As most of you know, I take tremendous pride in my professional standing. Being an '80s music blogger of the highest repute, I cherish the trust and confidence that my loyal readers have placed, and continue to place, into my peerlessly accurate work. Each blog post I publish serves as an integral testament to the veracity of my research, the credibility of my sources, the rigor of my analysis.
That said, I also believe this: when an extremely rare error is made, when a minor oversight occurs, I owe it to my public to clarify my mistake, to correct my misstep, to clear up any lingering confusion. It is with these words that I preface an announcement of a remarkable, and yet regrettable, recent discovery:
I don't know how else to put it - forged, phony, fabricated. Use the wording of your choice. The brilliant, riveting, bracingly frank Phil Collins memoir that I have been copiously quoting for roughly seven years now ... was not, it appears, actually written by Phil Collins.
It would seem that, as they say in the sales business, I've been had.
Gotta admit, it looked like the real deal. I have a nose for these things, can spot a counterfeit when I see one, but this, my friends, was no amateur forgery. Sherlock Holmes himself would have needed another healthy sniff of cocaine to lift his sunken spirits after failing to spot, as I am sure he would have, the fraud in his midst. Perhaps its supposed publication by a "small Bulgarian publisher" in a "limited edition" should have given me more pause, or the oddly-phrased subtitle should have set off an alarm bell or two, but in my excitement over the mesmerizing content, I'm afraid I let my guard down, rushed to judgment, and allowed my journalistic ethos to lapse grossly.
It was all a little ... too good to be true.
In retrospect, the fictional nature of the work should have been obvious. An imaginary hedgehog named Rot Rot? Sex with a one-legged Chilean dancer? Poodlephobia? Putting snails on his dick? Huffing varnish? Hippopotamus urine? Horse tranquilizer? Honestly, horse tranquilizer? What sort of rock drummer would possibly think of consuming horse tranquilizer?
Of course, this only raises even more questions, such as: if Phil Collins didn't write this compelling and yet utterly spurious memoir, then who did? Although getting to the root of this devilish mystery will take some time, I do have my theories. Mainly, I suspect that one of Phil's former bandmates - perhaps Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, Steve Hackett, a certain Peter Gabriel, or (quite possibly) a combination of the snickering foursome - concocted the entire ruse in order to have a private laugh at Phil's expense. Well, creo quia adsurdum est, as they say.
Nevertheless, even though it was all a farcical lie, it was a great ride while it lasted.
Which leads me to one final mea culpa. Upon unexpected news of the publication of a competing Phil Collins "memoir," Not Dead Yet, in 2016, I confidently proclaimed that particular work to be bogus, specious, apocryphal, what have you. Today, I now eat my words as I realize that Not Dead Yet is, indeed, the real Phil Collins's real memoir, and not, as I had so egregiously assumed, In The Air Tonight: The Secret Life and Twisted Psyche of Philip D. Collins.
However, having spent so much time and effort consuming the false autobiography, I have to admit that my initially casual interest in the subject has grown to a startling degree, and I am more than curious to find out the supposed "truth" behind the life of this hairless music legend. The quote on the back cover is certainly promising: "Hi, I'm Phil Collins and, as you can see from the front cover, I'm not dead yet, but when I do go, I'd prefer my epitaph not be 'He came, he wrote "Sussudio," he left.' That's why I wrote this book." Ah, there's the Phil whimsy we know and love. According to the blurb on the jacket from the Daily Mirror, the memoir is "Jaw-droppingly honest," and when has the Daily Mirror ever been wrong about something like that? In other words: think I'm gonna have to check it out!
