Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  The lyrics are for any of my kids, or any kids anywhere. It’s one of my favorite songs, the melody suggestive of a lullaby I used to sing to Lily in the back of limos in America. We make a music box for baby Nic, something to help him sleep, that plays that melody. I will then have to write one for his brother Matt and get him his own music box. Much to his frustration, at the time of writing, his melody has yet to transform into a song.

  I decide to call this deeply personal new album Testify: a word that sums up how I feel about my life at the time. I want to tell the world about a woman I’m very much in love with and a new baby boy in the family. In this period I’m blissfully happy undercover in Switzerland.

  It will therefore take something extraordinary to drag me, blinking, back to center stage. That extraordinary thing is a call from Her Maj.

  In spring 2002 I’m asked to be the drummer for the house band for the Party at the Palace, a lavish concert being held at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. Iffy ear or no iffy ear, I can’t say no to that.

  The brief outline is for a show celebrating the previous forty-plus years of British music. All the major artists from that period will be singing the songs that made them famous. Only Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson are bringing their own bands. For every other artist I’ll be playing drums and acting as de facto bandleader for the in-house musicians.

  We practice for a couple of weeks, a convoy of artists arriving in the rehearsal room adjacent to Tower Bridge: Ozzy Osbourne, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, Ray Davies, Joe Cocker, Annie Lennox, Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and many more.

  Come show day, my hands hold up, my ear doesn’t trouble me and everyone’s in great form—even Brian May, who’s playing up on the roof of Buckingham Palace and having to contend with wind that must be a nightmare for his sound, not to mention his hair.

  Five months later, Testify is released. I testify before you now that it flops rather dramatically. The French, Swiss, Swedes, Germans, Dutch and Belgians, bless ’em all, show it some love, making it number 2, 3 or 4 in their national charts. But the rest of the free world, notably the U.K. and the USA, are less enthused.

  I will also testify before you now that I am truly philosophical about this. I’ve had more than my fifteen minutes.

  On the plus side, I’ve made an album that hymns my love for my wife and baby boy, I’ve made it mostly at home, and I’ve made it while grappling with sudden deafness that, for a minute there, looked like it might have ended everything. That has to count as a result.

  And yet, and yet…In 2003, after Testify has rather quickly come and gone, I find myself doing some hard thinking.

  On June 12, at New York’s Marriott Marquis, I’m inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. It was established in 1969 by the legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer, in collaboration with music publishers Abe Olman and Howie Richmond, as a body (to quote their website) “to shine the spotlight on the accomplishments of songwriters who have provided us with the words and music that form the soundtrack of our lives.” To be deemed worthy of inclusion by my peers is a thrill. They’re a discerning bunch—to date (2016) there are fewer than 400 members. My fellow inductees in 2003 are Little Richard, Van Morrison and Queen, while Jimmy Webb (“Galveston,” “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and countless other classics that don’t feature place-names in their titles) takes home the annual Johnny Mercer Award. Good company.

  It’s a lovely validation, and it gets me thinking. If I am going to slowly retire this “Phil Collins” character, I should do so properly. Musically speaking, an underperforming solo album and a Big Band tour shouldn’t be my last hurrah.

  Another key factor in my decision-making process: by this time, three years after my sudden deafness, life is almost normal. My brain has adjusted, my right ear has compensated, my hearing disabilities have leveled out. I’m again able to listen to, and enjoy, music. And as I discover at Queen Liz’s little gig, wearing in-ear monitors makes performing very much doable.

  All things considered—and I do give this serious, serious consideration—I think maybe it’s possible to go out on tour and, rather than disappear without a trace, say goodbye properly.

  A final tour will also serve notice to my elders and betters and manager: when I say I want to stop, I mean it. I anticipate nobody will really believe me, because as we have seen, I have never stopped. But perhaps if I say it loud enough—over the course of a 77-date valedictory world tour, for example—I can alert those around me to the fact that I want to stop, properly, finally, forever, amen. After that, I will be free.

