The story of Phil Collins

A drum kit, a stage school and the Artful Dodger

Philip David Charles Collins was born on the thirtieth of January 1951 at Putney Hospital in London, the youngest of three children. His father Greville sold insurance. His mother June worked in a toy shop and later became a theatrical agent at the Barbara Speake Stage School. His sister Carole was a professional ice skater and his brother Clive became a cartoonist. The family settled in the western suburbs around Hounslow. When Phil was five he got a toy drum kit for Christmas, and two uncles later built him a makeshift set of triangles and tambourines that packed into a suitcase. He learned by playing along to the television and the radio. He never learned to read or write music, and he later said he regretted that.[1] [2] [3]

His nerve showed early. On a family holiday at Butlin's, a seven year old Phil entered a talent contest singing The Ballad of Davy Crockett, and stopped the orchestra halfway through to tell them they were in the wrong key. The Beatles and Ringo Starr were his first heroes. Then came a little known London band called the Action, whose drummer Roger Powell he copied, and who led him to the soul records of Motown and Stax. The big band drummer Buddy Rich made him rethink his kit, and after taking Rich's advice on the hi hat he dropped his second bass drum. At Chiswick County Grammar School he formed a group called the Real Thing, with two girls singing backup. One was Andrea Bertorelli, his future first wife. The other, Lavinia Lang, would come back into his life decades later.[1]

At fourteen Phil left school to study full time at Barbara Speake. His mother had spotted another boy playing football in the park, a lad called Jack Wild, and signed him up too, and the two became friends. In 1964 Phil was an uncredited extra among the screaming teenagers in the concert scene of the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. Later that year he was cast as the Artful Dodger in the West End musical Oliver!, on fifteen pounds a week, in what he called the best part for a kid in all London. His time as the Dodger ended when his voice broke during a performance, and he had to speak his lines for the rest of the show. Jack Wild went on to play the same role in the 1968 film.[1] [2]

In 1967 Phil had a starring part in Calamity the Cow, a children's film about farm kids trying to get a cow to the show ring before a crooked farmer steals her. He fell out with the director and decided to give up acting for music. Other screen chances slipped away anyway. He was meant to be one of the children storming the castle in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but his scene was cut, and he auditioned for Romeo in the 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet, losing out to Leonard Whiting. That same year he even travelled the country teaching people the crunch, a dance promoted by an advertising campaign for Smith's crisps. The drums were winning.[1] [2]

The Marquee, Flaming Youth and a fateful advert

Phil hung around the Marquee Club on Wardour Street so much that the managers put him to work setting out chairs, sweeping the floor and helping in the cloakroom. There he watched the Action again, and a new band called Yes, and both left a mark on him. Auditions for Vinegar Joe and Manfred Mann Chapter Three came to nothing, so he toured with the Cliff Charles Blues Band, then joined the Gladiators, backing a vocal group alongside his school friend, the guitarist Ronnie Caryl. When he heard that Yes needed a drummer, he spoke to their singer Jon Anderson, who invited him to audition the following week. Phil never showed up.[1]

In 1969 Phil and Ronnie Caryl joined the backing band for the American singer John Walker, of the Walker Brothers, on a British tour. Afterwards the four musicians stayed together as Hickory and put out one single. Then they met the songwriting team of Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, changed their name to Flaming Youth, and signed to Fontana. Their album Ark 2 was a concept record about people escaping a burning Earth into space, with every member taking a turn on lead vocals. Melody Maker made it album of the month and the band launched it at the London Planetarium, but hardly anyone bought it. Flaming Youth broke up in early 1970.[1] [2] [3]

In May 1970 Phil got a session that should have been a big break. He played congas on George Harrison's song Art of Dying, but his part was left off the record. Years later he asked Harrison what had happened. Harrison sent him a tape that was supposed to be his performance. It sounded dreadful, and Phil was mortified, until Harrison admitted the whole thing was a prank. Collins took it in good humour. The disastrous conga session, and Harrison's joke at his expense, later became one of the funniest stories in his memoir, Not Dead Yet.[1] [2]

That summer an advert in Melody Maker caught his eye. A band on Charisma Records wanted a drummer sensitive to acoustic music, and a twelve string guitarist, and Phil recognised the name of the label boss, Tony Stratton Smith. The band was Genesis, old boys of Charterhouse School who had lost their guitarist and decided their drummer John Mayhew was not what they needed. Phil and Ronnie went to audition at Peter Gabriel's parents' house. Arriving early, Phil swam in the pool while listening to the drummers ahead of him and memorised the parts. Gabriel, a former drummer himself, said he could tell from the way Phil sat down at the kit. On the eighth of August 1970 Collins became the band's fourth drummer. Ronnie did not get the guitar job, though they stayed friends for life.[1] [2] [3]

