Phil Collins singing into a microphone with one arm raised on stage in 1981

What Happened to Phil Collins. The 80s Didn’t Break Him. Stopping Almost Did.

August 2, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USAWe lived this decade in real time, some of it on national TV. The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

We sat with this one a while before writing it, so we are going to say it straight.

Phil Collins told The Sunday Times that he nearly died in 2024. Here is what happened to Phil Collins, in order: he stopped drinking in 2012 after a bout of acute pancreatitis, he started again in 2023, he was hospitalized at the end of that year, his organs began to fail, and the question of switching off his life support was raised. He spent seven months in hospital. He is 75. He has not had a drink since, and he is still here.

That is the news, and every outlet is running it today. What almost none of them are running is the part he has been telling us for ten years about why it happened. That part is about our decade, and it is not what you would guess.

What Phil Collins said

The interview ran in The Sunday Times, and the quotes are hard to read in a row.

On the drinking: “I’d have wine when I woke up,” he told the paper. “That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine.”

On how far it went: “My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up. People were coming to say goodbye.” He described what was being weighed around him as decisions to be made about “Do we keep Phil on life support?” kind of thing. He does not remember any of the visits. “But I don’t remember them coming,” he said. “They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.”

And on where he landed: “I was very lucky to have come out of that. Needless to say, I haven’t had a drink since.”

Two wire reports carrying the same interview place the worst of it in April 2024, when his children were called to his bedside. He has five.

How we got here: the timeline

This did not arrive out of nowhere, and it did not arrive today either.

Collins joined Genesis as its drummer in 1970 and took over singing after Peter Gabriel left in 1975. He launched the solo career with Face Value in 1981. He retired in 2011, came back to solo touring in 2017, came back again with Genesis in 2021, and retired for good in 2022 at the end of the farewell tour, singing from a chair while his son Nic played the drums.

The drinking he has written about himself. In his 2016 autobiography Not Dead Yet he put the start of it after the breakdown of his third marriage and his 2006 divorce, and he did not dress it up. “Night after night I find myself lying on the bed, staring out of a skylight at grey Swiss skies, rueing my life,” he wrote. “I’m all alone, save for my good friends Johnnie Walker and Grey Goose.” Somewhere in the 2010s his old friend Eric Clapton talked him into the Crossroads Centre in Antigua. He was booked for six weeks and left after a month because he had a tour waiting. The nurse who took him to the airport handed him a note to read on the plane. It said that if he had a drink, he would die. He had a glass of wine.

Then came the 2012 hospitalization with acute pancreatitis, and he stopped. He stayed stopped for years. By 2023 he had started again, and by the end of that year he was back in hospital, ending up in intensive care with doctors who did not think he would make it.

The 80s did not break him. Stopping almost did.

Here is the sentence that reframes the whole thing, and it is his, from Not Dead Yet, published a decade ago:

“It took me until the age of 55 to become an alcoholic,” he wrote. “I got through the heady 1960s, the trippy 1970s, the imperial 1980s, the busy 1990s. I was retired, content, and then I fell. Because I suddenly had too much time on my hands.”

Read that middle clause again. The imperial 1980s. He got through it.

Think about what getting through it actually meant for him. This is the man who, on July 13, 1985, played London and then got on a Concorde and played Philadelphia the same afternoon, because one hemisphere was not enough. Seven number one singles in the United States, three more in Britain. Fronting Genesis and running a solo career at the same time, so that on any given hour of Top 40 radio you could catch him twice under two different names. We have written the whole ridiculous run down elsewhere, if you want the seven number ones and the two-continent Live Aid day in full.

That decade should have been the thing that killed him. It is the thing he survived. What got him was the quiet on the other side of it.

He said the same thing again, in different words, on the BBC in January of this year: he had enjoyed coming off the road, he was going to do all the things he could not do before, and he started drinking during the day. “It all caught up with me,” he said, “and I spent months in hospital.”

Anyone who has watched a parent retire knows this shape. The schedule was holding the whole structure up, and when it goes, whatever was underneath it comes up for air. It is not a rock star story. It is the most ordinary story there is, and it happened to a man who spent our whole decade unable to sit still.

What is Phil Collins suffering from now?

