Iconic musician Phil Collins has opened up about the emotional challenges of being unable to play drums, revealing the physical effects that decades of performing have had on his body. In a new documentary, Phil Collins: Drummer First, released on December 18, the Oscar-winning artist discussed his forced retirement from drumming in 2022.
“It’s still kind of sinking in a bit,” Collins said in the film (via Good Morning America), which was filmed in October 2022. “I’m 71, I’ve spent all my life playing drums. To suddenly not be able to do that is a shock.”
“The drumming has taken a toll on my hands, legs,” Collins explained, adding, “If I can’t do what I did as well as I did it, I’d rather relax and not do anything. If I wake up one day and I can hold a pair of drumsticks, then I’ll have a crack at it. But I just feel like I’ve used up my air miles.”
His son, Nic Collins, who took over drumming duties during Genesis’s final “Last Domino?” tour, provided some insight into his father’s health struggles. “I think it all stems down to playing drums and the issues that he’s had with his back,” Nic said. “He had back problems throughout the years, and that goes hand in hand with just getting older. But I think he had a big surgery on his neck that stemmed from all those years playing drums and just bad posture and stuff, which caused him to have drop foot.”
Nic revealed that his father developed foot drop syndrome after neck surgery, a condition described by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke as the “inability to raise the front part of the foot due to weakness or paralysis of the muscles that lift the foot.” As a result, people with this condition “may scuff their toes along the ground or bend their knees to lift their foot higher than usual to avoid the scuffing.”
This condition has severely impacted Collins’s mobility, requiring him to use a cane. Nic mentioned that his father “doesn’t have that control that he used to anymore” and “wishes he could sit behind a kit and play the way he could.”
Learning from his father’s experience, Nic has taken steps to prevent similar issues with his own drumming setup. “He was great at playing drums and that worked [for him], and that setup was great and he could do everything he could do, and I don’t think he was necessarily thinking about, ‘Oh, this is going to take a toll on my back in the long run,’” he reflected.
Despite the challenges, Collins found joy in performing with his son during Genesis’s farewell tour. “Sometimes things feel very different when you’re playing it as opposed to when you’re singing with it or when you’re listening to it, so I’m so pleased that we did it,” Collins shared. “There were never any rough moments. There was never any doubts — it just went ridiculously smoothly. It was something that I wouldn’t have altered for the world.”
The band’s final London concert was attended by Collins’s daughter, Lily Collins, star of Emily in Paris, who paid tribute to her father and brother on Instagram: “To have witnessed this last show was truly the memory of a lifetime and an event I shall hold in my heart forever. Endlessly grateful doesn’t begin to do it justice.” She added, “Thank you dad for being such an inspiration, and thank you @nic_collins for making me the proudest sister there is.”