The drummer who became the singer

Mike Rutherford said Phil was an instant lift, bringing a kind of energy to the engine room the band had never had. Guitarist Steve Hackett arrived in January 1971. Collins quickly became the main backing singer, because layering his voice with Gabriel's was faster and sounded better than using all four of them. The two voices were so alike that together they sounded like one powerful singer, a trick used on the band's first hit single, I Know What I Like. His first album with the band, Nursery Cryme, included For Absent Friends, a short acoustic song with Collins singing lead. On Selling England by the Pound in 1973 he sang More Fool Me, and on that tour he took a lead vocal on stage for the first time.[1] [2]

He wrote little on his own in those years, but he shaped the band's long jams, and he came up with the clipped rhythm at the heart of Watcher of the Skies. Outside Genesis he was everywhere. He drummed on four consecutive albums by Brian Eno, who taught him that a rough home demo could be good enough, and on records by Steve Hackett, Anthony Phillips, Thin Lizzy and Andrew Lloyd Webber. His playing in this period still earns him praise from other drummers. Rush drummer Neil Peart called Selling England by the Pound an enduring masterpiece of drumming, and Rolling Stone has ranked Collins among the hundred greatest drummers of all time.[1] [2]

In 1975, unsure of his future in Genesis, Collins joined a London jazz fusion jam band that became Brand X. The name came from an Island Records man who wrote Brand X on the studio calendar to keep track of their sessions. They recorded their debut, Unorthodox Behaviour, that autumn, and at Phil's urging the Genesis manager Tony Smith took them on and moved them to Charisma. Collins played on their first two albums and came back for Product in 1979. One day in 1977 the band played the Crystal Palace Garden Party in London and a huge festival in Paris, flying between them on a chartered plane.[1] [2]

Peter Gabriel's exit was made public in August 1975. Genesis advertised again in Melody Maker and got around four hundred replies. Collins sang backing vocals for the hopefuls, and as the search dragged on the band realised the answer was sitting behind the drum kit. He reluctantly took over the microphone for A Trick of the Tail, which reached number three in Britain in 1976. Rolling Stone said the band had turned the possible catastrophe of losing Gabriel into their first broad American success. On stage Bill Bruford played drums while Collins sang, and from 1977 the American Chester Thompson, a veteran of Frank Zappa's band and Weather Report, took over the second kit. When Hackett left that year Genesis became a trio, and And Then There Were Three gave them their first British top ten single, Follow You Follow Me.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heartbreak, Face Value and that drum break

Collins had married Andrea Bertorelli in 1975. They had met as eleven year olds in a London drama class and reconnected when Genesis played Vancouver in 1974. He adopted her daughter Joely, and their son Simon was born in 1976. In the spring of 1978 the family moved into Old Croft, a house in Shalford in Surrey. But Genesis were almost always on the road. Andrea told him that if he did the whole nine month world tour of 1978, she would not be there when he got back. During a heated phone call he learned she was having an affair with a decorator. He finished the tour anyway. Afterwards she took the children to her parents in Vancouver. Phil followed, trying to save the marriage, and gave up after about four months.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Back alone at Old Croft in 1979, while Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford made solo records, Collins set up a Prophet Five synthesiser, a piano, a Roland drum machine and an eight track tape recorder in his bedroom, and poured his grief and anger into demos. He later said the divorce turned him from a musician into a lyricist. Some of the songs went to Genesis, including Misunderstanding on Duke, which in 1980 became the band's first number one album in Britain. Two others, In the Air Tonight and If Leaving Me Is Easy, he played to the band, but they felt too simple for Genesis. Then Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun heard the demos and told him they had to be a record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sound that made In the Air Tonight had been found by accident. In 1979 Collins was drumming on Peter Gabriel's third solo album at the Townhouse studio in London, where Gabriel had banned cymbals. Engineer Hugh Padgham happened to switch on the new mixing desk's talkback microphone, which was heavily compressed, while Phil was playing. Padgham then fed it through a noise gate, so the huge room sound was chopped off the instant the drums stopped. The result, heard on Gabriel's song Intruder, became known as gated reverb. Collins and Padgham took it into Face Value, and within a few years that booming, clipped drum sound was all over the pop music of the 1980s.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Collins signed a solo deal with Virgin in Britain and Atlantic in America, deliberately stepping away from Genesis's label Charisma, and Virgin gave him a sixty five thousand pound advance. He brought in the Phenix Horns from Earth, Wind and Fire, and wrote every sleeve note by hand, crediting himself simply as Me. The cover, an extreme close up of his face, was meant to take the listener inside his head. Face Value came out on the thirteenth of February 1981 and went to number one in Britain. The album closes with a cover of the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, followed by a hidden few seconds of Collins quietly singing Over the Rainbow, a nod to John Lennon, murdered just weeks earlier.[1]

