Phil Collins: the physical and musical decline of a rock legend

Phil Collins: the body that paid rock's bill

Recent images of Phil Collins have gone viral: frail, dependent on a cane, with a condition that keeps him in a wheelchair. The musician, who turned 75 last January, is the living image of a career paid for with the highest of tolls. This is not the decline of just any star, but the result of decades of drumming, excess and a series of injuries doctors have already ruled irreversible.

A back wrecked by the drums

Collins didn't just sing: he was one of the most in-demand drummers on the rock circuit. His aggressive style, that hammering like a medieval blacksmith which he himself acknowledged, took a direct toll on his spine. The nerves in his back became pinched over decades, and the result is a spinal cord injury that today forces him to need medical care 24 hours a day.

Add to that his knees, which no longer respond for the same reason. The diagnosis is harsh: irreparable damage. There is no magic operation and no going back. In fact, those of us who saw him at his last concerts, seated behind the drum kit in 2019, suspected something serious was going on.

Alcohol: the kidneys that said enough

If the injuries were the price of drumming, alcohol claimed what little healthy ground was left. Collins himself admitted it in a recent interview: his kidneys failed, his organs were shutting down, and people came to say their goodbyes. He spent most of that episode unconscious, unaware that people were coming to his bedside for a final farewell.

The British press reported his unvarnished testimony: "My kidneys were failing, my organs were shutting down." He pulled through, but not unscathed. His pancreas was permanently damaged. In a body already worn down by a lifetime of hitting drums, forced abstinence came too late.

The debate over his musical legacy

What some consider dead in physical terms is not dead musically. The debate remains over Collins's true stature as a musician. Some reduce him to the melodic pop of eighties Genesis, while others remember his more versatile side: more than 30 solo hits, not counting the band's, and a drumming style that stood alongside the greats at Live Aid.

The most generous analyses compare him with the heavyweights of his generation. The harshest critics, the ones who "never liked him," at least acknowledge the scale of the man. Time puts everyone in their place, and what is clear is that Collins will never play the drums again. What is unknown is how many more years we will have to see him like this, on that border between living legend and memory.

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At 75, Phil Collins is a mirror of what rock does to its heroes when the show ends. His body said enough at 74, when alcohol nearly killed him. The music, however, is still there. However much some insist on burying him alive, the artist who wrote In the Air Tonight does not need a wheelchair to remain immense.