  OK, calling it The First Final Farewell tour might confuse some people, and give them the idea that there’s some wiggle room. But let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of a good, Python-esque joke.

  What I don’t understand until later is that when I tell Orianne that I want to retire, that this tour is the end of the road for me, she has a sudden vision: pipe and slippers. She’s only thirty-one, the mother of a toddler, and here’s her old man saying he’s hanging up his clogs. And he’s half deaf! What’s next, gout?

  As I’m preparing for the tour in early 2004, I’m oblivious to all this. My head is very much elsewhere. But I snap back to domestic reality in spring, when Orianne tells me she’s pregnant again. Fantastic news. For the first time in my life I embrace the concept of paternity leave: the tour scheduling is hastily rerouted to make sure we’ll be at home for the birth, and around for a good while thereafter.

  —

  The First Final Farewell tour kicks off at Milan’s Fila Forum on June 1, 2004. We tour Europe and America until the end of September, where I will say sayonara to the States at the Office Depot Center, Fort Lauderdale.

  Before I leave America, though, I take advantage of a day off after the show in Houston. Aware that my retirement is nigh—meaning this might be my last visit to Texas—I make a special pilgrimage to San Antonio, site of the Alamo.

  It’s a half-century since I first saw the Disney film Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier on TV as a five-year-old, piquing my interest in the battle between 185 Texans and a couple of thousand Mexican troops. But what started as childhood games featuring toy soldiers and a fort in the garden at 453 Hanworth Road has become, in adulthood, a serious hobby.

  In 1973, during Genesis’ Foxtrot tour, I took Peter Gabriel with me when I visited the historic site, to explore the reality behind the Hollywood myth. It was incredible, and incredibly moving, to witness firsthand the iconic church façade of the Alamo; to me, the scene of the bloody thirteen-day siege was hallowed ground. I couldn’t wait to return and, on a subsequent trip to the city, I met a clairvoyant who was convinced that, in a previous life, I was one of those 185 defenders—a courier, John W. Smith. I’d have taken that with a pinch of gunpowder if it wasn’t for the fact that I used to end my childhood games by setting fire to my toy soldiers—which, I learnt much later, was actually the Texans’ fate.

  On a day off in Washington, D.C., on another U.S. tour, sometime in the mid-eighties, I ended up in a shop called The Gallery of History. It sold historical documents and, among its cache of Nazi military orders and signed Beethoven scores, I found a letter written by Davy Crockett. It was priced at $60,000. Crockett was my hero, but I couldn’t justify spending that amount on a piece of paper, no matter how thrilling it was to feel so close to the legendary frontiersman.

  But I was intrigued and began casually looking around for other memorabilia related to the battle, although it wasn’t until Christmas 1995 that I took possession of my first Alamo document, a gift from Orianne: a receipt for a saddle owned by the aforesaid courier Smith. He was out delivering final letters when the Alamo fell on March 6, 1836, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how many miles that saddle had gone in the name of the state of Texas.

  From then on I was a collector of all things Alamo, buying up weaponry and documents whenever opportunity and budge
t allowed—and occasionally when budget didn’t allow.

  Now, thinking that 2004 will be the last time I tour America, I charter a small plane to make another visit to the site. I drag Orianne, a three-year-old Nicholas and Danny Gillen with me. Leaving the Alamo after a ninety-minute private tour, I notice a store twenty yards from the northeast corner of the compound, scene of some of the worst carnage.

  Inside The History Shop I get talking to the manager, Jim Guimarin. It’s the start of a great friendship and a fruitful relationship—Jim will help me in my collecting endeavors over the coming years.

  Sometime later, Jim—who’s been renting the premises—mentions that he’s sure that the ground underneath the store has never been excavated. So I do the obvious: I buy the store so I can dig it up.

