effort to reach the emotive peaks that drive the song. Sometimes your body movements, and the shape of your mouth, could help you get there. But if I was drumming as well, the distraction would propel my voice to greater heights. In that regard, one helped the other: the drumming pushing the singing.

  Mainly, though, I didn’t allow myself too much time to think of these problems. For three decades I pushed on, and on, and on. What’s worrying is that if I counted now all the times I’ve been pricked in the buttocks in the name of a good vocal performance, I’d have trouble sitting down. I’d have trouble getting back up again, too: as I would one day find out, too much cortisone can make your bones brittle.

  —

  In 1998 the Tarzan experience is drawing to a close, and we have to make a “pop” version of “You’ll Be in My Heart” for the single release.

>   I book some studio time at Ocean Way in LA with Rob Cavallo, a producer who is also senior vice-president of A&R at Disney’s label Hollywood Records (and son of the boss of the label). Cavallo’s had huge, Grammy-winning success with Green Day’s Dookie, and he’ll go on to even greater successes as a producer (Green Day’s American Idiot, Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will, My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, to name but three) and as an executive—in 2010 he becomes chairman of Warner Bros. Records.

  One afternoon in Ocean Way we’re listening back to a vocal take. I’m in the vocal booth, wearing headphones, when the engineer presses play.

  Bang!

  It’s incredibly loud. Unbelievably so. Forget ear-splitting—this is head-splitting. The sound crashes from the headphones straight into me, overwhelming and explosive. I go deaf in one ear. As simple and as quick as that. In my left ear I can hear nothing. No ringing, no buzzing, just nothing.

  Rather calmly, I say to the engineer, “Please don’t do that again.”

  Somewhat dazed, I go back to the hotel, the Peninsula Beverly Hills. Lily, now aged nine, is waiting for me, which brightens things up no end. She and I start playing Spyro the Dragon—computer games are one of our new shared passions. I love them, and I love Spyro, although if push comes to shove, I’ll declare myself a Crash Bandicoot man. As if by magic, the hearing in my left ear roars back. It’s like I’ve been underwater, but the blockage is suddenly gone. Thank God for that.

  That evening we go out for dinner at a little Italian place opposite the hotel. I’m about to enjoy my pasta when suddenly my hearing goes again. From that moment, I will never hear properly in my left ear. Game over, just like that.

  I visit more than a few ear, nose and throat specialists. They all subject me to audiograms, and all, eventually, come up with the same thing: I have suffered what is known as an aural stroke, caused by an infection. It’s nothing to do with the music. This is just bad luck. You work behind a sweet-shop counter, it could happen to you.

  I learn that, in simple terms, the cells in the nerves that lead from my brain to my ear have been attacked by a virus. This has resulted in the loss of my ability to hear middle and bottom frequencies. If I’d dealt with it immediately—with a dose of my old friend cortisone, there’s the possibility of kick-starting the cells’ regeneration—it might have been different. But I left it too late, in true Collins tradition. It’s what killed my dad in the end, him not dealing with his diabetes and heart condition.

  Now, because this is a viral infection, the noise blast in the headphones was probably not the cause. However, as the months and years pass, it’s the only hearing-related experience I have that’s out of the ordinary, so I can’t help but feel it’s partly to blame.

  On the advice of Disney’s Chris Montan, whose son is chronically deaf, I visit the House Ear Institute in LA. The specialist asks, “Do you need to go on tour again?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well then, why would you? Because anything could happen and you could go completely deaf. No one knows what causes this viral infection, and you would be putting yourself at risk again.”

  Am I panicked? Strangely, not really. For one thing, I’m thinking, “This will eventually be OK.” For another, I’m having a deeper thought: “If it’s not eventually OK, I can live with that.”

  I’m not entirely deaf, only 50 percent in one ear, so I can carry on working at home. If I was out gigging with a rock group, or leading my own band in a big pop extravaganza, it might be an issue. But I have no intention of doing either for the foreseeable future.

  I’m happy here, bunkered in my garden on a Swiss hillside. I’m writing music for films. I’ve got my Big Band, who only play smaller venues and for whom I do barely any singing. I can take all the time in the world to make my next solo album. So, if I have to stop being the “Phil Collins” of headlines and headline-act (dis)repute, that’s fine with me. Partly losing my hearing is my get-out clause.

  I’m sanguine about this new, semi-deaf reality, which is baffling to my nearest and dearest. But the truth is, losing my hearing has given me something: control. It’s disability-induced control, but I’ll take that. After so many years of paying the piper but not entirely calling the tune, I can wrest back my destiny.

  I’ve come to resent this “Phil Collins” doppelgänger, the one who was out there performing, showing off, hoovering up plaudits and (increasingly) brickbats. “Phil Collins” comes with aggravations, expectations, obligations and suppositions dragging round his ankles and hanging off his neck. He has splintered families and embittered partners and distant children. I don’t like that guy. I don’t want to be that guy. I’ve had enough of me.

  Want me to go out and tour again, and be a pop/rock star again? Sorry, no can do. Doctor’s orders.

