Phil Collins has revealed that he nearly died in 2024 due to the effects of alcohol abuse.
Speaking in a new interview in The Sunday Times, the former Genesis drummer and solo superstar says that he was hospitalised and put on life support after his organs began to fail.
“[There] were some decisions to be made about ‘Do we keep Phil on life support?’ kind of thing,” Collins says. “My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up. People were coming to say goodbye. But I don’t remember them coming, I didn’t have no idea this was going on. They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.”
Collins gave up alcohol after being hospitalised with acute pancreatitis in 2012, writing in his 2016 autobiography, Not Dead Yet, that his drinking “nearly killed me”. But by 2023, he had fallen off the wagon. “I’d have wine when I woke up,” he tells The Sunday Times. “That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine.”
The drummer was hospitalised once again at the end of 2023, eventually ending up in intensive care, where doctors feared that he wouldn’t survive. He stayed in hospital for seven months. “I was very lucky to have come out of that. Needless to say, I haven’t had a drink since,” says Collins, who suffers from nerve damage that has left him unable to drum, as well as Type 2 diabetes and kidney issues.
In the same interview, Collins reveals that he and Paul McCartney have recently healed a rift that dates back to 2016.
According to Collins, McCartney took issue with an interview in which he said the ex-Beatle was always condescending towards him. Collins says McCartney emailed him at the time, “saying, ‘I’m a bit disappointed, blah blah’… it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth and obviously left a bad taste in his.”
Collins says that the two men made up after McCartney called him to say he would donate memorabilia to a charity auction that Collins was working on. McCartney bought up the decade-old interview and, according to the former Genesis man, the pair talked it through.
“And I wish I hadn’t said it, although it did happen. But we’ve made up, he’s happy about the fact that we discussed it, and I’m happy we discussed it, so it was just really lovely that it’s gone full circle now.”
Collins joined Genesis as drummer in 1970 before taking over singing duties after original frontman Peter Gabriel left in 1975. He launched a parallel solo career with 1981’s Face Value, soon to be reissued as an expanded, four-LP vinyl box set.
He retired from music in 2011 after suffering various health problems, but returned to touring as a solo artist in 2017 and, four years later, with the reunited Genesis. He retired for the second and final time in 2022, at the end of the latter’s farewell tour.
Collins is due to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame as solo artist in November 2026.
