Friday, August 27, 2004 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Calling it Quits

Phil Collins is making a pit stop in Las Vegas on his last tour ever -- no, really, it is

"I'm terribly unhip," Phil Collins laments.

Kiss, Cher and other musicians often describe their "final" tours as "farewells," yet they end up touring for years after that. But Phil Collins says he's serious -- the tour he's taking to Las Vegas on Saturday will be his last road trip to the United States, ever.

He's even named his goodbye show the "First Final Farewell Tour" "as a kind of take on the Cher's" of the music industry, he says.

Collins, 53, says this by phone in what may be his only interview to promote the American tour. He's speaking from the comfort of his Switzerland home, which other reporters have described as a castle.

This tour isn't the end of the career of the man who drummed in Genesis, then sang the hits, "Against All Odds," "In the Air Tonight" and the "Tarzan" theme, "You'll Be in My Heart."

Collins will continue to record albums. But by no longer touring, he'll be able to spend more time with his children. He has two grown kids from previous marriages. His son Nicholas is 3 1/2, and his wife, Orianne, is expecting to deliver Collins' fourth child, a son, in November, he announces.

"Don't give the impression that I'm retiring or slowing down. I'll be just as busy," Collins says. "I'm just givin' up (touring), because my son's going to go to school in 2006, and I want to be there to take him."

Collins says he'll still do a few one-off concerts a year, but those will be rare. So he's saying goodbye so people won't wonder, "What happened to him? Oh he retired, you know," he says.

"When I get onstage and I say, `This is the last tour here,' people are audibly shocked, because they haven't really bought the idea that I was serious."

Collins thought he wouldn't even be able to do this tour, because four years ago he suffered a sudden loss of about 60 percent of the hearing in his left ear. Doctors told him it would be unwise to perform in the uncontrollable din of a concert. A year ago, his ear gave him real trouble when he practiced with the band Queen at the royal Queen's Golden Jubilee.

"I was supposed to sing `We Are The Champions,' and I went to rehearsal and my ear just went crazy when they came in loud. They were the loudest band I've ever heard, other than AC/DC. It was so loud my ear just screamed in pain."

Collins' music isn't selling as well as it used to, but it could get a boost soon. He has a new double album coming out Sept. 28. It's called "Love Songs," and it has new arrangements of songs from his past, plus covers of standards and such songs as "The Way You Look Tonight" and the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim song, "Somewhere," from "West Side Story."

There are also a few noteworthy bands that have been covering Collins' songs. The group Postal Service has recorded "Against All Odds" for the soundtrack of the Josh Hartnett thriller "Wicker Park." And the rock band Nonpoint has covered "In the Air Tonight."

Collins learns about these covers during this interview.

"I'm going to have to write this down," he says. "I live in Switzerland. I live in the Outback, and no one ever tells me."

Then again, he doesn't have to be told unless a song is altered.

"I didn't ask anybody when I did `You Can't Hurry Love.' I just did it, because I wasn't changing it."

But back when R&B performers recorded a tribute album to Collins, he was asked for permission, because rappers changed his lyrics.

"I'm terribly unfashionable. I'm terribly unhip. But if you talk to musicians, they like what I do," Collins says.

Collins says he drums during this tour because he still thinks of himself first as a drummer. That was his job when he joined Genesis. He took over singing duties when vocalist Peter Gabriel left the band. His mother once said in an interview that from an early age Collins was always tapping things. He owned his first drum kit at age 5.

"I play as much as I can, but I don't practice. I think like a drummer. I write like a drummer. And I am a drummer. So I just wanted that to be reflected in the show."

He says his youngest son already plays better than he did as a child. His oldest son, Simon, drums, too.

Collins says his hits have been written on piano, or from inspiration from the groove or atmosphere of a rhythm machine.

" `In the Air Tonight' is a classic example of that," he says. "On the drum machine pattern, the one beat that is not there is the downbeat. Most people always play (`In the Air Tonight' with a downbeat). There's nothing on the downbeat."

Collins passes up a chance to strike back at the creators of "South Park." The cartoon spent an episode slagging Collins after his "You'll Be In My Heart" won an Oscar over a song from the "South Park" movie. Collins was drawn as a cockney hack who walked around holding his Oscar and performed for children who enjoyed him only because they were medicated.

"I'm flattered more than offended, to be honest," he says.

Collins says the episode reminded him of an earlier caricature of him.

"In the '80s, there was a thing called Spitting Image, and they did very cruel puppets, which we (later hired for the music video for) Genesis' `Land of Confusion.' We got a Grammy for that. It's the only Grammy we ever got, for a video we weren't in," Collins says. "We thought they were very funny. They'd done me already, with my kind of broken-heart songs, writing at a piano with water streaming out of my eyes."

He notes, though, that the tone was harsher with "South Park."

"With the `South Park' thing, it's very vicious. I kind of laughed a bit at the Oscar (episode). But if you don't know someone, it just made it look like I was someone totally different than the person I am," he says. "And they kind of couldn't be seen to be nice to me, because they've got their own position in their culture to think about. They're not gonna own up and say anything nice about me, even if they felt it."

Collins is accustomed to catching flak. Tabloids in Britain and Australia have gone after him during divorces and other tribulations. But his private life has never really made a splash in the States.

"The kind of (U.S.) papers that print that kind of thing, you buy in a supermarket and everyone knows what they're buying. You get the Globe, the Enquirer or the Star, or whatever. In England, they're the national papers. They're the broadsheets. Even the Times has gone tabloid now," he says. "About a year ago, it went tabloid size, and it's got lots of pictures in it so people can read it."

Finally, Phil Collins strikes back.