Genesis drummer Phil Collins made a heartbreaking confession about his children rushing to his deathbed when he thought he was going to die. The music icon, 75, sat down with Piers Morgan for his Uncensored YouTube show to talk about his life and career – including the time he was hooked up to a dialysis machine after battling alcoholism.

Piers asked him in a new trailer: “When you do look back at it, what do you feel?”, and Phil’s response was: “Lucky. All I wanted to do was be a drummer, and earn a living with it, really. Every night I’d look down the pit and there’d be the drummer that did it for six years, and I thought, ‘That will be me, so I’d better learn to read [music]’.”

Piers then turned to harder subjects, asking: “You had a lot of physical issues, but the drinking issue became something that nearly killed you. Do you feel lucky just to be alive?”

Phil admitted: “Yeah. I do. It was not looking good at one point. I was on a dialysis machine, things were just breaking down. The decision was whether I should be kept on a dialysis machine.”

He previously said that his manager had called his five children to gather around his bedside.

Phil’s five kids are eldest daughter Joely and son Simon, with first wife Andrea Bertorelli; Lily Collins with second wife Jill Tavelman; and sons Nicholas and Matthew with third wife Orianne Cevey.

He said: “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.”

Phil has been dealing with complications from a spinal injury he suffered in 2007, and was recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He retired from music in 2022.

Related video