Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  But unfortunately, despite all I’ve been through—despite all I’ve put them through—on this holiday I really go for it.

  Though I need to tell this story, I don’t wish to remember it. Neither do my sons. If I bring up Turks and Caicos with Nic or Matt, they say, “Don’t mention that place, we’re not going there ever again.”

  We’ve been there on holiday once before, for Nic’s birthday the previous year, and a great time was had by all. But by this trip, my drinking has escalated again. As well as the Klonopin, I’m also on new medication for my hypertension.

  We have a lovely beachfront house in Parrot Cay. Keith Richards is in residence in the adjacent property with his family, flying his “Jack Sparrow’s father” pirate flag. It takes some going to live next door to Keith Richards and be classed as the rowdy neighbor. No, I’m not proud.

  There’s no bar on the beach where we’re renting our little cottage, but no bother—the kitchen is well stocked. There are bottles of tequila, vodka, whiskey, rum.

  The whiskey just disappears. I’ll drink it out of sight whenever possible, but I’m not past doing it in front of the boys.

  “What’s that, Dad?”

  “It’s Daddy’s drink.”

  I realize that I’m at a crossroads—or, more like, a dead end—as I embark on a lost weekend of catastrophic proportions. These houses have maids, and the maid has seen all these empty bottles (“You really like whiskey!”) but I plow on, unashamed and unabashed. After the whiskey disappears, I fall asleep. Lindsey wakes me to tell me she’s taking the kids out to the beach.

  “Do you wanna come?”

  “No, I’ll stay here.”

  I go back to catatonic sleep, eventually waking at four. Fuck, we’re leaving today! I get up, hurriedly pack my bags and stomp outside. “Hello?” I shout. “Hello, Lindsey, Nic, Matt? We need to go!” But they’re nowhere to be seen. The penny drops: it’s dawn. It’s not four in the afternoon, it’s four in the morning. And we’ve only been here a day.

  If Lindsey was worried before, she’s now wild with anxiety. She’s already long been anticipating finding my lifeless corpse, but this weekend she’s seeing the boys witness Daddy not being Daddy. She’s frightened for me, and she’s terrified for them. So later that morning she gives me an ultimatum: “Enough is enough, Phil. I’m going to have to call a doctor. Because I think you’re in real trouble.”

  “If you really must. I’m feeling fine, though.”

  Lindsey’s also been on the phone to Dana in New York. “He’s in a terrible way,” she tells Dana. “Possibly even worse than before.” Then she calls Dr. Timothy Dutta in New York, who has already been giving advice to both Lindsey and Dana about how to deal with me and my apparent suicide mission.

  Dr. Nurzanahwati is the doctor for the island’s resort. She comes to check me over and doesn’t like what she sees. I’m a danger to myself and, it seems, a liability for the resort—if something goes wrong, we’re all in the dock. Or, in my case, the emergency ward. Or worse.

  “Mr. Collins, your heart is racing. How were you planning on getting home?”

  “We’ve got a private plane to take us back to Miami.”

  Danny can organize anything at the drop of a hat. I don’t give a fuck about the money. I’ll say, do anything to get another quack off my back.

  Dr. Nurzanahwati says, “You need to come with me and see another doctor before I can let you leave the island.”

  I’m thinking, “Well, why? If I’ve got my own plane.”

  But I relent. “OK, I’ll come with you.”

  Forty-eight hours into our holiday and it’s a bust. Dr. Nurzanahwati’s opinion: I am so ill that I need urgent medical attention—attention that is beyond the capabilities of the island hospital.

  I tell Lindsey to go to the airport with the boys and I’ll meet her there—I first have to get a certificate to allow me to fly. I accompany Dr. Nurzanahwati to this little surgery and it’s clear from the tests that I have a lot of alcohol in my bloodstream; or, more accurately, a bit of blood in my alcoholstream.

  The second doctor says, “I can’t let you go.”

  “What are you talking about? I am gonna leave on my plane! I’ve got to take my kids to Miami and their mum.”

  I’m trapped in a catch-22 of my own making: so ill that I need medical help on the mainland, too ill to leave the island.

