Phil Collins and Paul McCartney End 20-Year Feud Over a Beatles Book

Phil Collins has ended his more than 20-year grudge against Paul McCartney, telling Piers Morgan on Friday's episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored: "So we kissed and made up. I said I was sorry."

The row began in 2002, at rehearsals for the Queen's Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace. Collins brought a rare first edition of Hunter Davies's book on The Beatles, a gift from Jill, the mother of his daughter Lily, and asked McCartney to sign it. McCartney obliged. Then, according to Collins, the Beatle turned to his then-wife Heather Mills and said: "He's a big Beatles fan, is our little Phil?"

"I thought, 'You arsehole'," Collins told Morgan. "I couldn't help it. That's just what I thought. I probably made more of it than he meant, I did make more of it. But when I was writing the book, and I wanted to write how I felt about certain things."

How did the feud finally end?

Collins first aired the grievance publicly in 2016, in an interview with The Sunday Times while promoting his memoir. McCartney emailed him afterward to sort things out. Collins did not reply.

Earlier this year, the stalemate broke. McCartney phoned Collins after hearing that the Genesis drummer was asking fellow musicians to donate memorabilia to a Kings Trust charity auction he was organizing. On the call, McCartney raised their long-running tension.

"And he said, 'While we're on the phone,' and I thought, oh, here we go. So he said, 'What is all this about?'" Collins recounted. "I said, 'I wish I'd never said it, Paul, I wish I'd never said it'. He said, 'I thought we were good, you know.'"

Collins framed the reconciliation as a matter of mutual understanding. "Obviously this had been bugging him because he likes to be liked, as we all do, you know, and maybe him more than some other people. But we all like to be liked. And I understand that. And we kissed and made up."

What else has Collins revealed this year?

The Morgan interview follows a harder-won disclosure. In August, Collins told The Sunday Times that he nearly died in 2024 during his battle with alcohol addiction.

He was first admitted to a Swiss hospital in connection with his alcohol use in November 2023. Discharged before Christmas that year, he was readmitted weeks later and placed in intensive care, where he lay unconscious. He spent seven months in hospital recovering.

"I was very lucky to have come out of that," Collins told the paper. "Needless to say, I haven't had a drink since."

The reconciliation with McCartney closes a chapter Collins first opened in his 2016 memoir — and clears the air between two of Britain's most commercially successful musicians ahead of the Kings Trust auction that prompted the call.