In the Air Tonight was largely improvised. Collins said he sang almost all of the words on the spot over a drum machine pattern and a few chords, and even decades later he could not say exactly what it was about, beyond the anger and bitterness of a separation. For the American single Ahmet Ertegun insisted on extra drums earlier in the mix, asking where the backbeat was. The song reached number two in Britain and number one in West Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Austria. Then it found second lives everywhere: in Miami Vice, in Risky Business, in a 2007 Cadbury advert with a drumming gorilla that won Britain's top TV advertising award, and in The Hangover, where Mike Tyson air drums the famous fill.[1] [2]

Producer, hitmaker and an Oscar snub

There was no solo tour for Face Value, because Collins went straight back to Genesis to make Abacab. In September 1981 he made his first solo stage appearance, at the Amnesty International benefit The Secret Policeman's Other Ball in London, playing In the Air Tonight. He was also in demand as a producer. He produced John Martyn's Glorious Fool, produced and played on Something's Going On by Frida of ABBA, and drummed on most of Robert Plant's first solo album, Pictures at Eleven. Plant later called him the most spirited and encouraging force as he started out after Led Zeppelin. In October 1982 Collins joined a one off Genesis reunion with Peter Gabriel at the Milton Keynes Bowl.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His second album, Hello, I Must Be Going!, named after a Marx Brothers song, came out in November 1982. Collins joked that if his first album said he was divorced and miserable, the second was the angry sequel, fed partly by letters arriving in the post with demands. It reached number two in Britain. His cover of the Supremes' You Can't Hurry Love, an attempt with Hugh Padgham to recreate the rough sixties Motown sound exactly, became his first British number one in January 1983. It was also the very first track on the very first Now That's What I Call Music compilation. He toured as a solo artist for the first time, and in 1984 he married an American, Jill Tavelman.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Director Taylor Hackford wanted a theme song for his 1984 thriller Against All Odds. Collins, on tour with Genesis, watched a rough cut on a video player in a Chicago hotel room and said yes. He dug out a ballad he had rejected during the Face Value sessions, then called How Can You Just Sit There, and wrote new words for the film. Arranger Arif Mardin finished the recording in two days while Phil kept touring. The song became his first American number one and won him a Grammy, and it was nominated for an Oscar. But he was not invited to sing it at the ceremony. A note from the show's producer turning him down referred to him as Phil Cooper, and he watched the dancer Ann Reinking perform his song instead.[1] [2] [3]

Collins turned the snub into a running joke, telling concert audiences he was sorry Ann Reinking could not be there, so he would have to sing his own song. Meanwhile he produced Chinese Wall for Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind and Fire. At the end of the sessions Bailey asked for one more song. The two of them jammed one night and recorded it straight away so they would not forget it. The result, Easy Lover, spent four weeks at number one in Britain. Collins said he appeared in the video because he knew it would not be shown with Bailey alone. That year he also produced Eric Clapton's Behind the Sun and drummed on Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas.[1] [2] [3]

No Jacket Required and the day he played twice

For his third album Collins wanted out of what he called the love song box. He would make a dance album, or at least one with a few fast songs. Several tracks began as nonsense sung over a drum machine. Sussudio was a made up word he tried to replace, failed to, and kept, then built a story about a schoolboy crush around it. Take Me Home sounds like a song about going home, but he based it on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sting and Peter Gabriel sang backing vocals. The title came from the Pump Room restaurant in Chicago, which turned Collins away because his jacket was not proper, while his companion Robert Plant walked straight in.[1] [2] [3]

No Jacket Required came out on the eighteenth of February 1985 and was enormous. It spent five weeks at number one in Britain and seven in America. One More Night and Sussudio both went to number one in the United States, and Don't Lose My Number and Take Me Home made the top ten. The album sold more than twelve million copies in America alone, won three Grammys including Album of the Year, and earned his first Brit Awards. Add Separate Lives, a duet with Marilyn Martin from the film White Nights, and Collins had three American number ones in 1985, more than anyone else that year. Critics were less sure. Rolling Stone wrote that he had settled firmly in the middle of the road.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirteenth of July 1985, at the suggestion of promoter Harvey Goldsmith, Collins played Live Aid twice. At Wembley he sat at the piano for Against All Odds and In the Air Tonight and performed with Sting. Then a helicopter flown by the TV presenter Noel Edmonds took him to Heathrow, Concorde carried him across the Atlantic to New York, and another helicopter took him to Philadelphia. On the plane he got talking to Cher, who ended up joining the finale. At JFK Stadium he told the crowd he had been in England that afternoon, sang his hits again, and drummed for Eric Clapton's set. Years later he called the whole stunt the nail in the coffin of his image.[1] [2] [3]

