by Phil Collins
Most weekends, and many a Thursday (the designated meeting night for club members), are spent in the company of others with boats: hanging out at a temporary clubhouse, or a mooring somewhere, rowing around for pleasure, the proverbial messing about on the river. Or, most of the time, just talking about messing about on the river. Soon I share Dad’s love for the life aquatic.
There is an annual event, held at Platt’s Ait in Hampton, where the club members gather for a weekend with their beloved boats and have rowing races, tug-of-wars and a knot-tying competition. I handle a rope and row a dinghy from a very young age, and am never scared of the water. For a little chap like me this is heady stuff, fostering a great feeling of bonhomie. In today’s world it might sound a bit dull, but not in my youth. I even feel it a point of honor that I attend Nelson Infants. As a sidebar to the water and its influence on our family: my dad never learnt to swim. His dad instilled in him a fear of ever being more than waist-high in water. Anything more, and he’d drown. He believed him. And this is the man who tried to run away and join the merchant navy.
One way or another, the Thames plays a big part in my early years. Most weekends, even from a very young age, I’ll take out a rowboat and potter between bridges. At this time the Converted Cruiser Club lacks its own clubhouse, so for meetings and socials we use Dick Waite’s Boatyard on the riverbank at St. Margarets, where Dad moors his small motorboat, Teuke. Eventually Pete Townshend buys the place and converts it into his Meher Baba Oceanic recording studio. I have an old photograph of me in my mum’s arms on the very spot, so I made him a copy. Pete, ever the gent, wrote me a lovely, tear-stained letter, thanking me. The photo hung in the studio for many years.
By the late fifties the club is renting a plot on Eel Pie Island for a penny a year. I spend a good deal of my early years first helping build the permanent clubhouse, then joining in the shows and pantomimes put on by the members. I can lay genuine claim to have played this famous venue in the middle of the Thames—the sixties seat of the British blues explosion—long before The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and The Who.
Apart from that, I’m still just messing about on the river. But these regular boat-club revues do, eventually, give me the opportunity to play drums publicly for the first time. Footage exists of a ten-year-old me performing as a member of the Derek Altman All-Stars, led by the squeezebox-playing maestro. Carole and Clive are involved, too, performing comedy sketches. Mum also does her bit, singing “Who’s Sorry Now?” with some feeling.
In fact, the whole family are part of the waterside troupe. Dad regularly wheels out his evergreen song about a farmer, deploying lots of rude noises to impersonate the animals. I entertain my youngest kids with this song even now: “There was an old farmer who had an old sow…” (insert various raspberry and fart sounds).
These occasions are the rare times Dad slips off the bowler, suit and tie and becomes a lovable rogue. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough detailed memories of my dad, happy or otherwise. What images I have, I later put in a song, “All of My Life,” on my 1989 album …But Seriously: Dad coming home from work, changing out of his suit, sitting down to dinner, and then an evening watching TV with just his pipe for company. Mum’s gone out; I’m upstairs playing records.
Recalling that scenario now, I’m overwhelmed with sadness. There are so many things I could have asked my dad; if only I’d known I’d be just twenty-one when he died. Simply, there wasn’t much intimacy or dialogue between us. Maybe I’ve blotted out the memories. Maybe they don’t exist.
Something I do recall vividly is my bed-wetting, and sleeping with a rubber sheet under the cotton one. If I do “have an accident,” the rubber sheet simply prevents the wetness from spreading, leaving me to sleep in a small pool of trapped wee. What do you do in this situation? You go and sleep with your mum and dad and then wet their bed. This must truly endear me to my father. We have no shower in our small semi-detached house, and early-morning baths are not normally taken, so I fear that for a good few years Dad goes to work every day with a slight hint of urine about him.
Perhaps inevitably, no matter how much he loves the river, Dad can’t help but revert to the occasionally insensitive action. I have cinematic proof. A home movie shot by Reg Tungay shows me and Dad by the water’s edge on Eel Pie Island. I’m about six. There’s a fifteen-foot drop below me into the Thames.
I know now, as I knew well then: this is a very dangerous river. There are fantastically strong undercurrents, and many tidal ebbs and flows. Quite frequently bodies are washed up by the sluice gates at the half-tide bridge at St. Margarets. As all good members of the Converted Cruiser Club are aware, you don’t take risks with the Thames.
In this old cine camera footage, you see my dad abruptly turn and walk away. He clearly says nothing to me, offers no warning or concern. He just leaves me teetering on the edge. It’s an ugly drop onto the water-lashed, stony foreshore. If I fall, I would badly hurt myself, if not be swept away. But Dad just abandons me there, without so much as a backward glance.
