At a family gathering to mark the new year, the actress Lily Collins sat beside her father and wept. “I never thought I’d get these moments,” she told him. Only months earlier, Phil Collins had been lying unconscious in a Swiss intensive care unit, his kidneys shutting down and his other organs failing, while his five children were called to his bedside to say goodbye.

Collins, now 75, has disclosed the scale of the health crisis that began in late 2023. After years of sobriety he had started drinking again, and by his own account he would open a bottle of wine as soon as he woke. He was hospitalised in November 2023, discharged briefly before Christmas, then readmitted and placed in intensive care, where he remained for seven months. “My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up,” he told The Sunday Times. “People were coming to say goodbye.” He was unconscious throughout and remembers nothing of the visits; his family, he later learned, had been forced to discuss whether to keep him on life support.

The singer and drummer, who sold more than 100 million records both as a member of Genesis and as a solo artist, is due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a second time in November. Yet the physical toll of recent years has been relentless. A serious spinal injury in 2007 left him with nerve damage that ended his ability to play the drums, the instrument he was given at the age of three and which he still longs to sit behind. He now walks with crutches, manages type 2 diabetes, and has been told his pancreas is permanently scarred and his kidneys “barely function”. He has not touched alcohol since leaving hospital.

Collins lives in Switzerland, cared for around the clock by a live-in nurse, and spends much of his time watching television. In the same interview he said he was open to the idea of a fourth marriage but doubted it would happen: “I think it’s too late for that. I don’t have a very active social life. I don’t go out much.” The crisis has, however, drawn his children closer. His relationship with Lily, strained for years after her parents’ divorce and laid bare in an open letter she wrote in 2017, has been repaired. “She takes it all back,” Collins said. “I have a wonderful relationship with Lily now.”

He walks with crutches, a live-in nurse at his side, and still wishes he could play. “That’s my life,” he said of drumming. “Ever since I was given a drum at three years old. It’s all I ever wanted to do.”