His last job of the day went badly. Collins sat in on drums with the surviving members of Led Zeppelin, alongside Tony Thompson of Chic, for their first performance since John Bonham's death. There had been barely an hour of rehearsal, Robert Plant's voice was hoarse and Jimmy Page's guitar was out of tune. Plant called it an atrocity. Page and Collins ended up blaming each other, a row that is still argued over, and the band has refused to let the set appear on the official Live Aid DVD. Collins said afterwards that he would have walked off if it would not have caused an even bigger story.[1] [2] [3]

Everywhere at once, then the backlash

In late 1985 Collins went back to Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford to make Invisible Touch. It became Genesis's biggest selling album, and its title track was their only American number one. The video for Land of Confusion used puppets from the satirical TV show Spitting Image, which had been mocking Collins, and Genesis paid for puppets of the whole band. He also produced and drummed on Eric Clapton's album August and toured with him, and played on Howard Jones's hit No One Is to Blame. By 1987 even Collins could see the danger of overkill, and he took a year away from writing music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He spent it acting. In Buster, released in 1988, he played Buster Edwards, one of the Great Train Robbers of 1963, opposite Julie Walters. The film was accused of glamorising a violent crime, and Prince Charles and Princess Diana stayed away from the premiere. Roger Ebert said Collins played the part with surprising effectiveness, and the real Buster Edwards made a brief cameo. The soundtrack gave him two more American number ones. One was a ballad version of the Mindbenders' A Groovy Kind of Love, which also topped the British chart. The other was Two Hearts, written with Motown's Lamont Dozier, which won a Golden Globe. Collins later listed recording A Groovy Kind of Love among his regrets.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For his fourth album he turned to heavier subjects, including the Troubles in Northern Ireland, apartheid and homelessness. Another Day in Paradise, written under the working title Homeless after he saw people sleeping rough within sight of the Capitol in Washington, featured David Crosby on backing vocals. It became the last American number one of the 1980s and won the Grammy for Record of the Year. But Seriously, released in November 1989, spent fifteen weeks at number one in Britain and was the country's best selling album of 1990. Critics savaged the single, accusing a millionaire of preaching about poverty. Collins replied that being rich did not stop him seeing what everyone else saw on the street.[1] [2] [3]

Genesis came back in 1991 with We Can't Dance, their fifth British number one album in a row. But Collins's second marriage was collapsing. During the 1992 Genesis tour he had an affair with Lavinia Lang, his old drama school classmate and one time fiancee. In 1994 The Sun splashed across its front page a fax he had sent Jill Tavelman about access to their daughter Lily, and the story took hold that he had ended his marriage by fax. He has always denied that, saying the fax came once the divorce was already under way. Either way, pop's Mr Nice Guy became a tabloid villain almost overnight. The divorce was finalised in 1996, with a reported settlement of seventeen million pounds.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He poured the pain into Both Sides, released in November 1993, playing every instrument and producing it himself because the songs felt too private to share. He later called it the real him. It went to number one in Britain but sold far less in America than before. At the start of his 1994 world tour he met Orianne Cevey, a twenty two year old Swiss woman working as his translator, and that year he moved to Switzerland to be with her. On the twenty ninth of March 1996 it was announced that Collins had left Genesis to concentrate on his solo career.[1] [2] [3]

Switzerland, a big band and Tarzan

The move to Switzerland fed another myth, that he had fled Britain to dodge taxes under Labour. It traced back to The Sun on the eve of the 1992 election, which quoted him saying he would consider going abroad if taxes went up. Collins says he left for love, and has called talking to The Sun about anything one of his biggest regrets. Musically he went back to his first love. The Phil Collins Big Band, inspired by Buddy Rich and by a tribute project put together by Neil Peart, played swinging versions of his and Genesis's hits with Collins at the drums. At Montreux in 1996 Quincy Jones conducted and Tony Bennett sang. Still unable to read music, Collins wrote out his parts in a notation of his own.[1] [2] [3]

Dance into the Light, his first album as a full time solo artist, came out in October 1996. Inspired partly by Britpop, he wrote guitar songs, even though he was no guitarist. Critics were harsh and sales fell, though the tour still filled arenas. Around then he met Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who had called him the antichrist of music. Gallagher and his wife teased him for posing with a guitar in a video, an instrument Collins had borrowed from Paul McCartney. The Gallagher brothers kept up the attacks for years, and in 2005 Collins called them rude and not as talented as they think. A 1998 greatest hits album still went to number one in Britain.[1] [2]

