There may still be life in the old dog. So says Phil Collins, after discussing some of the health challenges he has faced and taking a stroll down memory lane through his years with Genesis and as a solo performer.
Yes, he has a 24-hour live-in nurse, he says in a new interview, to make sure he takes his medicines on time. But he also has some things he could see himself working on in the recording studio in the future. He doesn’t seem frail or fragile, not for a 74-year-old.
As they say in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — and in Collins’ 2016 memoir and on his 2017-2019 tour — he’s not dead yet.
The sit-down chat with Zoe Ball, which will be broadcast to celebrate Collins’ 75th birthday after it concludes a five-episode podcast series about his life and times, isn’t nearly as dire as many headlines would have it. The drummer-singer-producer called managing his health an “ongoing thing.”
“I have a 24 hour live-in nurse to make sure I take my medication as I should do,” he admits, because “everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong.”
“You know, I mean, I got COVID in hospital, my kidneys started to back up, you know, everything that could, all seemed to sort of converge at the same time. And I had five operations on my knee.”
He says everything just caught up with him at once, and he spent months hospitalized.
The kidney issues might have had something to do with the amount of alcohol he drank, he says. “I’d probably been drinking too much,” but he maintains that he was never drunk and was actually the type to stop drinking as soon as the evening began, rather than the other way around. Collins recently reached two years without a drink — something he was apprised of by his assistant, who marked the occasion by bringing him a “2” balloon.
“Now I’ve got a knee that works and I can walk, albeit with assistance, you know, crutches or whatever.”
As for touring, he says he would “love to do it again.”
When the band was out on tour in recent years, Collins says, they all “enjoyed ourselves every night and, you know, the audience sang along with pretty much everything, especially on the last couple of tours. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And I sometimes, I feel like, you know, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if’ — and I’m sure I could, certainly, physically I could.
“I just don’t know if I wanna go as far as to launch that boat, you know? ‘Cause once you launch it, it’s difficult to unlaunch it.”
He doesn’t think he could play a few shows in England and be done with it. Then it would be South America and Australia and and and and, he says.
“The things that are ahead for me would be — apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy — is sort of maybe [to go into a recording studio] and have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music … you’ve got to start doing it to see if you can do it. Otherwise, you don’t do it. So that is something on my horizon.”
So there you have it, he does see new things on the horizon.
“I’ve got some things that are half-formed or were never finished,” Collins says, “and a couple of things that were finished, which I like, so you know — maybe life in the old dog. Yeah. You’ll see.”
Part five of the “Eras: Phil Collins” podcast series comes out on Jan. 26, and the TV special “Phil Collins: Eras — In Conversation” will be broadcast Jan. 31 on BBC Two at a time still to be determined. Collins turns 75 on Jan. 30.
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