Phil Collins is telling the closest call in plain English. In a new Sunday Times Magazine interview, the Genesis and solo icon says alcohol put him on the edge of death in 2024: organs failing, family gathering to say goodbye, doctors floating life-support questions he does not even remember.
What he says happened
Collins places the spiral after Genesis’s farewell run. He relapsed hard enough that wine became breakfast.
I’d have wine when I woke up. That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine.
He was admitted to a Swiss hospital over alcohol in November 2023, discharged before Christmas, then pulled back into care weeks later. By April 2024 he was critically ill. His five children were summoned. He spent about seven months in hospital.
My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up. People were coming to say goodbye. But I don’t remember them coming. I didn’t have no idea this was going on. They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.
On the life-support moment:
There were some decisions to be made about, ‘Do we keep Phil on life support?’ kind of thing.
And the line that lands like a coda:
I was very lucky to have come out of that. Needless to say, I haven’t had a drink since.
All of that is Collins in his own words to Decca Aitkenhead for The Sunday Times Magazine (“Phil Collins at 75: ‘My personal life? It’s a minefield’”).
The longer medical stack (not new, now sharper)
This is not the first time Collins has framed alcohol as near-fatal. He quit after acute pancreatitis in 2012, then wrote in the 2016 memoir Not Dead Yet that drinking “nearly killed me.” The new interview is the postscript: years of sobriety, a relapse, then a Swiss ICU chapter that almost closed the book.
Separate from alcohol, he has been open about Type 2 diabetes