In 1995 Disney hired Collins to write songs for Tarzan. The directors did not want a half naked hero bursting into song in a tree, so Collins sang the songs himself as a kind of narrator. You'll Be in My Heart began as a lullaby for his daughter Lily, and in the film it is sung by Tarzan's gorilla mother. He recorded his songs in French, Italian, German and Spanish for the dubbed versions. The single spent nineteen weeks at number one on the American adult contemporary chart, a record at the time, and in 2000 it won the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Original Song, beating Blame Canada from the South Park film. South Park's creators got their revenge in cartoon form. He went on to write songs for Brother Bear and the Tarzan stage musical.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1999 he married Orianne Cevey, and the couple set up the Little Dreams Foundation to support gifted children in sport and the arts. In 2000, after a recording session in Los Angeles, he suddenly lost most of the hearing in his left ear. Doctors gave him little hope, but it turned out to be a viral infection and most of his hearing came back. He later admitted part of him was relieved, as if he had been told to stop. That year he also took two former horn players, Louis Satterfield and Rahmlee Davis, to the High Court over royalties from his live album Serious Hits Live, and the judge sided with him. In 2001 the satirical show Brass Eye tricked him into backing a fake anti paedophile campaign, and he consulted lawyers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His seventh album, Testify, released in 2002, was among the worst reviewed records of its year, though his cover of Leo Sayer's Can't Stop Loving You topped the American adult contemporary chart. From 2004 he went out on what he wryly called the First Final Farewell Tour, a dig at stars who kept saying goodbye. Then his third marriage ended. He and Orianne divorced in 2006, and he paid a reported twenty five million pounds, at the time the biggest settlement in British celebrity divorce history. In 2008 Orianne moved to Miami with their two young sons, Nicholas and Matthew.[1] [2] [3]

The broken drummer

In 2007 Collins reunited with Banks and Rutherford for Turn It On Again, a tour of Europe and North America that included the Live Earth concert at Wembley. It grew out of a meeting called to discuss staging The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with Peter Gabriel. Collins left that meeting having agreed to a full reunion tour, because, as he put it, he could not say no. The drumming took its toll. He dislocated vertebrae in his upper neck, and after surgery in 2009 he lost feeling in his fingers. He could only hold drumsticks if they were taped to his hands.[1] [2] [3]

He put what he had left into Going Back, a collection of the Motown and soul songs he had first heard the Action play at the Marquee as a teenager. He wanted the tracks to sound exactly like the originals, and he recruited surviving members of the Funk Brothers, Motown's studio band. He had to tape his left hand to the stick to drum, and his two youngest sons stomped their feet on Jimmy Mack. The cover used a photo of him drumming at thirteen, found in the Getty Images library, and he had to pay to use a picture of himself. Released in September 2010, Going Back went to number one in Britain.[1] [2]

That year he told Rolling Stone he had thought about suicide, and had held back for the sake of his children. He talked about wanting to write the Phil Collins character out of the story, and asked his girlfriend, the New York news anchor Dana Tyler, to call him Philip instead. He also said a psychic had told him he might have fought at the Alamo in a past life. In March 2011, citing health problems, he announced he was stepping away from music to be a full time father to his two young sons. He insisted it had nothing to do with bad reviews.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Retirement was lonely. His sons were in Miami, and in Switzerland he filled empty days with sport on television and drink. In his memoir he described falling so hard that he left teeth marks in a tiled floor, waking in a pool of blood, and a spell in intensive care when he heard a doctor ask his family whether his will was in order. His great passion in these years was the Alamo, the 1836 battle in Texas. He built a collection of hundreds of artefacts, published a book about it in 2012, and in 2014 gave the whole collection to the Alamo. In 2015 the Texas legislature made him an honorary Texan.[1] [2] [3]

Not dead yet

In 2014 his sons talked him onto a stage at their Miami school, where he sang In the Air Tonight and Land of Confusion with the student band. In October 2015 he announced he was no longer retired. He reissued all his solo albums with new covers that recreated the old close ups of his face, now older. He had moved to Miami to be near his sons, and in January 2016 he and Orianne got back together. That October he published his memoir, Not Dead Yet, which revealed his alcoholism for the first time. His first wife Andrea took legal action over the way the book described their marriage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Not Dead Yet Tour opened in June 2017 with five nights at the Royal Albert Hall that sold out in fifteen seconds, followed by a headline show in Hyde Park, his biggest solo concert. For the first time he did not play drums at all. His teenage son Nicholas took over the kit. Early in the run he got up in the night at his London hotel, slipped, and hit his head on a chair, needing stitches near his eye. A condition called foot drop, left by his back surgery, meant he now walked with a cane and sang sitting down. The tour ran until 2019 and grossed more than two hundred million dollars. In 2020 Orianne secretly married another man, and Collins went to court to evict her from his Miami home.[1] [2] [3]

