I can’t hear a thing.
Much as I try to shake free the blockage, my right ear is unyielding. I attempt a little rummage with a cotton swab. I know this is never advised—the eardrum is sensitive, especially if it’s been subjected to a lifetime of drumming.
But I’m desperate. My right ear is kaput. And it’s my good ear, my left having been dicky for a decade. Is this it? Has music, at last, done me in? Am I finally deaf?
Picture the scene (and readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now): I’m in the shower. It’s March 2016 and I’m at home in Miami. This is the morning of a very special gig—my first time onstage in years and, more importantly still, my first proper public performance with one of my sons, fourteen-year-old Nicholas.
The kid will be drumming, the old man will be singing. That’s the plan anyway.
To rewind a little: 2014 saw the launch of Little Dreams USA, the American wing of the charity that my ex-wife Orianne and I founded in Switzerland in 2000. Little Dreams helps children with tuition, coaching and guidance in the fields of music, the arts and sport.
To get things rolling in the U.S., and to raise some cash, we had long planned a gala concert for December 2014. But in the interim I’d endured a pile-up of health issues. Come the day of the show, I wasn’t physically up to singing.
I had to call Orianne, mother of Nic and his brother Mathew, who’d just turned ten, and tell her that my voice was gone and that I couldn’t perform. I didn’t tell her that my confidence was gone, too: there’s only so much bad news you can put in one phone call to your ex-wife. Particularly, maybe, when she’s your third ex-wife.
Sixteen months later, I have some making up to do. But 2016 feels like not only a new year but a new me—I’m ready for this gig. I’m not ready to play a full show, though, so we need a cast of supporting artists.
But even with that musical help, I realize that this show is mostly going to be down to…me. This is a scenario familiar from forty years of back-to-back touring and three decades of one-after-the-other Genesis and solo albums: I’m being written back into a script that’s not entirely of my own making. But I can’t bail again. Not if I want to live to see my sixty-sixth birthday.
Some long-standing musician compadres join me for rehearsals in Miami, as does Nic. He knows we’re going to do “In the Air Tonight,” but once it’s clear just how good a drummer he’s become, I throw some more songs into the mix: “Take Me Home,” “Easy Lover” and “Against All Odds.”
The rehearsals are great; Nic has really done his homework. More than that—he’s better than I was at his age. As with all my children, I’m bursting with paternal pride.
Reassuringly for me, too, this time my voice feels and sounds strong. At one point guitarist Daryl Stuermer, a wingman of many years’ standing, says, “Can I have some vocals in the monitor?” That’s a good sign—nobody wants the singer in the monitor when he’s sounding crap.
The following morning, the day of the gala concert, I’m in the shower. That’s when the ear goes. And if I can’t hear, I certainly can’t sing.
I call the secretary of one of the many Miami medical experts that I by now have on speed-dial. An hour later I’m at a surgery, a hearing specialist applying his mining-grade suction apparatus to both ears. Instant relief. Not deaf yet.
Onstage that night at the Jackie Gleason Theater we play “Another Day in Paradise,” “Against All Odds,” “In the Air Tonight,” “Easy Lover” and “Take Me Home.” Nic, whose appearance onstage after the opening number gets a big whoop from the crowd, handles all of this brilliantly.
It’s a wild success, way better—and way more fun—than I thought it would be. Post-show, I end up alone in the dressing room. I sit there, soaking it all in, remembering the applause, thinking, “I’ve missed that.” And, “Yeah, Nic is really good. Really, really good.”
The feeling of a gig well done is not a sensation I ever expected to have again. When I retired from solo touring in 2005, from Genesis in 2007 and from my recording career in 2010, I was convinced that was it. By then I’d been at it—playing, writing, performing, entertaining—for half a century. Music had brought me more than I could ever have imagined, but it had also taken more from me than I could ever have feared. I was done.
And yet, here in Miami in March 2016, I find it doing the opposite of what it’s done for years. Instead of separating me from my kids, from Simon, Nic and Matt and their sisters Joely and Lily, music is connecting me with them.
If ever anything is going to blow off the cobwebs, it’s playing with your children. A billion-dollar-payday offer to re-form Genesis wouldn’t get me back on the road. A chance to perform with my boy might.
But before we go forward, we have to go back. How did I get here, and why did I get here?
This book is my truth about things. The stuff that happened, the stuff that didn’t happen. There are no scores settled, but there are some wrongs righted.
When I went back there, looking at my past, for sure there were surprises. How much I’d worked, for one thing. If you can remember the seventies, you clearly weren’t on as many Genesis tours as me, Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford. And if you can remember the eighties, I’m sorry about me and Live Aid.
It’s 2016 and we’ve lost many of my peers, so I’ve had cause to reflect on my mortality, my frailties. But also, courtesy of my children, I’ve had to think about my future.
Not deaf yet. Not dead yet.
That said, these aren’t new sensations. I was hit by death when my dad passed away just at the point when his hippie son’s decision to reject a life in insurance for a life in music started to bear fruit. I was further blindsided when, within two years of each other, Keith Moon and John Bonham died, both aged thirty-two. I worshipped them. I thought at the time, “These guys are supposed to be around forever. They’re indestructible. They’re drummers.”
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My name is Phil Collins and I’m a drummer, and I know I’m not indestructible. This is my story.