He has been open about this since long before today. In January he sat down with Zoe Ball for a BBC Two special and said the line that got quoted everywhere: “everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong with me.”

The list, as he has described it: nerve damage dating to a 2007 spinal injury, which is what took the drumming away. Drop foot after a back operation, which makes walking difficult. Five separate operations on one knee. Type 2 diabetes. Kidney problems he ties directly to the drinking. He walks with crutches after spine and knee surgery, and he has a live-in nurse around the clock, in his words, “to make sure I take my medication as I should do.” He caught COVID while he was in hospital, on top of everything else.

By that January conversation he had recently marked two years sober. On the evidence of this week’s interview, that number keeps climbing.

If you searched his name this week you probably ran into something ugly, because this corner of the internet is thick with death hoaxes and AI slop headlines about announcements he never made. Every quote on this page is his own words, from coverage we read in full, which is how we sort what he actually said from what the internet invented about him.

Is Phil Collins going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Yes, and this is where it turns into something better than a health bulletin.

On November 14 he will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, in a class with Iron Maiden, Oasis, Billy Idol, Wu-Tang Clan, Joy Division and New Order, Sade and Luther Vandross. It airs on ABC and Disney+ in December. It is his second induction. He went in with Genesis in 2010, which puts him in the small club of two-time inductees, and this one is for the solo career. NPR made the point plainly when the class was announced: it was the string of 80s hits that helped turn him into one of the most commercially successful artists of the decade.

He told SiriusXM he never saw it coming. “I’d kind of thought that that was it for me. I didn’t expect it.”

He will not be performing. Back in May he explained why. “They asked me if I would perform,” he told BBC Breakfast, “and I said, No, because you’ve got to be match fit to do something like that.” In the same conversation he said something that sounded modest in May and reads very differently now. “The last 18 months, say, has been fine,” he said. “Before that, not so good. Everything health-wise caught up with me at the same time, and whatever could go wrong did go wrong.”

In May that sounded like a man being careful about his voice. Read it today and the arithmetic lands differently: about two years before he said that, his children had been called in to say goodbye.

He does physio three times a week now. Asked whether he might ever play again, he left the door open a crack: “I can’t really see it happening, but I’m healthier now than I have been for quite a while.”

Why this one hit us

Because he was unavoidable, and we mean that as the compliment it never quite got treated as at the time. If you had a radio between 1981 and 1990 you did not choose Phil Collins, you simply received him. He was the drummer, the voice, the movie ballad, the charity single, the guy on MTV, sometimes in the same hour.

Being that famous that fast bought him a decade of jokes about overexposure. The backlash wrote itself, and some of it landed. But the drum break around three and a half minutes into “In the Air Tonight” still stops a room cold, and the man who built it spent seven months in a hospital bed while people filed in to say goodbye to him, and he does not remember a single one of them walking through the door.

He is 75, he is sober, he is going into the Hall of Fame in November, and he is not dead yet. He named a book that. It seemed like a joke in 2016.

Go put on Face Value. The whole way through.

Bobby and Jason

Frequently asked questions

What happened to Phil Collins?
He nearly died in 2024 from the effects of alcohol abuse. After relapsing in 2023 he was hospitalized at the end of that year, suffered organ failure, and spent seven months in hospital, during which his family was asked whether to keep him on life support. He recovered and has not had a drink since.

What is Phil Collins suffering from?
Nerve damage from a 2007 spinal injury that ended his drumming, drop foot that affects his walking, five knee operations, type 2 diabetes, and kidney problems he attributes to drinking. He uses crutches and has a 24 hour live-in nurse.

How long has Phil Collins been sober?
He stopped drinking after his hospitalization and said in January 2026 that he had recently marked two years sober. In the interview published on August 2, 2026 he said he has not had a drink since.

Why can’t Phil Collins play drums anymore?
A spinal injury in 2007 caused severe nerve damage that left him unable to drum. On the final Genesis tour he sang from a seated position while his son Nic Collins played drums.

Is Phil Collins in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Yes. He was inducted with Genesis in 2010 and will be inducted again as a solo artist on November 14, 2026 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. He has said he will not perform at the ceremony.

Sources

Photos: Phil Collins live in Strasbourg, October 1981, by Philippe Roos, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.