I’m not saying he didn’t care, but I believe he sometimes just didn’t think. Maybe as he left me hanging on the edge of the Thames, his mind, his emotions, were elsewhere. He was making it up every day.
In adulthood I’d do that, too. Partly in a positive, creative way—I’m a songwriter and performer, and making things up is at the heart of the job description. But also, partly, I concede, in a negative way. As I toured the world incessantly for almost four decades, in Genesis and as a solo artist, I was constantly shoring up a fiction: that I could maintain a solid family existence of my own while maintaining a career in music.
Us mums and dads, we don’t know it all. Far from it.
Or: a starry-eyed sixties youngster’s adventures hitting the stage and hitting the drums
It’s all Santa’s fault.
Yes, I’m blaming the big red beardy fellow in a bid to explain the roots of a lifelong passion, an instinctive habit that will have me hitting things with varying degrees of relish until the fateful time, some half a century later, when first the flesh and then the spirit start to fail me.
As if I’m not making enough racket as a typically tyrannical toddler, aged three I receive an infant’s plastic drum for Christmas. The family Collins are staying, as we often do at this time of year, with Reg and Len Tungay. Armed with this new drum, it’s immediately and noisily apparent to everyone around me that I take to it completely. Or it takes to me completely. Even at this early age, I have no doubt about the all-round brilliance of this new toy. I can now “communicate” by bashing things to my heart’s content.
The Tungay brothers, frequent visitors to 453 Hanworth Road, especially for Sunday lunch—a weekly opportunity for Mum to assiduously boil all the greens until they’re grays—notice my enthusiasm for matters percussive and rhythmic. They’re perhaps less mindful of my dad’s views on the subject.
When I’m five years old, Reg and Len fashion for me a home-made set-up. Two lengths of wood are screwed into a crosspiece. Each end has a hole drilled in it, into which is pushed a pole. These four poles are topped off with two biscuit tins, a triangle and a cheap plastic tambourine. It’s collapsible and fits neatly into a brown suitcase.
To call this a drum “kit” is pushing it. It’s more Heath Robinson than Buddy Rich. But I’m in heaven, and this crash-bang-wallop apparatus will serve as both my musical tools and my best friend for several noisy years to come.
I practice wherever, whenever, but usually in the living room when everyone’s watching TV. I’ll set up in the corner and play along to that late-fifties obligatory viewing experience, the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Mum, Dad, Reg, Len, Clive and Carole sit patiently through my unschooled clatter, trying to watch the latest routines from funnymen Norman Vaughan and Bruce Forsyth, and from whichever pre-rock’n’roll musical turn is guesting that week.
I hammer along with The Harmonics and their massed mouth organs. I supply a boom-tish f
or the comedians’ punchlines. I accompany all the Jack Parnell Orchestra’s intro and outro music. It doesn’t even have to be an act. I’ll play to anything, with anyone. I’m a versatile jobbing drummer, even then.
As I approach adolescence my commitment only hardens. Piece by piece I assemble a semi-decent kit. Snare drum is followed by cymbal is followed by bass drum bought from the guy across the road. This tides me over until I’m twelve. Now, on the cusp of my teenage years, Mum says she’ll go halves with me on the purchase of a proper kit.
It is 1963, and the sixties are in full flow. The Beatles have landed and the future can begin. Their first single, “Love Me Do,” came out the previous October and already Beatlemania has me firmly in its grasp. I make the ultimate sacrifice: I will sell my brother’s toy train set to raise my half of the bargain I’ve made with Mum. It doesn’t occur to me that perhaps I should have asked his permission.
Flush with £50, Mum and I go to Albert’s Music Shop in Twickenham and purchase a four-piece Stratford kit in white pearl. I am sitting at that kit in the photograph of a thirteen-year-old me on the cover of my 2010 album, Going Back.
I feel my drumming game is stepping up, not least because I play whenever possible. I’m sure I must have put in my 10,000 hours before I’m even a teenager, as my neighbors at 451 and 455 Hanworth Road would confirm. When I’m home I drum to the exclusion of pretty much all else, a fact to which the teachers who marked my homework at first Nelson Infants and then Chiswick County Grammar would probably attest.
But I’m no drumming dummy: I do pass my 11-plus exams. That enables me to bypass the then rather bog-standard comprehensive school structure and enter the grammar-school system.
I will admit, though, that for all the time I spend in my bedroom, not much of it is taken up with studying. The Stratford dominates the space and I sit there, endlessly, drumming and drumming and drumming, positioned in front of the mirror. This is part vanity, for sure, but it’s also part learning. I’ve watched Ringo Starr with ardent fascination, and if I can’t sound like him, maybe I can try to look like him when he plays. Then, when in early 1964 The Rolling Stones hit number 3 with their third single, “Not Fade Away,” fickle youth that I am, I move on to copying Charlie Watts.