  I see the boys and Lindsey off in a taxi, powerless to hold back my tears. They fly out, headed for Miami. I’m left behind, on my own once again, feeling more than a little fragile, topped with a whole heap of self-loathing. I don’t even get a chance to see the boys before they fly, a nauseously familiar feeling.

  The disconsolate little party land in Miami and make their way to Customs and Immigration. Lindsey tries to explain to Mr. Rogers, the mercifully kind immigration officer, why she is traveling with two underage boys with another surname, and with her employer’s personal belongings—plus the family’s pet hamster, Bobby, who has come along for the holiday.

  Unbelievably, Mr. Rogers buys Lindsey’s story—including the bit about Bobby not being a drug-hamster—and soon nanny, boys and pet are through Customs and Immigration and into the waiting car.

  When Orianne sees them and not me, she quite rightly goes ape-shit. “You’re letting the boys see you this way?” she will later rant over the phone, entirely reasonably.

  In the car from the airport, the still-bewildered boys have lots of questions, obviously, but they can be boiled down to this: “Why was Daddy crying, and why isn’t he here?”

  Meanwhile, back on Fantasy Island, the only way they’re going to let me leave is on an ambulance plane or helicopter. So I’m flown straight to New York in an air ambulance. It drops me, at the request of Dr. Dutta, right on the doorstep of the New York Presbyterian Hospital on 68th Street.

  Here I am put under the microscope for a couple of weeks. And here I meet Dr. Dutta in the flesh. He’s a lovely man, one of the top twenty doctors in the States. I go to him for a complete 10,000 miles’ service. He puts it to me straight: “Phil, there is no question, you are going to die if you don’t do something about this.”

  I start seeing a therapist, Dr. Laurie Stevens, and an addiction specialist, Dr. Herbert Kleber—both experts in their fields. I like them and trust them. Maybe they can help me, finally, to start liking and trusting myself again.

  It is January 2013. A new year and, I hope, a new me.

  I’m put on heavy medication, part of a medically enforced drying-out process. I need to be made to understand how close I am to dying.

  After being discharged from New York Presbyterian, I continue to see Dr. Kleber regularly.

  “There is something I can give you, Phil, but I can’t give it to you yet. Do you want to stop drinking?”

  “Well, yeah, now I really do.”

  He explains how Antabuse—a drug prescribed to people with chronic alcoholism—works: it blocks an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol, which means very unpleasant side effects if you do drink while on it. Basically, have a drink and you suffer an immediate brutal headache and nausea. I’ll have to report to him for blood tests and, if there’s no alcohol in my blood, Dr. Kleber can give me the Antabuse—but I will have to have a nurse administer it.

  “Come on, you can trust me,” I say.

  “I trust you,” he replies, possibly lying. “I don’t trust the disease.”

  But I dig my heels in, again. “I can’t.” My lifestyle is not such that I can have a nurse come at eight o’clock every morning to give me the pill. I need to be able to take the Antabuse on my own. A compromise is agreed: despite my protests at being babied, Dana gives it to me every day for a month or so.

  In the end, close to The End, Dr. Dutta saves my life. He makes me realize how really, actually, truly close I am to dying. My pancreas is not only scarred, it’s showing signs of irreparable damage.

  That’s, finally, a good enough reason for me. I want to see my kids grow up, g
et married, have their own children. I want to live.

  There have been moments of great clarity throughout this rotten period—the Genesis Turn It On Again tour, my Going Back album and shows. But not enough of them.

  And after all the darkness, I do have to thank my kids, all of them. Joely, Simon, Lily, Nicholas and Mathew gave me their huge support throughout this hideous period in my life—in all our lives. For constantly saying, “Good on you, Dad,” when maybe they were crying inside. Also Orianne, Dana, Lindsey, Danny, Pud, my sister Carole, my brother Clive and Tony Smith for helping a stubborn bastard to stay alive. The doctors and nurses in Switzerland, America and Britain that I pushed to the limits of their patience—I thank you all.

  Telling this story now, it all sounds absolutely horrific. It took me till the age of fifty-five to become an alcoholic. I got through the heady sixties, the trippy seventies, the imperial eighties, the emotional nineties. I was retired, content, and then I fell. Because suddenly, I had too much time on my hands. The huge hole, the void, left by my kids being taken away from me, again, I had to fill somehow. And I filled it with booze. And it nearly killed me.

