Phil Collins has addressed the criticism he has received over the years from Noel Gallagher, ahead of a potentially awkward run-in at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony.
Both Collins and Oasis are being inducted into the Hall in November – Collins for the second time, after his band Genesis was honoured in 2010 – alongside fellow artists including Wu-Tang Clan, Sade and Joy Division/New Order.
“There’s a lunch that happens before the ceremony. Just the inductees and a guest. So I will get a chance to be in a small room with them,” Collins told the Observer in an interview this week.
The “In the Air Tonight” star insisted that he has nothing against the Gallagher brothers: “The whole thing has got to comical levels… I’m sure they’ll brush it off, as if nothing happened.”
Collins also acknowledged that he was “everything that Noel and Liam would probably dislike”.
“I’m soft as a person,” he said. “Musically, I’m not edgy… So, I understand it. But it’s got a life of its own now. So, yeah, we’ll see.”
Noel has taken multiple swipes at Collins, perhaps most famously when he described the drummer as “the antichrist of music” after Oasis broke through in 1994 with their debut album, Definitely Maybe.
“We’re gonna get rid of Phil Collins and Sting,” Noel declared. “We’ve got to get in the charts and stamp them out. I want the severed head of Phil Collins in my fridge by the end of this decade. And if I haven’t, I’ll be a failure.”
Noel continued to take swipes at Collins in interviews over the years. In 1997, he encouraged people to vote Labour in the general election to stop Collins, who then lived in Switzerland, from moving back to the UK.
“If the Conservatives get in, Phil Collins is threatening to come back and live here. And let's face it, none of us want that,” he told The Guardian.
While Collins did eventually hit back, dismissing Oasis as “rude, horrible… and not as talented as they think”, in an interview with the Irish Examiner in 2005, until recently he had mostly ignored their remarks.
However, his daughter, Emily in Paris star Lily Collins, did apparently confront Liam backstage at the 2007 Live Earth charity concert when she was a teenager, asking him: “Why do you hate my dad?”
Recalling the encounter, Collins said that Liam responded casually: “I don’t hate anybody, love.”
Noel later said in a 2023 interview that he believed Lily thought Liam was him when she approached his younger brother.
Asked what he had against Collins, Noel said: “He kept The Jam off No 1 [on the charts] with ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. I thought, ‘Once I get there, I’m not going to let him get away with that.’”
He added: “The best thing about the Phil Collins thing is that Liam got accosted by his children one day because they thought he was me.
“They had a pop at him, saying, ‘Why are you always having a f***ing go at our dad?’ When I heard about it I thought, ‘I really hope someone filmed it.’ Anyway, f*** Liam. And f*** Phil Collins and all.”
His comments were made before he and brother Liam mended their own feud in time for their mammoth 2025 reunion tour.
Elsewhere in his Observer interview, Collins was candid about his struggles with alcoholism and his long-running health issues.
In one recollection, he admitted that a nurse dropped him at the airport for Genesis’s 2021-22 reunion tour, where she left him a note that said: “If you drink, you will die.”
“I had a glass of wine on the flight,” Collins, who is now sober, said. “I was tempting fate. You can go to these rehabs. But you have to want to stop. I don’t think I wanted to stop. I didn’t see the damage it was doing.”
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