In March 2020 Collins, Banks and Rutherford announced one final Genesis tour, The Last Domino?, with Nic Collins on drums. The pandemic pushed it back, and it finally ran from September 2021 to March 2022. Phil sang from a chair and could manage only a little percussion alongside his son. At the last show, at the O2 in London on the twenty sixth of March 2022, he told the crowd it was the last show for Genesis. His daughter Lily, by then the star of Emily in Paris, wrote that she had witnessed the end of an era.[1] [2] [3] [4]

What followed nearly killed him. After he stopped taking Antabuse, a drug that makes drinking unbearable, he started again, wine from breakfast onward. In November 2023 he was admitted to hospital in Switzerland with damage to his kidneys and pancreas, and he spent around seven months being treated. He has said that at the worst point there was talk of whether to keep him on life support, and people came to say goodbye, though he remembers none of it. Five operations on his knee added to the ordeal. In January 2026 he told the BBC that he had a live in nurse around the clock, that he had stopped drinking, and that he could walk again with help.[1] [2] [3]

In April 2026 Collins was voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, sixteen years after going in with Genesis. Among his fellow inductees were Oasis. As of 2026 the ceremony is set for November in Los Angeles, and he has said he will not perform. His reputation has come full circle. Once mocked as the face of eighties excess, he has been championed by hip hop and R and B artists, from the Urban Renewal tribute album to Kanye West, and by drummers from Taylor Hawkins to Mike Portnoy. He remains one of only three artists, with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, to sell more than a hundred million albums both solo and as part of a band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Phil Collins

Phil Collins and Andrea Bertorelli. They sang together as schoolkids in his band the Real Thing, reconnected in Vancouver in 1974 and married in 1975. He adopted her daughter Joely, and their son Simon followed in 1976. Her affair and departure while he toured in 1978 and 1979 broke him, and the songs he wrote in response became Face Value. The divorce was bitter, with a later court fight over a Vancouver house, and in 2016 she took legal action over his memoir.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Phil Collins and Jill Tavelman. Collins married the American Jill Tavelman in 1984, and their daughter Lily was born in 1989. He later wrote You'll Be in My Heart as a lullaby for Lily. The marriage collapsed after his affair with Lavinia Lang in 1992, and a fax he sent Jill ended up on the front of The Sun. The divorce was finalised in 1996 with a reported seventeen million pound settlement. He has said he regrets cheating on her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Phil Collins and Orianne Cevey. They met in 1994, when she was his twenty two year old translator on tour, and he moved to Switzerland to be with her. They married in 1999, founded the Little Dreams Foundation and had two sons, Nicholas and Matthew. They divorced in 2006 with a record settlement, reunited in Miami in 2016, and split again in 2020 when she secretly married another man and Collins moved to evict her.[1] [2]

Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel. Gabriel sat in on Collins's audition in 1970 and knew straight away he was the right drummer. For five years they blended their voices so closely that they sounded like one singer. When Gabriel left in 1975, Collins reluctantly replaced him, and was forever compared with him. They stayed friends. Collins drummed on Gabriel's third album, where gated reverb was born, and Gabriel sang on Take Me Home. Gabriel called him the workaholics' workaholic.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Phil Collins and Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. The three men who became Genesis's most successful line up worked together, on and off, for more than fifty years. Banks said that by Duke, Collins was becoming an equal as a writer. Collins left in 1996 but came back in 2007, and after Rutherford guested at a Not Dead Yet show in 2019, the trio planned one last tour. Rutherford once summed Collins up as a bloke next door who liked a drink and a joke.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Phil Collins and Hugh Padgham. Padgham was the engineer who discovered gated reverb while Collins drummed on Peter Gabriel's Intruder. He went on to co-produce Face Value, Hello, I Must Be Going!, No Jacket Required and But Seriously, as well as Genesis albums including Invisible Touch. Their partnership won Grammys for Album of the Year and Record of the Year, and defined the sound of 1980s pop drums.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Noel Gallagher. The Oasis songwriter made Collins his favourite target, calling him the antichrist of music and sneering that selling lots of records did not make you good. Liam Gallagher joined in. Collins admitted the attacks got him down, and on Room 101 in 2005 he nominated the brothers, calling them rude and not as talented as they think. In 2026 both acts were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the same class.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Phil Collins and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Collins drummed on Plant's first two solo albums and encouraged him to keep going after Led Zeppelin, and Plant has called him a hugely positive force. That friendship led to Live Aid, where Collins joined the Led Zeppelin reunion. It went badly, and Page blamed Collins, while Collins blamed Page. It was also Plant who was with him the night the Pump Room turned him away, the incident that named No Jacket Required.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Phil Collins and Philip Bailey. Collins met the Earth, Wind and Fire singer through the Phenix Horns and produced his 1984 album Chinese Wall. The start was rocky, and Collins nearly quit as producer, but a late night jam gave them Easy Lover, a British number one and Bailey's only American top forty hit as a solo artist. Collins said he appeared in the video to help it get shown.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Eric Clapton. The two became close collaborators in the 1980s. Clapton played on Face Value, and Collins produced and drummed on Clapton's Behind the Sun and August and toured Europe with him. At Live Aid, Collins drummed for Clapton's Philadelphia set. Clapton returned the favour with the lead guitar on I Wish It Would Rain Down, and even acted in its comic video.[1] [2] [3]