  Lost my hearing? Found myself. Or what was left of me.

  Admittedly, I already have a pretty good fallback plan. The very day Tarzan was released in theaters in June 1999, Tom Schumacher asked me to come on board for another new Disney movie. Brother Bear—a yarn about Native Americans, the ancient harmony of man and nature, animal spirits and, yes, bears—would involve writing the songs and, even more interestingly, writing some of the underscore. That was a challenge I was itching to try. It more than compensated for Disney’s other creative suggestion—that I might not be singing these songs in the film.

  The making of Brother Bear is another drawn-out creative process, as I might have expected from a story that, in its earliest incarnation, had a King Lear subtext.

  First off, Disney’s music team insist that I get a computer in my life. Before this, I was working with tape. On Tarzan, every time they made edits to the film, it would affect the songs, which meant I had to go away and re-record the entire thing. Time-consuming, but I knew no other way. With computers you can shift around tempo and music at will.

  I undergo a week’s course with one of Mark Mancina’s technical boffins, Chuck Choi. I take lots of notes and at first it seems a mountain to climb. But before too long, I’ve become a computer buff. I’ve developed my own new ways of working in a studio; plus I’m sitting elbow-to-elbow with guys who live and breathe this stuff. Mark is a seasoned score-writer, young and enthusiastic, and he’s an old-school Genesis fan to boot. We click well, we divide up the music cues to be done, and I set to work—a very excited, soundtrack-composing, Disney-affiliated, partially deaf man.

  Imagine now one of those old black-and-white films, where the pages of the calendar fly off, one after the other, month after month. A multitude of video conference calls with the directors and the scriptwriting and animation teams. Many late-night telephone conversations between Begnins, Burbank and Orlando (location of Disney’s Florida studios), receiver pressed hotly against my (good) right ear. Lots of back-and-forth as I listen to the temporary score—used by film-makers when they’re in production—and wonder whether it’d be best to copy it, mirror it or improve it.

  Even more back-and-forth when Mark attempts to translate my pieces of underscoring into a real orchestral chart. We discover that parts I’ve written for a flute are out of the flute’s range, or that my trombone part is really a French horn part. I’m learning, and learning fast, that for all my musical experience, when it comes to scoring a film, in some crucial areas I don’t know my arse from my oboe.

  Meanwhile, the writing of the songs is coming on just fine. I’m feeling quite breezy. But I do wonder: who’s going to be the singing voice of the fish, the bear, all of the other animals? Ultimately those Brother Bear necessities are Disney’s problems, not mine, although I’m included in all the discussions.

  For “Great Spirits,” the film’s opening song, we call Richie Havens, a longtime hero of mine. He does a beautiful version, but it doesn’t cut it for the team. After some more tryouts, we decide to ask Tina Turner. But she’s just announced her retirement, so securing her services could be a struggle. Handily, I met her with Eric during the making of August—she duetted w
ith him on “Tearing Us Apart.” Also, she lives in Switzerland, which is another plus for stay-at-home Collins.

  Tina says yes, and we hop to Zurich to record her. Being supremely professional and a true artist, she’s learnt the song from the tape I’d sent. She gives it all she can and, after a couple of takes, we have it. Tina oozes musicality and class.

  Another stirring piece, “Transformation,” soundtracks the man-to-bear transition in the film. My lyrics are translated into Inuit and the song ends up being sung by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. On paper, an odd juxtaposition and a leftfield choice, you might say. In the finished film, extraordinary.

  I do end up singing six of the songs as extras on the soundtrack album, so partially I’m satisfied. But for “Welcome,” one of my best songs for the film, it’s deemed a good idea to ask The Blind Boys of Alabama to sing it. It’s for a hunting scene, where the bear clan welcome the hero bear to the wider ursine family with, basically, an orgy of salmon fishing. The salmon seem oddly unbothered.

  This segment is the only one I feel doesn’t work musically: the Boys were a little past their prime, and didn’t have the groove for a song that I wrote as Motown-with-bears.

  Still, when Brother Bear finally opens in October 2003, I do get to share a stage with Tina Turner at the premiere at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre. After the screening, I sing one of my songs, “No Way Out,” and then introduce Tina, who sings “Great Spirits” with me on drums. It’s quite amazing how Tina turns it on. She’ll walk through the soundcheck, she’ll “pretend” she’s retired, and then she’ll kill the song and give a solid-gold performance.

  Meanwhile, back in the real (non-animated) world…In parallel with the Brother Bear work, I’ve been working at home—slowly—on the songs for my seventh solo album.

  In late summer 2000, we discover that Orianne is pregnant. Nicholas Grev Austin Collins is born on April 21, 2001, “Grev” in tribute to my dad, and Austin for my brother Clive (it’s his middle name) and our paternal grandfather. This glorious time inspires a new batch of writing. “Come with Me” is about Nic as a baby, but really it’s about any baby. It’s a rush of pure paternal love and care: don’t worry about anything, come with me, close your eyes, it’s going to be all right.