Or: divorce my wife by fax? Of course I didn’t

It’s the morning after the affair before.

The emotional turbulence has left me hollow. It’s not the rejection that’s killing me. It’s the loss. Little wonder that my head isn’t wholly in the game by the time the We Can’t Dance tour finishes in Wolverhampton on November 17, 1992. The mammoth run of globetrotting shows may have finally ended, but I’m still all over the place—a feeling not helped by a surreal detour to Neverland.

That December I’m in LA to present the Billboard Awards, which is not something I’ve ever done before. The big winner on the night will be Michael Jackson. He’s swept the board with Dangerous. On top of that, it’s the tenth anniversary of Thriller and Billboard wants to honor its ever-more-astronomical sales figures.

Unfortunately Jackson is off on tour the day after the awards, so the plan is to pre-record my presenting him with the trophies at his Neverland ranch in Santa Barbara.

The opportunity to meet the man properly, and see what Neverland is really like (are there monkey butlers?), is hugely exciting. Even getting there is exciting, if by “exciting” you understand that I mean “alarming”: the helicopter ferrying Jill, Lily and me gets lost in fog en route, we have to make an unforeseen landing several miles shy of the ranch, and are then limousined the rest of the way.

When we eventually de-limo, we’re met by a pair of greeters dressed in Disney-esque uniforms. There’s Muzak tinkling in the gardens, and children running around in the on-site amusement park.

We’re led into the house and parked in his living room to wait for the maestro to come downstairs. There are photos on the wall of him in his Thriller-era pomp, and various family portraits. There’s also a huge oil painting of Jackson surrounded by animals and birds, the King of Pop giving it some St. Francis of Assisi.

Eventually Michael descends and introduces himself. He’s very sweet and friendly. All thoughts of the weird things I’ve heard disappear in an instant, and I don’t bat an eyelid when he invites Lily and Jill to play upstairs in his toy room. He and I go to his studio complex, where the camera crews are setting up—in addition to the Billboard Awards team, there’s his own team who film for his archives everything he does.

While we wait we make small talk, and he apologizes for his pale make-up. It’s for a skin condition, he tells me. I get the impression he feels safe with me—and not just because, as the LA Times later notes in its report on the telecast, I’m an “English paleface.”

After we finish filming the somewhat stilted awards presentation—he has to pretend he didn’t know about the second award—we walk back to the house and Michael says his goodbyes.

It’s only a brief encounter, but I’m left with the feeling that Michael Jackson, though clearly not the same as us mortals, is not the weirdo we’ve been led to expect. A brilliant musician and a nice guy who’s had to live an extraordinary life from the age of five. But, even though I have no direct knowledge of the murkier side of Michael’s life, I have to say that there’s probably no smoke without some kind of fire.

In January 1993 I’m at home in Lakers Lodge, considering my next moves. Genesis have never been bigger, yet I’ve never felt smaller. The confusion is rattling around in my brain just like the trains rattling around the rapidly expanding model railway set-up that I built for Simon (and for myself) downstairs in the cellar.

I’ve apologized profusely to Jill, explained that Lavinia was a bolt-from-the-past aberration, and promised to be a better, truer husband.

In my studio at the top of the house, as I contemplate the beginnings of the songs that might make up my next solo album, I’m having different, darker thoughts. If it was anybody other than Lavinia, I’d be able to put it out of the way, to banish the thoughts and bury the ache. But this is Lavinia. She’s something special. The painful truth? I’m deeply confused. Might the first love of my life still be the last?

I write a lot in my little room, with calming views of our newly renovated barn. Just me and my twelve-track Akai recorder. I sit on my stool, and I sing spontaneously. I sing out, and I sing loud, without using headphones, just using the speakers. The words, the music and the emotions pour out of me at once. I write “Can’t Turn Back the Years” (“the perfect love was all you wanted from me / but I cannot turn back the years…”) and “I’ve Forgotten Everything” (“I’ve forgotten everything about you till someone says your name…”). That’s my version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and it’s a song that I create and record so fast I don’t even write it down.

I write “Both Sides of the Story,” and its bold appeal for understanding all the circumstances surrounding a scenario gives me the title for the album: Both Sides.

The emotions that are firing these new songs are similar to the ones that gave Face Value its power, impact and, ultimately I hope, resonance. They’re me, laid open and laid bare. On my first solo album, and on this, my fifth, I put it all out there. In the long run this is why Face Value and Both Sides are my two favorite albums, and why No Jacket Required doesn’t come close for me.