Phil Collins and Chester Thompson. Collins brought the American drummer into Genesis as its touring drummer from 1977, and Thompson played on his solo tours from 1982 to 2005. Their long partnership ended badly in 2010, when Collins was unhappy with his drumming on the Going Back shows. Thompson said he was upset and had not spoken to Collins since, but wished him well and praised Nic Collins, his successor.[1] [2]

Phil Collins and Nic Collins. His son Nicholas, born to Orianne Cevey, stomped his feet on the Going Back album as a child. When nerve damage stopped his father drumming, the teenage Nic took over the kit on the Not Dead Yet Tour and then on Genesis's final tour, where Tony Banks compared his playing to a young Phil. It meant Collins could keep touring as a singer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Phil Collins

• At seven, Collins stopped a Butlin's talent show orchestra to tell them they were playing in the wrong key. On a family holiday at Butlin's, young Phil sang The Ballad of Davy Crockett in a talent contest. Halfway through he stopped the orchestra and told them they had the key wrong.[1]
• In 1967 Collins toured Britain teaching people a dance called the crunch, part of an advertising campaign for Smith's crisps. Between acting jobs as a teenager, Collins travelled around the country showing people how to do the crunch, a dance that Smith's crisps promoted in its advertising.[1]
• Collins had a scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it was cut from the film. He was cast as one of the children who storm the castle in the 1968 film. His scene did not make the final cut, and around the same time he lost the role of Romeo to Leonard Whiting.[1]
• Collins was invited to audition for Yes, and simply never turned up. After hearing Yes needed a drummer, he spoke to singer Jon Anderson, who invited him to an audition the following week. Collins did not show, and joined Genesis instead the following year.[1]
• His first job at the Marquee Club was setting out chairs and sweeping the floor. Collins went to the Marquee so often as a teenager that the managers put him to work setting out chairs, sweeping up and helping in the cloakroom. It was there he saw the Action and Yes.[1]
• Phil Collins's mother discovered Jack Wild, who later played the Artful Dodger in the film of Oliver! June Collins, a theatrical agent, spotted Jack Wild playing football in the park and enrolled him at the Barbara Speake Stage School. Phil had played the Dodger on stage, and Jack played him on film.[1] [2]
• George Harrison once pranked Collins with a fake tape of his own terrible conga playing. Collins played congas on Harrison's Art of Dying in 1970 but was left off the record. Years later Harrison sent him an awful recording supposedly of that session, then admitted it was a joke.[1] [2]
• Ronnie Caryl, who failed the Genesis audition alongside Collins, was best man at his first wedding. Caryl and Collins had played together since school and in Flaming Youth. Caryl did not get into Genesis, but stayed a lifelong friend, joined Collins's band in 1996, and died in 2023.[1]
• Brand X got its name from a note scribbled on a studio calendar. An Island Records man wrote Brand X on the studio calendar to keep track of the jam band's sessions. The placeholder stuck and became the name of Collins's jazz fusion side project.[1]
• On the Face Value sleeve notes, Collins credited himself simply as Me. He handwrote every note on the album, down to the legal text around the record label. Instead of writing Phil Collins in the credits, he wrote Me, and later just his initials.[1]
• Some original vinyl copies of Face Value have the words Play Loud etched into the run out groove. The message appears where the matrix number usually goes, possibly because the album was cut at a relatively low volume compared with other records of the time.[1]
• Face Value's version of Behind the Lines was born when Collins sped up the Genesis recording. The song first appeared on Genesis's Duke. When Collins played the tape faster, he thought it sounded like a Michael Jackson track, and he rebuilt it as a horn driven funk song.[1]
• The original In the Air Tonight single came with a twelve page cartoon storyboard drawn by his brother Clive. Clive Collins was a professional cartoonist. He drew the black and white storyboard included in the British single sleeve, and was later made an MBE for services to art.[1] [2]
• You Can't Hurry Love was the first track on the very first Now That's What I Call Music album. Collins's cover of the Supremes hit, his first British number one in January 1983, opened the compilation series that went on to run for decades.[1]
• Glycerol was sprayed on his forehead to make him look sweaty on the No Jacket Required cover. The red lit close up was meant to show the album's hot, up tempo feel. Collins revealed in his memoir that the sweat was fake.[1]
