Let’s all play the Phil Collins game
An old man speaks on BBC Radio 6Music. He sounds wrought, his cockney tones lacerated with vocal fry and weariness. He sounds familiar yet distant. A voice speaking of and from my past.
I recognise it, and all at once, Phil Collins becomes the harbinger of death. This jovial, pinball-headed drummer assumes the form of the human condition — mortality itself, squaring up to me, eyeball-to-eyeball, toe-to-toe, sizing me up for the fight of my life.
And it scared the shit out of me
Thirty-odd years ago, Phil Collins’ tawdry oeuvre (alongside Dire Straits, Simply Red and Peter Gabriel) represented the firmament of my youth. No Jacket Required, that evocative fairground on the cover of Serious Hits Live! — these albums were touchstones. They were objects and sounds which I, for a long time, associated with safety, continuity and the long warm summers of childhood — watching mum or dad iron school uniforms, ‘Something in the air tonight’ leaking out from their headphones.
What remained of that precious firmament of youth evaporated in an instant. Phil, ostensibly sharing wistful reminiscences of his fruitful career in music, was secretly letting me know half my life was almost over (I’m 40 this year), and he was asking what I had to show for it.
It wasn’t so much what he’d achieved that made me feel bad; regret is a bottomless void. And I have no ambition to cash in off the back of a gorilla flogging chocolate, or line my pockets while gurning from the cover of a heist movie.
No, what unsettled me was the passage of time: change, decrepitude, death.
Last time I checked in with Phil he was a middle-aged man promoting nonce-sense. In fact, he’s always been just shy of middle-age, a bit hipster in his ragged jumpers and scruffy jeans, plus maybe a beard, all the while indulging his passion in a tuneful studio somewhere.
What’s so unsettling about all this
In writing that description I see him then as me now. Yes, I’m projecting onto (and identify with?) Phil Collins. Buster has become a voodoo doll for my own vain wrestles with mortality and what I will or won’t leave behind.
Time seems to have raged at Phil, and he’s (almost) run out of it. As I will too, and you, one day. So best make it count. For fuck’s sake hurry up doing what you do! Make a difference!
Then things got worse when someone (listening to the same radio broadcast) told me he can’t even drum anymore. Phil Collins not allowed to drum. What a cruel rumour. That’s like saying birds aren’t allowed to fly anymore. All poor swallows who live on the wing must now sit, aimlessly, pecking themselves to death for want of something better to do with their time.
What a hideous thought that at any point, the universe can intervene like this and snatch away the things we hold precious, hastening us inexorably towards death.
Death wants to play
Like every good addict, I couldn’t resist more. I got hooked on what’s really bad for me. I soon became morbidly addicted to what I call the Phil Collins game.
It goes like this: watch a TV programme, a film or any other cultural artefact that’s significant in your earlier life. Pick a respected or well-known character, comedian, actor or actress (ideally someone pedestrian you don’t particularly admire). Next, do google image search of what they looked like in their creative prime (yes, older people can be here too). Then the fun part: do another search for the most recent photo you can find. And bear tragic witness to what life does to us all. Stare into the abyss.
Lately I’ve been playing the Phil Collins game with Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs fame. In my head he’s perpetually a spritely middle-age. Now he’s sage-looking and silvered. Likewise with Chris Packham, or any contestant from improv show ‘Who’s line is it anyway?’.
I know what will happen when I indulge this game, yet I can’t resist. Death wants to play.
Cue the dreams
Lately, as I sleep, I’m vicariously reliving some past predicament of my younger self. I’m conscious of who I am now (older, wiser?), yet transposed into a school science lesson with a childhood crush. Or putting my feet up in the sixth form common room talking shit with friends. Or huddled in some dark undergrowth supping cider with my best mates, howling ‘Country House’ by Blur into a bleak, windy night in the industrial north west.
All these dreams, thematically, orbit a sense of times and places past, carved into weathered stone, ever immutable. I can’t engage with or shape the dream — the memory has and is happening. But it’s been and done. Then I wake, longing for some nostalgic past that is now beyond reach.
Perhaps it’s the brain transferring my youth into deep, cold storage. Yet it feels like mild heartbreak. That’s done now, it says. Look but don’t touch. We’re over the hill. You won’t need these memories where you’re going…
Here’s my theory why this happens. By now I should have kids; those ready-made micro-legacies, and our one decent stab at immortality. It’s my genes playing tricks on me, yet I refuse to concede — children seem like a lot of life-ruining, exhausting work. Plus, there are other ways to stamp an indelible thumbprint on humanity (however vain or futile).
It’s fair to say Phil Collins probably won’t be remembered in a few hundred years from now, like the vast majority of souls who recline dustily in graveyards throughout the land. Not even living memory remains of practically all of them. Their headstones crumble, and even the lucky ones who threw enough money into the void, eventually have their statues torn down for crimes past.
So what hope is there for trivial me, for any of us alive now, of leaving anything vaguely meaningful in our wake? None, probably. I accept that. I can’t offer any certain answers to the question of death (although I hope you weren’t expecting any; an obscure, introspective article always felt like an unlikely source of enlightenment on life’s ultimate failure).
Another day in paradise
Death skirted the periphery of my childhood, nipping off grandparents before I really got to know them. Then death took a long career sabbatical, enjoying a brief hiatus in the mid-noughties when it snatched a couple of people close to me. I’ve been fearful and suspicious of its many forms ever since — especially perpetually balding, maverick pop geek drummers.
I see death lurking on the distant horizon, more mirage than landmark. Assuming I’m lucky enough to play the averages and last into my eighties, I’ll continue doing all I can to stave off defeat — eat and exercise well. But that does little to abate that nibbling existential worry some of us have buzzing in our ears — am I using my short time wisely?
Are you?
Life is absurd. And legacy is a ridiculous, pompous idea. But can we really rid ourselves of desiring it? Should we not dream of leaving something meaningful in our wake? Is it really pathetic to nurture humble hopes of making life a little better for just one fellow creature at a time?
I hope not, because that’s what I’m striving for — for all its futility, against all odds.