Specifically, on Both Sides the rage and hurt of Face Value is replaced by the pang of regret, heartache and nostalgia. Lyrically, to my mind, I hit some of those emotions pretty perfectly on the head. I love the simplicity and the purity of the songs.

As I’m writing I come to a decision. With songs this personal, so close to home, no one else will be playing on or recording them. This is private, and I’m going to keep it that way for as long as possible. The irony, of course, being that, if I’ve done my job properly and written movingly from the heart, I’m fearful that as soon as Jill hears Both Sides, our marriage will implode.

I suppose that, in keeping the creation and recording of these songs purely to myself, I’m trying to delay that moment for as long as I can.

I play all the instruments myself, record the vocals and work up my home demos into an almost releasable state before taking them to The Farm to add the drums. There I will continue to keep them close to my chest by producing the album on my own, and doing so with some briskness. The musicianship is, you might say, amateurish. Or, better, intimate. But that works for these songs; that’s part of the charm.

While I have an idea that writing these songs will have ramifications that are earth-shattering for my personal life, I have no clue that recording them in this manner will have an equally tumultuous impact on my professional life. That will come a little later. But for now, the album is finished.

Then, some breathing room before I go public with Both Sides. In early 1993 the phone rings with an enticing invitation: a young Australian director, Stephan Elliott, has seen Miami Vice and wants me to play the lead in a film called Frauds, a black comedy about a perverse insurance inspector who terrorizes the lives of a couple he suspects of fraud.

In the window between finishing recording Both Sides and its release, I travel to Sydney for the shoot. It’s great fun and a welcome change of headspace after the We Can’t Dance tour, and from what’s been happening at home. Hugo Weaving is my co-star, and soon he’ll rocket to fame in The Matrix series, while Elliott goes on to direct genius, ABBA-channeling musical The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

In October 1993, “Both Sides of the Story” is released as the first single from Both Sides. It’s long, almost seven minutes on the album. Even edited for radio purposes it’s still five and a half minutes. The Americans want “Everyday” as the first single because “it’s more like what Phil Collins does.” I dig in my heels. I don’t care if this album isn’t as commercial as my four previous albums. It’s not meant to be. It’s a defiantly, proudly personal record, made entirely to my script and my specifications. It’s my heart on my sleeve, as ugly and messy as that must necessarily be.

I don’t view Both Sides as a public statement that I have closed the doors on my second marriage. That’s certainly not the message intended for Jill. Rather it’s an honest account of the turmoil I’ve been experiencing. I’m just acknowledging what happened, and doing so the only way I know how.

“Both Sides of the Story” is a hit—just. It’s the only hit single from the album. Both Sides still reaches number 1 in the U.K. but, broadly, the innermost thoughts and feelings of this haunted, guilty man are not clicking with the record-buying public, certainly not compared with the surreally huge sales of what has gone before. I don’t care. I’ve done what I set out to do.

In any case, I have more pressing concerns. To be painfully honest, I’ve realized that my marriage to Jill is over. I’ve undermined everything, and I can’t see a way back. I’m so sad for Lily, who is trying to make sense of all this mess her dad has made. I will always be sorry for that. I know that confessing to these feelings will unmoor Jill and Lily’s lives, so I make the difficult decision to take the coward’s way out: I say nothing.

—

The Both Sides of the World tour starts in spring 1994, on April Fool’s Day. Given what soon unfolds, it’s an auspicious date on which to kick off a 169-show tour that will run for thirteen torrid months.

The first three weeks of the tour are uneventful, other than the fact that the concept for the show is going down brilliantly with the fans. The gig is in two halves. The first half I title “Black & White,” featuring as it does songs from Both Sides and other, similarly reflective and/or downcast numbers: “One More Night,” “Another Day in Paradise,” “Separate Lives.” The second half, “Colours,” despite beginning with “In the Air Tonight,” is more upbeat and fun: “Easy Lover,” “Two Hearts,” “Sussudio.” The home straight.

They’re long and demanding sets, taxing from the opening moments. I enter the stage through a fake door, hang up my coat and sit down at what looks like a pile of rubbish but which has drums hidden inside. Drummer Ricky Lawson, in the band for the first time, enters playing a kit of pads hidden inside his waistcoat. There’s a call-and-response drum piece, and seamlessly we segue into “I Don’t Care Anymore.” And we’re off. I’m enjoying throwing myself into the performances. The distraction, certainly, and the expelling of energy and emotion, are welcome. Receiving rapturous responses night after night can’t fail to cheer me up.