  I’m one of the lucky ones.

  Or: back together—a band of five, a family of four and one man’s life (if not his body)

  It’s the morning after the hangover before. My lost weekend became a lost few years, and nearly lost me my life. Now I have to engage with some sober reflection and wonder: how did I end up like that, alone and drowning at the bottom of a bottle?

  As 2013 becomes 2014 I’m given an opportunity to consider much of the above. Tony Smith contacts me, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett. The BBC wants to make a documentary about the entire history of Genesis and all the music we’ve spawned. To a man we’re pleased. For all the films made about the band over the years, this is the BBC, and the corporation confers approval and authority, a stamp of quality that resonates around the world.

  This will be a lovely opportunity to look back on everything we’ve achieved, together and apart, and to reconnect with each other—and with ourselves. Given my recent brush with mortality, this is perhaps more meaningful to me than to any of the other guys, so I suggest to the director, John Edginton, that we try to do something that we’ve never done before. Why doesn’t he interview the five of us together in one room?

  Maybe the idea sparks similar emotions in Tony, Mike, Peter and Steve, because it’s quickly agreed and swiftly put into action.

  In March 2014, in a big white room in a photographer’s studio in Notting Hill, west London, the five of us sit down. It’s the first time we’ve been together since our ill-starred Glasgow summit in 2005, and the first time we’ve ever been filmed in conversation. It’s about forty-plus years since I and my fellow new boy Steve joined, and thirty-five years since Peter left, so there’s some catching up to do. Yet again, it’s eerie how we all revert to type—Steve still the dark one, me the comedian, etc.

  With no decisions to be made, no obligations pending, the atmosphere in the studio is relaxed and jovial. Each of us takes the opportunity to say our piece. At one point Peter says, “When we got it right, we had something which none of us could do on our own.”

  For my part, I tell Peter something that I honestly have never previously had the opportunity to communicate directly: “A lot of people have always thought that I tried to push you out so I could become the singer. I just want you to know that that was not the case.”

  I don’t think Peter ever thought I had been plotting with Machiavellian glee. But this seems a golden opportunity, with the cameras running, to clear up forty years of supposition and gossip about my “taking over” Genesis. Surprisingly, this confession doesn’t make the final cut.

  The candor goes both ways. As Tony, talking about my solo success, notes in his individual interview in the documentary: “It was great for [Phil]. He was our friend—we wanted him to do well. But you didn’t want him to do that well—not initially,” he says, half joking. “But…it kind of never went away. He was ubiquitous for about fifteen years. You couldn’t get away from him. Nightmare,” he shrugs, smiling. Just as meaningfully, he adds that Genesis were unique in that we were able to run the band and our individual careers in easy parallels for so long. Hence the documentary’s title—Genesis: Together and Apart.

  During a break in filming, over lunch, Tony Smith, Dana, Steve’s wife Jo and the band chew over what’s new in our lives, how everyone’s kids are growing up, what they’re doing. I’m reminded it’s great to have friends like these.

  There’s been talk for a while of a new compilation album, and its conception reflects the lifelong, all-for-one conviviality of this meeting. For the first time ever, the best of the band is gathered alongside the best of the five solo careers. This three-CD, 37-track, near-four-hour career-spanning box set is chronologically assembled and stoutly democratic: three tracks from each of us. I mainly stay out of the conversations about which Genesis tracks will figure—I trust the other guys to carry that torch—but from my albums I pick “In the Air Tonight” (it would be rude not to), “Easy Lover” (partly because it’s not on any of my studio albums) and “Wake Up Call” from Testify (because it’s my favorite song on an overlooked album).

  When it comes to what to call this package and how to dress it, it’s surprising how easy it is. Although there is a little corner-taking, we’ve all aged gracefully and it’s a process that is mainly diva-free. The Big Tree and Its Splinters is a suggestion, but eventually we go with an idea of Peter’s, R-Kive, the spelling giving a little bit of a nod to “today.”

