Phil Collins is healthier, sober, and writing again

Phil Collins news has been hard reading for well over a decade. This is not.

In a 2026 BBC interview, the 75-year-old said he is “healthier now than I have been for quite a while” — and, for the first time in years, talked about making music again.

What he actually said

The headline is the knee. Collins has had five separate operations on it, describing a “difficult, frustrating few years”, and is now considerably more mobile than he has been.

He has also celebrated two years of sobriety, after a period of kidney trouble related to drinking. He has a live-in nurse managing his medication.

And then the part that made drummers sit up:

The things that are ahead for me would be, apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy, is go in there and have a fiddle about and see if there’s more music.

He described lyrical ideas he keeps writing down, and material at home that is half-finished — plus “a couple of things that are finished”. He has not ruled out performing live again.

What it does not mean

It is worth being clear, because some of the coverage has not been.

This is not an announcement that Phil Collins is going to drum again.

The underlying problem is nerve damage from a 2007 spinal injury. During the Genesis reunion he lost power and grip in his left hand mid-drum-duet, and eventually lost the feeling in it entirely. A back operation left him with drop foot. By the final Genesis shows in 2022 he was performing seated, with his son Nic Collins on the kit.

None of that has reversed. What has changed is that he is mobile, sober and interested — which is a great deal more than was true two years ago.

He has said before that if he woke up one day able to hold a pair of sticks, he would try. That is still where things stand.

The 2024 moment

There was a hint of this already. In late 2024, footage surfaced of Phil sitting behind his classic Gretsch setup for the first time in over a decade.

He was not playing a gig. He was just sitting at his kit. For anyone who has followed the last fifteen years, that was quite a thing to watch.

Final thoughts

We are not going to pretend a new Phil Collins drum performance is on the way, because the honest reading of the medical picture says otherwise.

But new music from the man who wrote “In the Air Tonight” — even if somebody else plays the fill — would be very welcome indeed. And a musician who has been through what he has describing himself as healthy and curious again is the best news this site has run all year.

Read our full Phil Collins feature or see his full rig, era by era, in the Rig Vault.