On April 26 I fly into Geneva. I have a show tonight in Lausanne, Switzerland’s fourth biggest city, located on the shores of Lac Léman. I’m in Lyon the day after tomorrow, and three days from now the tour reaches Paris. There I’m booked for three shows at the Palais Omnisports arena, playing to 20,000 people each night.

Tony Smith, booking agent John Giddings, tour manager Andy Mackrill, Danny Gillen (still by my side seven years after joining me during the making of Buster) and I land at Geneva, at the Global Jet Aviation hangar, the private part of the airport.

As at every other airport at which we land, we’re met by cars driven straight onto the tarmac, usually containing a local record company employee or some such.

So we deplane, and split into two groups. There waiting, as scheduled, are two Renault Espace vans with drivers…and this very attractive woman. Girl, really.

She’s very smart, formally dressed in a gray skirt suit, and very beautiful. She introduces herself as Orianne—an unusual name, I think to myself—and says she’s been hired by the local Swiss concert promoter, Michael Driberg, to translate during our stay in Lausanne. She has an Asian look (her mother is Thai, I later learn) and speaks great English with a French accent.

We climb into the back of the van and settle in for the forty-minute drive from Geneva airport to Lausanne. I’m reading the book that accompanied the documentary Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. I love Quincy’s big-band stuff, and am mulling over the idea of having my own big band, so I’m hoovering up anything I can find on the man and his music.

Well, I say I’m reading Quincy’s book. I’m holding Quincy’s book. Really, I’m drinking in this incredible young woman in the front seat. I nudge Danny and raise my eyebrows. He gives me the look: “Yeah, I know.” I ask her name again—Oriel? Orion? I’m not messing, I really can’t remember her name.

She’s not a translator by profession, even though everyone will come to describe her that way. Orianne is twenty-one and works in the Geneva offices of Capital Ventures, an investment company. But because Driberg knows her, and knows she speaks excellent English, he asked if she would get me from the airport, take me to the hotel, escort me to the show, then deliver me back home again, all the while meeting my linguistic needs.

And I’m not lying or exaggerating: on the way from Geneva airport to Lausanne’s Beau-Rivage Hotel, I become besotted with Orianne Cevey. There is no flirting, in part because I’ve never been any good at flirting. She’s giving me no signals. I’m not even talking to her. Stupid, really.

Obviously in real, practical terms I’m thinking, “This isn’t going to go anywhere.” Yet at the same time: I would love this to. This feeling reminds my forty-three-year-old self of being a teenager. With light-speed certainty and blood-rush irrationality, I know I want to take this further. And this is not just about sex. It isn’t even the conversation, or any intimacy, because no one’s speaking, and she’s in the front, and I’m in the back, with big lump Danny and big hero Quincy. This stranger’s presence, in this crowded car, for forty quick minutes, is enough. As I later learn in French, it’s a coup de foudre.

We arrive at the extremely elegant Beau-Rivage. Get out, check in, and I now take the opportunity to appreciate the full splendor of this young woman. Half my age, half Asian, half a whole world away. But numbers don’t mean a thing.

I have an hour or so before soundcheck, so Orianne arranges to come back with the driver and collect me for the gig. Danny and I go upstairs and, for the first and only time in our entire history of touring, we have connecting rooms. We open the doors between the suites and excitedly chat.

“Did you see her, Danny?”

“Yeah. Lovely girl, lovely girl.”

“Wow.”

Frankly, I can’t think about much else. An armchair therapist might suggest that right now I’m predisposed to a reaction like this, given the emotional turmoil I’ve been experiencing (and yes, of course, I brought all that on myself). But I’d tell the armchair therapist to take a running jump. This woman seems special, and so are my feelings.

I manage to unpack, get my head together, remember that I’ve got a gig that night. At the appointed hour, we go down to the lobby and find Orianne waiting, still looking businesslike but smiling sweetly.

Back in the car, on to the gig at the Patinoire de Malley arena, into the dressing room. Orianne hangs around because her job is to take care of me. It’s soon apparent that as well as being beautiful, she’s intelligent. It’s only in the far reaches of my silly, hopeful imagination that anything has happened, but already I’m riddled with the old Collins chestnut: guilt.