  Underneath The History Shop we find a treasure trove of artifacts: soldiers’ personal effects, buttons, horseshoes and teeth, both human and animal. We clean and itemize them, then replace the floor and refit the store. It now houses an accurate model of the Alamo as it was 200 years ago and, with a guided tour voiced by me, it attracts many a tourist.

  —

  After the American run of The First Final Farewell tour I’m home for two months, and then Mathew Thomas Clemence Collins is born on December 1, 2004, in Geneva. I’m a supremely happy dad all over again. All my older kids seem to be as happy as me, and I am finally on the verge of giving up the touring life of a musician, eagerly ready to become a stay-at-home dad and help bring up the young ones.

  I stay off work until October 2005, when we resume the last final leg of the tour at the Saku Suurhall in Tallinn, Estonia. The shows are fantastic. The closing run is especially great, not least because I’m playing places—Estonia, Lithuania, Finland—I’ve never played before. My hearing holds up fine, too, which is a huge relief. Everyone is having a ball. Me, retire, at my age (I’m a chipper fifty-four at tour’s end)?

  But my commitment to stopping is unwavering. I said this would be the end. I have to stick to my word. I have to go home. If nothing else, it’s only fair—while I’m First Final Farewelling, Orianne is stuck at home, either pregnant while mothering a toddler or, in the second leg, nursing a newborn while mothering a toddler. With an absent husband, she has a lot on her plate.

  I’m counting down the days to when I can come off the road, close the door on a lifetime of performing, go home and settle into a job I’ve craved, but never been able to enjoy, my whole life: that of a Proper Dad. A Full-Time Dad. On both previous occasions, with Simon and Joely, and then with Lily, I hadn’t even managed to be a nine-to-five dad. We’d all paid the price for that. This time, with my two baby boys, I will do right by my children. I have a lot of loving to give and, for sure, a lot of making up to do. It’s family time.

  Simultaneously, Orianne is doing a lot of thinking, and a lot of worrying. She’s convinced that my retirement will be total: no working for me, or for anyone.

  But Orianne has no interest in giving up on a career, becoming a full-time mother and settling down as a full-time partner to an unplugged and indolent retiree. She’s creative, has a master’s degree in International Management, and a bachelor’s degree in Commerce, and has experience running her own business, an events organizing company called O-com.

  Her dynamism was one of the driving forces behind a charity we launched in 2000. For years I’d been receiving letters from kids wanting advice on how to get into the music business and, other than giving them a couple of contacts, I really didn’t know what else to tell them. Discussing this at home one night, Orianne and I hatched a plan to start a foundation that could help with tuition, coaching and guidance in the fields of music, the arts and sport. We contacted our friends in these areas and asked them to be godparents in their particular field of expertise. So began the Little Dreams Foundation.

  All told, then, the idea of me stopping work and sliding into comfy dotage is not particularly appealing to Orianne. I can imagine her thinking, “This is not what I signed up for.”

  On top of these genuine fears and justified concerns, Orianne starts to have mood swings. She feels unattractive and useless. And, I’m appalled to admit, I don’t have too much compassion. I keep flashing back to my dad’s attitude to illness of any sort. “Pull yourself together,” he’d say, “and get back to work.”

  Orianne’s fears about what my retiring will mean for us as a family, combined with her “baby blues,” mean that when I go home in the middle of the tour, she and I have very different mindsets. It’s a tense household, we’re both shattered, and the disconnection between us increases.

  If there’s unhappiness at home, touring can be the hardest place to keep smiling. Still, by the time I resume the last two-month run in October 2005, there’s part of me that’s grateful for the distraction. Perhaps a bit of distance will be good for both of us. I can take time to think more carefully about our future, and about Orianne’s needs. She can take time to get better—albeit, yes, while looking after two small children.

  But on the few occasions when she comes to meet me on tour, things are still tense. During the downtime at hotels, we’re arguing. During the drives to the airport in the band van, the silences are icy and awkward, and magnified by the discomfort of the other members of the touring party. Joely, who’s joined me for the tour, is especially aware of the discord. The celebratory shine of this First Final Farewell tour is dulling. The paradise of our marriage, and of our young family, is darkening.

