Phil Collins reveals struggle that 'nearly killed him' ahead of his comeback (2024)

IT was the most ambitious gig of his life.

At the height of his fame, Phil Collins played alongside Sting to a billion people watching Live Aid in 1985.

But while Sting cheerfully improvised, Phil was wracked with anxiety if he hit a bum note or mangled a lyric.

“The viewing millions are howling, ‘Shut up, Collins! You’re singing the f***ing wrong words! You should have rehearsed!’” he writes in his brutally honest autobiography, out tomorrow.

It is typical of a man who can find the negative in any situation — despite selling more than 150million solo albums and amassing a £115million fortune.

Describing his Eighties heyday, Phil moans about “monopolising the airwaves, MTV and the charts, even the bloody Oscars”.

This week, Phil, 65, announced a nine-date comeback tour while his book, wryly titled Not Dead Yet, is a bestseller before even hitting the shelves.

Yet he has endured great lows too.

Crippling back pain left him unable to play the drums, while he has wrestled with failed relationships, alcoholism, ridicule from his musical heroes and derision for his cheesy image.

Ten years ago, retired from music and with his third marriage breaking up, he turned to booze.

He writes: “Night after night I find myself lying on the bed, staring out of a skylight at grey Swiss skies, rueing my life.

“I’m all alone, save for my good friends Johnnie Walker and Grey Goose. ‘You’ve got everything,’ I think, ‘but you’ve really got f***-all’.

“It took me until the age of 55 to become an alcoholic. I got through the heady Sixties, the trippy Seventies, the imperial Eighties, the busy Nineties. I was retired, content — then I fell. Because suddenly, I had too much time on my hands.

“The huge hole, the void, I had to fill somehow. I filled it with booze. And it nearly killed me.”

Acute pancreatitis resulted and while at a Swiss intensive care unit, he overheard someone ask his children’s nanny: “Is Monsieur Collins’ will in order?”

Sons Nicholas, now 15, and Matthew, 11 — who he had with third wife Orianne — had seen Phil fall flat on his face, drunk, and called their nanny to help.

Phil writes: “I got up to give them a hug. Bang. My teeth went into the tiles in the living-room floor. The bloody lip’s long healed but what hasn’t healed is the memory of Matthew shouting, ‘Lindsey! LaLa! LaLa! Daddy’s fallen over!’”

Three divorces have cost him £40million. He married Andrea Bertorelli in 1975 but they split in 1980 and his rage over her affair with their decorator inspired 1981 single In The Air Tonight.

Its lyrics spit: “I saw it with my own two eyes, so you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been, it’s all been a pack of lies.”

He describes going back alone to the family home in Surrey in 1979: “Tail between my legs, boxes still packed in this house in which I’ve barely lived. The paint is still practically wet on the walls. The paint applied by the guy who’s been sleeping with my wife.”

Andrea, who has two children with Phil, tells a different story.

“I divorced him — not him me — on the grounds of his adultery and he agreed,” she told a newspaper last year, also pointing to his “short fuse” and “rage.”

He wed Jill Tavelman in 1984 before infamously dumping her by FAX — as revealed by The Sun.

It read: “I am so sick and tired of your attitude, Jill. I will not be coming back Thursday. I don’t expect you to like anything that’s gone on . . . it’s you that is offended that I should choose to be with someone else. You are the one with the f***ing problem.”

Phil insists he was not asking for a divorce but continuing a row when he couldn’t get through to Jill by phone.

They divorced in 1996 but by then fans had turned on him, record sales had plunged and Phil lay low in Switzerland with new love Orianne Cevey, a translator who worked for him on tour.

He writes: “I didn’t like being Mr Nice Guy, the Housewives’ Pal. But as soon as I wasn’t that guy any more, I missed it. Now I’m pop public-enemy number one.

“Rod Stewart shags around serially and it’s just Rod being Rod. Mick Jagger does it and, well, of course he does — he’s Mick. Phil Collins does it and, ‘What an a***hole’.”

He married Orianne in 1999 but they divorced in 2008.

Phil writes: “While three divorces might seem to suggest a casual attitude towards marriage, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m a romantic who believes, hopes, the union of marriage is something to cherish.

“Yet that trio of divorces demonstrates a failure to coexist happily and understand my partners. It suggests a failure to become and stay a family. It shows failure, full stop.”

Of a date with US newsreader Dana Tyler, he writes: “I ask her to call me Philip. Why don’t I like ‘Phil Collins’? Because his life is a mess. He’s a guy who’s going through another divorce — a third one — and who’s about to have a third broken family on his hands.”

But he and Orianne reunited last year — despite her marrying another man and having a son with him.

Of the £25million divorce settlement she got from Phil, he jokes: “She didn’t give me the money back.”

They now live together in Miami and plan to remarry.

Phil says he has developed a thick skin but recalling the time his idol Paul McCartney patronisingly referred to him as “little Phil”, he clearly still feels slighted. “I thought, ‘You f***, you f***’. Never forgot it,” he says.

In a 2002 interview with Jonathan Ross, David Bowiedismissed a creative slump in the mid-Eighties as his “Phil Collins years”.

Ross guffawed: “It’s OK, he hasn’t got any fans left.”

And in Bret Easton Ellis’s bestselling novel American Psycho, the murderous main character is an obsessive Collins fan.

But in recent years, Phil’s fortunes have revived. A 2007 ad for Dairy Milk featuring a gorilla drumming to In The Air Tonight was a huge hit.

Phil joked: “Not only is he a better drummer than me, he also has more hair. Can he sing too?”

Phil was recently asked to collaborate with Adele on her album 25, while Pharrell Williams and Kanye West are both self-confessed fans.

And while the collaboration with Adele came to nothing, she has called him a “genius”.

He writes: “She thinks I’m awesome. That’s cool. It was a lovely little interlude and, for sure, great for my self-esteem.”

So maybe now, after all the years of heartache and gloom, Phil has something to smile about after all.

Not Dead Yet: The Autobiography by Phil Collins is out October 20(Century, £20).