Backstage it’s like a pebble has been dropped into a pond. The ripples are radiating outward. Our wardrobe lady, Carol, says to me, “Who on earth is that?” She’s floored by this vision of loveliness, too. Carol disappears for a few minutes and primps up her hair and make-up. There’s another woman backstage and she will not be outshone.

John Giddings comes to the dressing room. “Who’s that?” he says, mouth agape.

“She’s the lady that’s helping me out with my French. Hands off.” Andy Mackrill echoes Giddings’ stupefaction: “Who’s that?” Then all the guys in the band start taking an interest. Our trombone player, a true gentleman, wants her name and number. I can hear the others mumbling, “Man, she’s beautiful…”

After soundcheck is when I brush up on my locally sourced stage patter. French, German, Italian, Japanese—everywhere we play, I prepare a little spiel in the native language, a little respect to, a little nod to the locals. I’ve always done it, just as Peter did it in Genesis.

Carol says to me, “Do you want to do your French now?”

I’m trying to be casual. “Ah, yeah, could you get Orianne?”

“Yeah, she’s lovely, isn’t she?”

Orianne comes in, sits opposite me and asks, “What would you like to say?”

We go through some lines for the concert—“Bon soir…” And mais oui, perhaps that soir I put a bit more effort into learning some passages. Frankly, I want to drag it out. But finally I can’t detain her any longer. And at the end of it I say, “Have you got a boyfriend?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you got a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“OK…But I’d love to take you out for dinner.”

She’s a little bit flustered, but seems to agree. Then, quickly, she’s on her feet and heading for the door. “But at least I said something,” I think, “made some sort of personal, non-work contact.” Just before she disappears, just to be sure, I say, “I’m going to see you afterward, right?”

“Yes, I’ll take you back to the hotel.”

We do the show, and I’ll hold my hands up: there is a little bit of pouting on my part. More so than normal. I’m trying to make it the best show possible. I may even have thrown a few more athletic shapes than is customary.

Because this is a cavernous ice-hockey venue, there are several doors leading from the arena floor to the hot dog stands, bars and merchandise stalls. During the gig I see Orianne and a friend standing by one of the doors nearest the stage. She’s dancing a little bit, moving in time to the music, enjoying herself. I’m schoolboy-pleased.

Show’s over and I’m backstage, getting changed. I ask Carol if she’s seen the translator girl. Carol, possibly with lips a little pursed, says she has no idea where she is. Danny comes in with the bags. Am I ready to go? Not really. Where’s that translator girl? Danny says he can’t find her but that we have to vacate the premises. Reluctantly, I head back to the hotel. It’s fair to say that my mood is somewhat crestfallen.

Up in our adjoining rooms, at my relaxed-but-also-insistent request, Danny phones the back office at the venue. “Is that translator girl around? The promoter’s girl? Oh, she’s there?” It seems that Orianne had been waiting for us, but had missed us in the crush of 10,000-odd fans tipping out of the venue and a ten-strong band and thirty road crew scurrying about their post-show business.

Danny hands me the phone so I can speak to Orianne directly. I ask for her number. After some hesitation she gives me her work number. “And can I have your home number?” Also: “What are you doing tomorrow? You’re working? What about after that? I’ve got a day off!”

“Well, I’m supposed to…I don’t know. Call me tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

I’m ecstatic. That’s enough for me.

I call her the next day, and she’s not there. I’ll end up getting to know Les, her boss at Capital Ventures, very well. He tells me she’s out on assignment. I don’t have a nuanced understanding of the Swiss finance industry (or even of Swiss cheese or chocolate), but I gather her job is to go and charm money out of businessmen.

That evening I call her at home. Her dad, Jean-François, answers, a lovely Swiss man who barely speaks English. So he puts on her Thai mum, Orawan. “Who is it? Phil? Phil Collins!” She’s flustered. “Orianne told me you may call. She’s not here.”

Orawan goes off to get a number for her. Only later do I find out that in her hurry to find me the number, she’s left the dinner cooking on the stove. The dinner burns, and the kitchen catches fire. Dad, not unreasonably, loses his rag. One minute the phone’s ringing, the next minute the fire alarm’s ringing. “It’s OK,” toots Orawan through the din, smoke and flames, “I have Phil Collins on the phone!”

