After feeling it coming in the air tonight and waiting for this moment for all his life, Phil Collins is ready to come out of retirement. That’s according to an interview he gave with Rolling Stone, in which he reveals that he’s planning a comeback tour and getting ready to record a new solo album. Collins hasn’t released a proper new album since Testify in 2002 (not counting the covers album Going Back in 2010), but he didn’t make a big deal out of being retired from making music until 2011. That’s when, after watching the MTV Music Awards, he declared, “I don’t really belong to that world and I don’t think anyone’s going to miss me. I’m much happier just to write myself out of the script entirely… I’ll go on a mysterious biking holiday and never return. That would be a great way to end the story, wouldn’t it?”
Now, that may sound like a cry for attention, but we’ll give Collins the benefit of the doubt and assume he really was in the middle of planning his biking holiday suicide when Rolling Stone knocked on the door of his house and inspired him to change his mind. Collins says the real reason he’s coming out of retirement, though, is that his kids are getting older and they want to “see what their dad does.”
The Rolling Stone interview doesn’t really offer much more information on this new album, but it does goes into what Collins has been doing in his retirement years. Basically, his wife left him, she took the kids, and then he started drinking a lot (which makes his biking holiday idea sound even more depressing than it already did). He says he hasn’t had a drink in three years, though, and now he lives in Jennifer Lopez’s old mansion in Miami and is “right down the street from Barry Gibb.” Hey, even if this comeback doesn’t work out, a Phil Collins/Barry Gibb sitcom would be a lot of fun. He should look into that.