• The Sussudio and One More Night videos were shot in a London pub then owned by Richard Branson. Both clips were filmed at the Princess Victoria in Shepherd's Bush. One shows the band playing while the pub is open, the other after it has closed.[1] [2]
• Easy Lover was the theme for the very first WrestleMania in 1985. The World Wrestling Federation used the Collins and Philip Bailey duet for its first WrestleMania at Madison Square Garden in March 1985. Take Me Home later closed Saturday Night's Main Event.[1] [2]
• In one of the Two Hearts videos, Collins wrestles the Ultimate Warrior. Two videos were made for the song. One featured Collins in a wrestling match with the Ultimate Warrior, made for a 1990 TV special.[1]
• Collins met Cher on the Concorde to Live Aid and persuaded her to come to Philadelphia. Flying between the two Live Aid concerts, he told Cher about the show. She went, and appears in the Philadelphia finale singing We Are the World.[1]
• Collins paid for David Crosby's liver transplant in 1994. Crosby, who sang on Another Day in Paradise, needed a new liver after years of hepatitis C. Collins covered the cost of the operation.[1] [2]
• He sang Doesn't Anybody Stay Together Anymore at Prince Charles's fortieth birthday party. The No Jacket Required song is about everyone around him getting divorced. Collins later noted he sang it for the Prince not long before Charles and Diana's own marriage fell apart.[1]
• The anti apartheid song Colours was first titled Oh Mr Botha, What Can We Do. The working title on But Seriously played on the music hall song Oh Mr Porter, aimed at South Africa's leader P W Botha.[1]
• Something Happened on the Way to Heaven was originally written for the Four Tops. Collins wrote it with guitarist Daryl Stuermer for the Motown group, but liked it so much by the time it was finished that he kept it. It reached the American top five.[1]
• Collins's Spanish version of You'll Be in My Heart is his only entry on Billboard's Latin chart. He recorded the Tarzan songs in several languages. The Spanish version reached number thirty two on Billboard's Hot Latin Tracks.[1]
• His daughter Lily Collins has a voice role as a baby ape in Tarzan. Lily, for whom You'll Be in My Heart was first written as a lullaby, appears in the cast of the 1999 Disney film.[1] [2]
• Collins played a con man in a 1985 episode of Miami Vice called Phil the Shill. The show had already made In the Air Tonight famous. Collins guested as a cheating con man, and his song The Man with the Horn was rewritten for the episode.[1] [2]
• Collins appears as himself in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. Players must protect a fictional Collins from hitmen, including during a concert where he performs In the Air Tonight.[1]
• He had to pay Getty Images to use a photo of himself on the cover of Going Back. The album was going to be called 18 Good Reasons until the picture of a thirteen year old Collins at the drums turned up in the Getty archive.[1]
• A street in the French village of Saint Jean d'Heurs is named after Phil Collins. The rural commune in central France honoured him with a street name.[1]
• Collins was made an honorary Texan by the state legislature in 2015. It recognised his donation of his huge Alamo collection to the state. McMurry University in Texas had already given him an honorary doctorate in history in 2012.[1]
• Collins gives all his music royalties from South Africa to an HIV and poverty charity. He supports the Topsy Foundation, which works in some of South Africa's poorest rural communities.[1]
• In 1982 Collins drummed in Kate Bush's backing band at the first Prince's Trust rock concert. He went on to play the charity's concerts many times and was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order in 1994 for his work for the Trust.[1]
• In 1989 he played Uncle Ernie in The Who's Tommy on stage. Collins guested at two shows on The Who's 1989 tour, performing Fiddle About and Tommy's Holiday Camp.[1]
• By 2011 Collins had spent 1,730 weeks in the German charts. Of those, 766 weeks came from Genesis records and 964 from his solo releases. But Seriously is one of the best selling albums in German chart history.[1] [2]
• He once rang a critic in Indianapolis to tell him he was not very good at his job. Collins was so stung by bad reviews that he would call writers directly. He admitted he still remembered every stinker and who wrote it.[1]
• I Missed Again features a saxophone solo by the jazz club owner Ronnie Scott. The Face Value single, about his first wife leaving, was later used by the BBC over a montage of snooker players missing shots.[1]
• In 2020 Collins sent Donald Trump's campaign a cease and desist letter over In the Air Tonight. The song was played at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, and his representatives said lawyers were monitoring the situation.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.