She gives me the number for Christophe, Orianne’s best mate, whom she’s currently out with. I call, and Christophe passes the phone to her.

“Can I meet you for dinner tonight?”

“I can’t. I have to see my boyfriend.”

“OK. How about afterward?”

“Maybe. I’ll call you at your hotel later.”

I appreciate that in the cold light of the printed page, this might all come over a little, well, stalker-ish. What can I say? She already had me by the heart.

Danny and I book a great table in our hotel’s well-regarded restaurant, and immediately order a lovely bottle of wine. We sit and sip and wait. And we wait. The waiter hovers. “Another bottle of wine, sirs?” I’m feeling chipper, and not just because of the Chateau Orianne.

Another waiter comes up. “Monsieur Collins, there’s a phone call for you.”

It’s Orianne. She says she can’t come. Why not?

“Because my boyfriend heard about you and he hit me.”

I later find out that she’d been in the process of breaking up with him. But right now’s he’s punched her in the face and she has a fat lip. I express my outrage and my sympathy, and I’ve a good mind to dispatch Danny to sort out this fucker. I tell her I don’t mind how she looks—she should just come to the restaurant.

“Maybe later.”

Danny and I have something to eat, then go up to our adjoining rooms. Eventually the phone rings. Orianne is in the lobby, with Christophe. He’s a lovely big guy who I will grow very close to. He wants to make sure that his best friend is OK, that she’s not messing around with some jerk, especially after the evening she’s had. Maybe he’s already heard about the Ceveys’ kitchen going up in flames, too.

The four of us rendezvous for a drink in my room, and eventually Christophe looks at me and says, “Phil. You’re a nice guy. I’ll leave you alone. But I’ll be waiting in the car.”

For the next couple of days, I’m like a dog with two tails. But at the same time: I’m about to go to Paris. And in Paris I’m due to meet my wife and our five-year-old daughter, who are flying in from London.

What have I done? Well, I know what I’ve done. I’ve betrayed my wife and child. Again. And I’ve set sail for perilously uncharted waters. “Meet Phil Collins’ new mystery girlfriend. She’s young enough to be his daughter.” Ticks all the midlife-crisis boxes.

My dalliance with Lavinia has already pulled the carpet from underneath my marriage, and I was really kidding myself if I thought I could make things right again with Jill after that. This doesn’t make the guilt any easier to deal with, and it won’t make it any easier to deal with for years and years after. My love life is a cauldron of conflictions of which I am far from proud.

In Paris, from the window of my hotel room, I watch Jill and Lily get out of the limo. I feel like a complete shit.

If my marriage to Jill wasn’t over with the Lavinia episode, it is now. With my actions in Los Angeles and Lausanne, I’ve made sure of that.

Considering I’ve been on the road pretty much my whole life, up until Lavinia I’d never been unfaithful. Why now? I don’t buy the “midlife crisis” thing. Maybe Jill and me being a couple had run its course?

Separations are chaotic and difficult at the best of times, but they’re much more complicated here. I’m barely a month into a mammoth tour that will last for another year. It’s not an option to cancel a leg, or even rearrange a run of shows, so that I can return to the U.K. and sort through the legal and logistical mess of my matrimonial breakdown. This is of no comfort to my wife—in fact it worsens things—but I have professional obligations coming out of my ears and I have to look at the bigger picture. These are huge shows, employing dozens and dozens of people, performing to hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. The juggernaut must go on.

Two weeks after Paris, in mid-May 1994, I’m on the other side of the Atlantic. I’m starting the North American leg with four nights at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes, a fantastic, 26,000-capacity circular dome built for the 1968 Olympics. It’s a phenomenal venue in which to start an intense, three-month run of shows. I’ve never played Mexico before, neither solo nor with Genesis, so there’s huge anticipation. The concerts become something of a national event. For 100,000 Mexican fans—some of the most enthusiastic music-lovers in the world—I have to keep one set of emotions in check, while giving full vent to another. I’ve let down my family. I don’t want to let down the fans, too.

The Both Sides of the World tour rolls on, as it must. My schedule is, often literally, up in the air, and we’re now also contending with tricky and ever-changing time differences between the U.S. and the U.K. So there are few times when I can sit down in peace and quiet and make the difficult phone calls home. I want to speak to Jill, I want to speak to Lily. I also want to speak to Simon and Joely and explain the situation to them, but that means going through Andy, which is a whole other world of pain.

