Phil Collins was ‘falling over drunk’ in front of kids in the mornings
Music legend Phil Collins has opened up about the extent of his alcohol addiction and how it impacted his wife and young children.
Phil Collins (WENN)
Yesterday the 65-year-old star told Yahoo Celeb he’s coming out of retirement and launching an exciting comeback but during the press conference at the Royal Albert Hall hosted by Jools Holland, the star laid bare his not-so-distant past admitting he was a “mid-life drinker” who had a taste for the “hard stuff”.
Phil started drinking heavily following the collapse of his nine-year marriage to Orianne Cevey in the late 2000s and came “very close to dying” from binging on booze whilst drowning his sorrows watching cricket.
Phil’s booze of choice was vodka. The star explained: “I would never drink during the day because I had a show to do. And after the show, I couldn’t stay up too late because I had to get up in the morning and do another show.
Phil Collins and Jools Holland (Phil Lewis/WENN)
"It’s when everything stopped that I thought, okay, I’ll turn on the television, watch a bit of cricket, have a couple of drinks.
"And then before you know it, within months you’re drinking vodka from
the fridge in the morning and falling over in front of the kids, you
know.
"But it was something I lived through, and I was lucky to live through
it and get through it. I was very close to dying.”
The honest star kicks off his ‘Not Dead Yet’ tour in London next June before heading to Cologne and Paris and has written a book of the same name in which he goes into detail about the boredom that drove him to drink in front of his two sons Nicholas, 15, and Matthew, 11.
Orianne Collins, Nicholas, Matthew and Phil Collins (JLN Photography/WENN)
The In The Air Tonight hitmaker wrote: “It took me until the age of 55 to become an alcoholic. 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.”
Phil - who had two previous marriages - is delighted to be back with the love of his life Orianne and his kids and the family now live in Florida.
He told us: “I’m back with my third wife so I’ve only really been divorced twice you could say, if you were being generous.”