  R-Kive is released in September and, just before the BBC broadcast of Together and Apart on October 4, 2014, the five of us go to the documentary’s premiere in London’s Haymarket. It’s a lovely, relaxed evening, in the company of a lot of old friends including Hugh Padgham and Richard MacPhail, and many more. At the screening, everyone laughs in the right places and no one takes their ball home in a huff.

  At this time I’m considering my legacy in other areas, too. Sixty years since first seeing that Disney Davy Crockett film, and almost two decades after Orianne’s first gift to me of an Alamo artifact, I have by now amassed quite a collection of relics and militaria related to the battle. At the suggestion of a Texas publishing house, I have even authored a book, The Alamo and Beyond: A Collector’s Journey (2012). By some estimates, mine is the world’s biggest collection in private hands, with a value somewhere in the region of $10 million.

  While the monetary value means nothing to me, the historical value is of huge importance. Now, after my boozy dance-with-death, I’m more concerned than ever with what will happen to my collection after I’m gone.

  So, to pre-empt any unseemly squabbling over who gets my rare Crockett musket, and just in case a sibling feud breaks out over my cherished Mexican cannonballs, I decide to donate my 200-piece collection to an appropriate museum or institution in San Antonio.

  After talking to friends and experts on the ground in Texas, I agree that the best approach is for this collection to come home: I’ll give everything to the Alamo itself, located in downtown San Antonio, and the Lone Star State’s largest tourist attraction.

  We make the public announcement on June 26, 2014, outside the Alamo, and in October I’m back there again to see the collection arrive from Switzerland. It’ll be housed in a museum, the center of a $100 million makeover of the Alamo compound. I’m also granted the title of Honorary Texan on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives. The little Hounslow kid that lives inside me still can’t believe that. But if you catch me talking with a Texas twang, feel free to clip me round the ear.

  Meanwhile, back in the world of my former day job, all this activity—not to mention the public displays of bonhomie between my former band mates and I—have kick-started another flurry of conversation about a Genesis reunion. As ever, I’m not sure people have entirely thought this through—if the five of us did go back on the road af
ter a forty-year absence, it would necessarily have to be the Peter-era band. This would mean playing the material we made when the five of us were together, and the blunt fact is that that material has a more limited audience. Concert-goers will get “Can-Utility and the Coastliners,” and they’ll get “Fountain of Salmacis,” but they won’t get “I Can’t Dance” and “Invisible Touch.”

  All this said, there’s a more pressing, more practical problem: I am still not up to the task of drumming. More than that: I’m not even up for the idea of performing.

  I know that because, in September 2014, just before the release of R-Kive, at Tony Smith’s gentle but insistent urging, I gather together a handful of core musicians in Miami. I’m going to be there anyway, visiting the boys, so I see it very much as no kind of undertaking or commitment. This will be not so much a rehearsal as a friendly thrash around. And it’s as much a sop to Nic and Matt, who are desperate to see the old man go out and play some shows. So I agree to a relaxed, three-week rehearsal-room romp through the old stuff.

  To bring in a bit of relatively youthful energy, I’ve asked Jason Bonham to play drums, and we set to working our way through some songs. Initially it all sounds good, Jason kicking some serious butt during the heavy numbers, but I soon find myself, dare I say it, distracted. I think, “Do I really need to sing ‘Against All Odds’ again, now?”

  I’m embarrassed to report that I start to act like a sixty-three-year-old schoolboy. I bunk off early, then the next day I pull a sickie, then I skive off completely. I put keyboard player Brad Cole in charge of the band and they play without me. I’m utterly uninterested.

  Unfortunately this flakiness sets off alarm bells around the world. Tony gets to hear of it back in London, and in turn Dana hears about it in New York. Understandably, they fear the worst. Before I know it, Dana is storming into my hotel room in Miami, demanding some answers. Why am I skipping rehearsals? Am I drinking again?

  I’m placatory—“No, honestly, I’m not drinking”—but I’m also angry. Alerted by Tony, she’s taken a day off work, hopped on a plane from New York, somehow got a key to my room and burst in, ready for confrontation and intervention. Of course she’s doing this with my best interests at heart, and of course she’s been through a nightmare with me over the last few years. But I don’t appreciate being treated like a child.