But on the rare occasions when I can call Jill, it’s difficult to get through. That said, Jill still occasionally joins me on tour in the U.S.—Lily wants to see me. Bless her, she’s trying to snow-plow through it all and, in her young heart, thinking that whatever’s wrong will soon be all right. On more than one occasion I’ll be standing center stage, singing “Separate Lives,” which is obviously a hugely emotional moment in the show. And whenever Jill is in the audience, she makes a point of walking down the side aisle and standing by the stage, staring at me.

Three weeks into the North American leg, six weeks after Paris, I handwrite a four- or five-page letter in which I try to outline the way I feel about us, about the future. The most reliable and quickest way to get this letter to her is to fax rather than post it. So that’s what I do. But it doesn’t help. Things are still messy and complicated, communication lines still fractured.

The situation doesn’t improve when the tour comes back to Europe at the start of September. In fact, by the end of that month, when we reach Frankfurt, they’re worse. Jill is rattling around a big house in the English countryside, single-handedly parenting our daughter. Meanwhile, her faithless husband is out and about in the world, playing giant shows to adoring fans, living the high life—and, I suppose she presumes, taking his pretty young girlfriend along for the ride. The truth is that only occasionally does Orianne join me; most of the time she’s working in Geneva. Still, that’s bad enough.

Now, in Frankfurt, we’re playing three nights at the 100-year-old Festhalle. I’m in one place for seventy-two hours, and there’s only an hour’s time difference between Germany and Britain. So I figure this is an opportune moment to catch up with Jill and sort out a few things. But I can’t get through. I never seem to be able to get through. Thinking I have no other option, I fax her again at Lakers Lodge.

By this point on the European leg of the Both Sides tour, whenever I have the odd day off I’m jetting to Switzerland, where I stay in a little hotel down the road from Orianne’s parents’ house. Early one morning I’m woken up in this hotel by the phone. It’s Annie Callingham, my secretary. “What’s going on, Phil? You’re all over the front page of The Sun.”

“What is?”

“The fax.”

“What fax?”

“The fax you sent Jill.”

“How did that happen?”

All hell has broken loose. Somehow Britain’s biggest-selling tabloid has got hold of the fax I sent from my dressing room in Frankfurt. What The Sun has edited and used from what I actually wrote has given them the headline “I’M FAXING FURIOUS,” and the story that I was faxing for a divorce.

More all hell breaks loose. The press queue up outside Orianne’s parents’ house. Her father is dying of cancer, and this is the last thing they need.

Reporters doorstep my mum, my brother, my sister. Anyone who knows me is contacted for comment, and the story becomes a national talking point. Actually, scratch that—an international talking point. I become used to never entering a hotel via the front door, lest I’m ambushed by the paparazzi.

The recently installed twenty-nine-year-old editor of another tabloid, News of the World, gets in touch. Piers Morgan oozes oily blandishments: it’s my chance to tell my side of the story, I’ll have copy approval, I can be reassured that this will set the record straight, in a grown-up manner, blah blah. Of course, it still comes out News of the World–ish. Oily Piers pours some of that oil on the flames.

This scrutiny is hard enough for me to take, especially as the crux of the story is untrue; for Orianne, however, a twenty-one-year-old suddenly enmeshed in a world of which she has no experience or comprehension, it’s hellish. She has to look behind her wherever she goes.

In timing that’s so perfect it’s painful, just as “Faxgate” hits I’m booked to perform an MTV Unplugged show at Wembley TV studios in London, to promote the U.K. leg of the tour. I’m contractually obligated; otherwise it would be the last thing I’d do right now. Walking onstage in Birmingham, a few days later, I’m still thinking this is the worst possible moment to be starting a tour at home. I’ve gone from being Mr. Really, Really Nice Guy (Albeit a Bit Ubiquitous and Annoying) to Mr. Bastard.

As I mentioned before, the show opens with rubbish on the floor: corrugated iron, bins, scrunched-up newspapers. Having played the drum duet with Ricky, the first number is “I Don’t Care Anymore,” from the Hello, I Must Be Going! album. That song was written about my first failed marriage, when Andy and I were going through the legals. The lyrics, accordingly, are caustic, and I perform it appropriately moodily, scuffing my way through the rubbish scattered on the stage.

But now everything takes on added resonance. The lyrics are nothing to do with Jill or our marriage. But when I kick those newspapers, I’m apparently kicking the tabloids.