  There’s a deep love for sure, but Orianne and I just can’t find it at this time.

  I can’t help thinking, “I can’t believe this. Here I go again. Again I’m on tour and again my marriage is rocky, if not worse. Third time unlucky. And what’s the common denominator? Me. There can’t be anyone else to blame.”

  If I have to sum up what’s causing the breakdown between Orianne and me, I’d say that it’s my fault for not hearing her crying out. I can’t understand why we’re arguing, I can’t understand why I’m being pushed out of the marital bed. I just don’t get it. I’m sorry.

  Nic is four and a half, Matt not even one. If this goes the way I think it might go, my kids are going to be ripped from me. They have no idea. The feeling of déjà vu makes me sick to my stomach.

  When The First Final Farewell tour ends on November 24, 2005, at Prague’s Sazka Arena, Orianne and I are still together, in that we’re still married, on paper at least. And we’re still living in the same house, but we won’t be for long.

  What do you call a drummer who splits up with his girlfriend? Homeless.

  What do you call a drummer who splits up with his third wife? A mess.

  Or: a Genesis reunion, a Broadway communion, a family disconnect

  The final six weeks of 2005 bring a traffic jam of conflicting pressures. Actually, more a car crash. In the resulting collision it’s not only fenders that are bent out of shape.

  In mid-November, the five core members of Genesis have a long-planned rendezvous in Glasgow, which is the latest pit stop on my First Final Farewell tour, to discuss a much-awaited, much-discussed reunion.

  At the end of November, the tour finally says farewell, and I go home to a home that doesn’t feel like my home anymore, and to a young family in urgent need of emergency TLC.

  In December, Disney requires my presence post-haste on Broadway, to begin work on a theatrical musical adaptation of Tarzan—four months earlier than scheduled, and on the day after Christmas to boot.

  In sum, my work-life balance is yet again well and truly out of whack. So much for retirement.

  The Genesis meeting is to discuss the thirtieth anniversary of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the band’s now legendary moment. Actually, to be precise, 2004 was the thirtieth anniversary of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Even three decades on, Genesis’ Finest Hour™ can’t stick to a schedule. A suggestion has been floating around for a while that the “original” line-up—myself, Tony, Mike, Peter and Steve—get back together for a new stagin
g of the album that was Peter’s swan song with the band. This time, though, we’d be prepared. The best of modern technology will be utilized to properly realize the theatrical vision contained within Peter’s lyrics and the entire double-album concept narrative. On paper, that’s more appealing than a bog-standard, Greatest Hits, lap-of-honor, cash-in comeback tour. Appealing enough, anyway, for five geographically scattered middle-aged men to submit to some furious diary juggling, which is how the five of us come to meet at my hotel in Glasgow on November 20, 2005. Even though this occasion comes in the dying days of my so-called retirement tour, I’m notionally up for this new project.

  Live, The Lamb never had a fair shake of the tail. Personally, I feel like I didn’t say goodbye properly to Genesis, and nor did we say goodbye properly to our fans. After ten years away, I miss Mike and Tony. Equally, it would be nice to slide back behind the kit again and just drum with the band. Crucially, too, an ambitious, expensive, multimedia theatrical presentation of The Lamb would not, by definition, lend itself to a long tour of the world’s biggest venues. This would be both shorter and infinitely more artful than the original tour. It would be confined to multiple nights in a nice theater somewhere, perhaps on Broadway even, with the rest of the global interest assuaged by a live internet stream or cinema broadcast. The possibilities are thrilling.

  So, for the first time in thirty years the five of us sit down together. Also present: Tony Smith and Peter’s manager, Mike Large.

  The atmosphere is good. We’re there to talk detail, and to pin down solid dates to rehearse and perform—if Peter can decide whether he wants to be involved or not. With him, it’s a “go.” Without him, it’s a “no point.”