No Phil, I didn’t run off with the decorator. You broke your vows – and are still cashing in on our divorce
DURING Phil Collins’s enormously successful musical career, certain stories have become synonymous with him. Perhaps the first to spring to mind is the dumping of his second wife, Jill, by fax.
But long before that less-than-edifying incident came the one that laid the foundation for his solo career away from his band, Genesis. It was the breakdown of his first marriage in 1980, which provided the theme for his first major solo hit, In The Air Tonight, and many others like it.
The song was written, so the story goes, after his first wife left him for a painter and decorator; a fact underlined by his infamous appearance on Top Of The Pops, where he placed a pot of paint onn his piano. His heartbreak was the inspiration for his first two solo albums, setting him on the path that would lead to sales of 150 million records worldwide and a fortune of more than £100m.
But all this time, his first wife Andrea has listened in distress as s her name has been sullied. Now,, after 35 years, she has had enough. .
‘Phil has claimed in interviews and his lyrics that I ran off with the decorator, but that’s simply nott true,’ she says. ‘Our marriage broke e down for many different reasons, , the main one being his short fuse e and preference for arguing insteadd of discussing anything we disagreed d on. He would rage a lot and I feltt like I was being bullied.’
Indeed, contrary to the popularr myth, she says that it was she whoo divorced the singer on the groundss of his adultery.
‘I divorced him – not him me – on the grounds of his adultery and he agreed,’ she says. ‘There was also the fact that, within a day or two of me leaving the hospital after giving birth to our son, Simon, he went off on a two-year world tour with Genesis.
‘He’s made a lot of money singing about the break-up… and his heartbreak, and he’s never stopped to consider my feelings or those of our children. All these years on, he’s still playing the victim, and I think it’s time he stopped.’
The musician’s recent attempt to return to performing – after his retirement in 2011 – has reopened wounds for Andrea, 63, a softly spoken woman who has spent most of the past 30 years living on a remote island off British Columbia.
In a recent interview he couldn’t resist making what Andrea sees as a clear dig at her. He admitted he felt guilty for not spending as much time with his eldest children, Simon, now 38, and Joely, Andrea’s daughter whom he adopted during their marriage.
But added: ‘A lot of it’s the chemistry of the people involved. Simon’s mother, my other half, has got her part to play in all that as well.’
For Andrea, it was the final straw. ‘Trying to partly blame me for him not seeing as much of his children as he should have done is typical of him,’ she says. ‘I realised the time had come for me to speak out.’
Andrea met Phil at stage school aged 11. They began dating aged 14 and had an on-off relationship, which ended when she emigrated to Canada with her parents at 18.
Phil joined Genesis as the band’s drummer in 1970, and when the group visited Vancouver, he and Andrea reunited. She and Joely, then a toddler, returned to Britain and they married aged 24.
In 1975, singer Peter Gabriel left Genesis and Phil took over as frontman. It brought a new level of fame and, Andrea says, changed him. ‘Drummers don’t get much attention, so when he was just doing that he could be a low-key guy. Once he became the singer he became much more focused on the band and his career. His drive and ambition became his No. 1 priority and his ego started to grow.’
Shortly afterwards, Andrea found she was pregnant. A few months into the pregnancy, Phil broke the news that he would be leaving after the birth on a world tour.
‘I told him I wouldn’t survive – I knew it would destroy our marriage,’ she says. ‘He used to say in interviews that I told him, “You do that and I won’t be here when you come back,” but actually I said that I didn’t think I’d be able to cope, holding things together for such a long time on my own.
‘Simon was born two weeks later than scheduled… I came out of hospital and within a day or two, Phil had left to go on the road.’
Andrea was left alone with a newborn baby, four-year-old Joely and the couple’s two dogs. She says it was a miserable, lonely time.
‘I felt totally overwhelmed. Phil seemed to have no empathy at all for my situation. He’d tell me to get on with it and stop complaining. I felt like a single parent.’
On one occasion, Andrea was looking forward to joining Genesis on the road in Japan – but then had an argument with her husband.
‘He told me he was going to cancel my ticket and called the tour manager in front of me,’ she says. ‘I think he was enjoying being on the road as a single guy. It would have given him more freedom and an open schedule to do whatever he wanted to do.’
By this stage, she says that Phil’s temper had begun to cause major problems in their marriage. ‘It was out of control,’ she says. ‘He was constantly snapping at me and would begin raging over the smallest things. There was screaming and shouting, often in front of the children, which I found unacceptable.’
It was during this time Andrea got to know a man helping a friend to renovate their house.
‘He wasn’t a decorator by trade,’ she says. ‘We had a brief affair and I told Phil as soon as he came home. We did our best to put it behind us, but the same issues were there. Things got worse as Phil was always arguing and lashing out rather than trying to resolve anything.
‘I hated what happened and suffered from immense guilt and shame. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. I think I just wasn’t coping very well and made a bad decision, which I regret. But my relationship with Phil didn’t end because of it. For me it was already over before the affair happened. It was a symptom of a bad marriage, not the reason the marriage ended.’
When her aunt died suddenly, Andrea went to Vancouver to clear her head and decided she could not return to the marriage. When she finally did return and started a new relationship she says ‘Phil went nuts’. ‘I remember watching Top Of The Pops the night he performed with the pot of paint on the piano. I was horrified; I felt sick and betrayed… This story played into the media’s hands and portrayed him as the good guy and cast me as the villain, and there was nothing I could do about it.
‘He’s happy to let those claims be repeated. I know that some of the pain Phil has felt over the years has been real. I think it comes from the fact he knows he pursued his own ambitions at the expense of his family. But it’s time for him to stop me being used as a marketing tool to sell records.’
‘It’s time he stopped playing the victim’ ‘Our marriage was over long before the affair’