After that opening song, I sit on the edge of the stage at Birmingham’s NEC and say to the audience, “Listen, this is all very embarrassing, but you mustn’t believe everything you read in the papers…” I don’t know if that sets anybody at ease, maybe not even me. I was always told in the theater: “Never make apologies to the audience. Just get on with it.” But I like to think there was a little bit of a sigh of relief. “Thank God we got that out of the way.”

But then, introducing “I Wish It Would Rain Down,” from …But Seriously, I do my take on a skit by politically incorrect, intense (and intensely funny) comedian Sam Kinison (a friend, who’d died two years previously). It’s about a couple in a car, arguing about an old girlfriend of the husband’s they’ve just seen. My thinking: it’s me, doing a bit of acting, talking up my love of comedians, segueing into a song in a characterful manner. In my ignorance, I don’t see that this is a bit too close to the bone for some. That it might look like I’m dancing on the grave of my marriage. I’m just desperate to make the audience laugh, or defuse the tension that I feel is there. To my shame, I don’t understand that, in the circumstances, it’s in poor taste.

The European leg, and 1994, ends with eight nights at Wembley Arena. Sounds impressive, and on lots of levels it is. But a London crowd are a crowd apart; at the best of times there will be a bit of that “so impress me” vibe. But now, every night there’s a portion of the crowd for whom I’m a villain.

In spring 1995 I resume the tour, in South Africa. This final leg is called The Far Side of the World, and it will also take in Asia and South America. Professionally things are going great. I play football stadiums, and I play places I’ve never been to: Indonesia, the Philippines, Puerto Rico. Here on the far side of the world there’s relief, too, from the endless barracking I’ve been getting in the U.K. press. Back home it feels like Faxgate is the scandal that will not die.

Orianne joins me whenever she can arrange a few days off from Capital Ventures. She flies in, seemingly impervious to jet lag, and we stay up all night, just talking and catching up. These are moments, hours, of bliss in the maelstrom of a thirteen-month world tour and the hurricane of a collapsing marriage.

There are no winners in this situation. I’m fortunate enough to be able to bury myself in my work. Unfortunately my work necessitates being out front and center, in front of thousands of people who are reading all this terrible stuff about my terrible private life.

Night after night, peering into the gloom beyond the stage lights, I don’t see the tens of thousands enjoying themselves. I see the odd huddle who are having the intense conversations: “I used to like him. But now he’s left his wife for this young girlfriend, and she’s a bimbo, who he’s trying to mold into what he wants. But he’s not getting our money for nothing—we’re still going to the concert! Let’s see how far he’s fallen! Oh, I like this song. But what a bastard. Oh, this is a good one too…but it’s about his first marriage! Another ex-! Can’t faxing Phil Collins sort himself out?”

Paranoid? At the very least my guilt is making me highly sensitive to the psychic energy, real or otherwise.

This is the damage Faxgate does. It messes up my head, and in my confused mind it blows out the foundations of my career. I certainly didn’t like being Mr. Nice Guy, the Housewives’ Pal. But as soon as I wasn’t that guy anymore, 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 arsehole.

Now I don’t know where I am. I feel like I’ve lost control. My standing as a human being—my dignity, or lack of it—is being buffeted by stuff that’s reduced to headlines in newspapers. The cumulative effect is I just want to write myself out of the script. I want to scrub the blackboard clean and say, “I don’t want any part of this. Because this is now too much. I carry too much baggage.”

That wound festers, and deepens.

After …But Seriously and Both Sides, people begin saying, “Phil, we don’t want this. Lighten up, mate. You are ‘You Can’t Hurry Love.’ You are ‘Sussudio.’ You are the cheeky chappy who makes us laugh onstage and romps for two hours. That’s what we love. No more dark nights of the soul, please. We have other people to go to for that.”

And Lavinia? I never gave her a heads-up as to what Both Sides was about. So I don’t know what she thought of it. After that phone call, I never hear from her again. But I still love Both Sides. It’s not clouded or tarnished by the events that inspired and surrounded it. It had its little day in the sun.

Despite the personal cataclysms, I don’t think of the album as being an unhappy experience. It was very pleasurable to make. Writing and playing and recording entirely on my own was utterly liberating. Which is why I decided to liberate myself in other ways. During the promotion of Both Sides—before the tour, before Orianne even—I tell Tony Smith that I’m leaving Genesis.