Photo: David Wolff – Patrick/Redferns
Two hearts, one very good update: Phil Collins is healthier than ever, stating in a new BBC podcast interview that he’s feeling his best in years and considering a return to music. “It’s an ongoing thing. I have a 24-hour live-in nurse to make sure I take my medication, as I should do,” Collins said. “I’ve had challenges with my knee. Everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong with me. I got COVID in hospital. My kidneys started to back up. Everything seemed to converge at the same time. I had five operations on my knee. Now, I’ve got a knee that works and I can walk, albeit with assistance, crutches, or whatever.” Following Genesis’ farewell tour in 2022, Collins, a former alcoholic, admitted he indulged in “drinking too much,” resulting in “messed up” kidneys. “I’d drink during the day, but I guess I had too much of it. I was never drunk, although I fell over a couple of times,” he said. “It all caught up with me, and I spent months in hospital.” Collins has been sober for two years. “It’s just been a difficult, interesting, frustrating last few years,” he added. “It’s all right now.”
Collins, who most recently worried fans by stressing he was “very sick” in February 2025, has a mix of completed and unfinished projects in the studio that he wants to further pursue. (Not that we didn’t enjoy the No Jacket Required reissue last year.) His last studio album, 2010’s Going Back, was comprised entirely of Motown covers and no original, “Easy Lover”–y songs. “The things that are ahead for me would be, apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy, to maybe go in there and have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music,” he said. “You tend to sort of feel, That’s it. I’ve done that. But you’ve got to start doing it to see if you can do it. Otherwise, you don’t do it. So that’s something on my horizon.” And if Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford wanted to join him, that would be fine by us.
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