Phil Collins’ Last Stand: Why the Troubled Pop Star Wants to Call It Quits
In a rehearsal hall somewhere in Switzerland, Phil Collins is belting out some tunes in front of an 18-piece band, getting ready to go on a small tour to support a new album. He looks happy, snapping his fingers, bopping his head. It’s all Motown — upbeat stuff like “Dancing in the Street,” “Going to a Go-Go” and “Heat Wave.” He’s not playing the drums, and not a song of his own passes his lips. There’s no “In the Air Tonight,” no “Sussudio,” no “One More Night,” nothing from his Genesis days — none of the hits that turned him into one of the most loved and then most unfairly and inexplicably vilified men in rock & roll.
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Later on, halfway through lunch in a mixing room, he happily rolls a great big gherkin around his plate and begins sawing into it with a knife and fork. He’s 59 and looks pretty much the way he’s always looked: kind of small, kind of bald. He’s wearing a green polo shirt, the collar popped. As a solo artist, he has sold 150 million records, which puts him right up there with the all-time greats. He’s saying that his new album, Going Back, which features only classic-soul songs, is his “best album ever,” that he couldn’t resist making it because it’s the music he grew up with, and that it may be his last album ever, too. Medically, he’s got a few serious and life-altering problems: The hearing in his left ear is shot, and a dislocated vertebra in his neck has rendered him all but unable to pound on the drums that first made him famous. But those aren’t the reasons why.
Mainly, it’s because he’s had it with people thinking they know who Phil Collins is. And not in a good way. He has been called “the Antichrist,” the sellout who took Peter Gabriel‘s Genesis, that paragon of prog-rock, and turned it into a lame-o pop act and went on to make all those supercheesy hits that really did define the 1980s. So, he wants to move on. He could make another original album, but he knows that will bring a rehashing of all the old criticism. It’s inescapable. Forget it. He’d rather spend his time in his basement, building up his collection of Alamo memorabilia, which, oddly enough, is his great consuming passion these days. “I sometimes think, ‘I’m going to write this Phil Collins character out of the story,'” he says. “Phil Collins will just disappear or be murdered in some hotel bedroom, and people will say, ‘What happened to Phil?’ And the answer will be, ‘He got murdered, but, yeah, anyway, let’s carry on.’ That kind of thing.”
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He is already taking steps. When he started dating his girlfriend, Dana Tyler, a TV newscaster from New York, he said to her, “I’m tired of being Phil Collins. You can call me Philip.” So that’s who he is to her, Philip, anyone but Phil, and that’s who he’d like to be to the rest of the world, too. Like he says, in his mind, the guy known as Phil Collins would be better off dead.
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Who people think Phil Collins is derives mainly from how absolutely everywhere he was in the 1980s. It’s almost impossible to overstate. He released four solo albums during the decade and had 13 hit singles. As Genesis’ lead singer and songwriter after Peter Gabriel quit, he was largely responsible for that band’s output too, which reached a high point in 1986, with Invisible Touch and its five hit singles. Of all his songs, “In the Air Tonight” was particularly ubiquitous, propelled forward by Collins’ towering drum entrance. It became the unofficial theme song for the Eighties drugs-guns-and-glamour cop show Miami Vice; and was used to hawk Michelob beer; and was prominently featured in Risky Business 26 years before Mike Tyson air-drummed new life into the song in The Hangover. And then there was Collins himself. His face was plastered over all his albums, close up, looking placid and somewhat smugly self-serious. He tried his hand at acting (the 1988 movie Buster, an episode of Miami Vice). He came to be known as Mr. Nice Guy. He did lots of charity work. (Later on, he went so far as to pay for well-known-substance-abuser David Crosby’s liver transplant.)
But then a curious thing happened. The Eighties ended and the Nineties began in a whole different mood, with Nirvana and other punk-influenced bands establishing grunge as the dominant musical force. In many ways, grunge’s threadbare, garage-rock sound was a direct reaction to the overblown, synth-heavy bombast of the previous decade — and no one typified those excesses more than Collins. In the summer of 1994, reports began circulating that Collins had informed his (second) wife that he wanted a divorce — via fax. He denied it vehemently, and the fax itself was never produced, but no matter: Suddenly, it was open season on the guy. Oasis’ Noel Gallagher started hammering on him any time he could, to uproarious effect. Among his choicest bons mots: “You don’t have to be great to be successful. Look at Phil Collins” and “People hate fucking cunts like Phil Collins, and if they don’t, they fucking should.” And so it’s gone, especially on the Internet, where I Hate Phil Collins sites have flourished. He gets criticized for everything. For his hair, for his height, for his pants (pleated khakis), for his shirts (tucks them in), for being “a shameless, smirking show hog.”