Next week, the ’80s pop giant Phil Collins will turn 75. In the past few years, there’s been some talk about new music from Collins, who hasn’t released any original songs since he did the soundtrack for the Disney film Brother Bear in 2003. In a MOJO interview last year, however, Collins said that he’s been having health issues that have prevented him from making music: “I keep thinking I should go downstairs to the studio and see what happens. But I’m not hungry for it anymore. The thing is, I’ve been sick. I mean, very sick.” Now, Collins has more to say about his health and about the possibility that he’s not done yet.
Collins recently spent some time with interviewer Zoe Ball for a BBC Two film and podcast special centered around his 75th birthday. Collins talks about his life and career on the show, which has also has interviews with stars like Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, and Bob Geldof. The show’s fifth and final episode comes out Jan. 26, and it’s got Collins talking about going through a “difficult, interesting, frustrating last few years.” In the interview, Collins says that he’s been recovering from multiple knee surgeries:
It’s an ongoing thing. I have a 24-hour live-in nurse to make sure I take my medication, as I should do. I’ve had challenges with my knee. Everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong with me. I got COVID in hospital. My kidneys started to back up. Everything seemed to converge at the same time. I had five operations on my knee. Now, I’ve got a knee that works, and I can walk, albeit with assistance, crutches or whatever.
I’d probably been drinking too much, so my kidneys were messed up. I enjoyed coming off tour. Coming off the road, but I thought, right, I’m gonna do all those things that I couldn’t do. So I stopped drinking at six o’clock in the evening. I wasn’t one of those guys that stayed up all night drinking. I’d drink during the day, but I guess I had too much of it. I was never drunk, although I fell over a couple of times. But it is just one of those things that happened, and it all caught up with me, and I spent months in hospital.
The other day, Lindsay, my wonderful assistant secretary who does everything, came back with an inflatable two, and I said, “Who’s two?” And she said, “No, it’s two years since we had a drink.” It’s just been a difficult, interesting, frustrating last few years. It’s all right now.
Collins also said that he’s been working on some extremely unfinished musical ideas and that he aspires to do some more work on that stuff:
The things that are ahead for me would be, apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy, is maybe go in there and have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music. You tend to sort of feel, That’s it, I’ve done that. But you’ve gotta start doing it to see if you can do it. Otherwise, you don’t do it. So that is something on my horizon…
I’ve got some things that are half-formed or were never finished, and a couple of things that were finished, which I like. So maybe life in the old dog. You’ll see.
You can check out the first four episodes of Zoe Ball’s Phil Collins special here.