But for all my zeal for the drums, I am also developing another interest: acting.
The seeds were sown at those boat-club pantomimes, performed at the Isleworth Scout Hall, when I knocked ’em dead as Humpty Dumpty and Buttons. It was at one of these stellar performances that Dad, dressed as Sir Francis Drake, wandered out to take a breath of fresh air. Next door was an ancient church with a number of open tombs courtesy of Adolf’s bombs. Pipe-puffing Dad, shrouded in midnight river mist, looked like a ghost risen from the grave. This apparition was caught in the headlight glare of a passing motorist. Braking sharply and turning on a sixpence, he reported it to the local police. They in turn reported it to the local paper. Cue the headline in that week’s Richmond and Twickenham Times: “Ghost of Sir Francis Drake seen in Isleworth.”
It’s around this time that I also have an unfortunate but mercifully brief outbreak of childhood modeling. Alongside half a dozen other adolescent boys, all of us gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance, I star in advertisements and knitting patterns. Possessed of a flicky blond fringe and a cherubic smile, I wear a mean pair of pajamas and am a very good sporter of woolly sweaters.
Still reeling from witnessing my Shakespearean Humpty Dumpty and impressed by my proto-Zoolander modeling brilliance, my eager mum coerces me into spending my Saturday mornings taking elocution lessons in a dour basement in Jocelyn Road, Richmond, taught by a lady named Hilda Rowland. There is lino on the floor, ballet mirrors on the wall and the slight odor of female hormones in the air. Mrs. Rowland has a special friend named Barbara Speake, who founded her titular dance school in Acton in 1945. My mum becomes friends with Miss Speake. At a loose end, having stopped managing the toyshop, Mum starts working with her, launching the school’s theatrical agency from our house. June Collins supplies all-singing, all-dancing children to London’s West End, and to the blossoming commercial TV and film world.
In these, the early days of advertising on TV, there is always a need for children. The Milky Bar Kid is the choicest role to land. Casting this and many other commercials gives my mum a daily challenge as she decides which child she represents would best fit the bill. She throws herself into this completely, which is how, in 1964, she hears about auditions for Oliver! The hit Lionel Bart musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is now in the fourth year of its blockbuster ten-year run. I go for the part of The Artful Dodger, a role future Monkee Davy Jones has already played and would do so again in the Broadway transfer.
After multiple auditions, and recall after recall, much to the surprise and excitement of my thirteen-year-old self, I’m chosen for the part. I’m cock-a-hoop. As far as I’m concerned, street-smart, wisecracking Dodger is the best kids’ role in the show. Oliver, that simpering goody two-shoes? No chance.
I make an appointment to see my headmaster at Chiswick County Grammar to give him the good news. Mr. Hands terrifies the entire pupil body. He is a stern educationalist of the old school, always sweeping into assembly, his robe flowing like bat wings, mortar board firmly planted on his head, cheeks ruddy and ready for a day’s stiff learning.
To go to his office means one of only two things. You’re either due a caning, or you have something to impart that had better be highly important. To give Mr. Hands his due, he does seem pleased that I have landed a major part in an important and critically acclaimed London theater production. But it is also his somber duty to inform me that if I accept the part he will have no option but to remove me from the school.
The rules governing under-fifteens working in the West End at this time are strict. The maximum you can perform anywhere is for nine months. This comprises three three-month contracts, during which period children must have three weeks off per contract. Mr. Hands cannot allow such term-time laxity. I will much later discover, via Reg and Len, that he followed my career with great interest and not a little pride. This comes as a shock, as he always appeared so witheringly uninterested in matters of entertainment. On the subject of whether Mr. Hands was more a Genesis man or a Phil Collins man, the jury is still out.
I tell Mum and Dad about his stage-or-school ultimatum, and their response is swift and simple: stage school. They will withdraw me from Chiswick County Grammar and install me in Barbara Speake’s newly instituted acting school. Such has been Mum’s success running the Barbara Speake Theatrical Agency that she and Miss Speake have turned the dancing school into a fully fledged establishment to teach the performing arts.
In many ways, this will prove a win-win for me. For one thing, I can act as much as I like. For another, at the Barbara Speake Stage School girls outnumber boys by some considerable margin. In the newly formed “student class” there’s me, one other boy, named Philip Gadd, and a dozen girls.
In fact, it’s a win-win-win. With the priority being firmly on improving performance, taking auditions and winning parts, my formal education as good as ceases at this point. As a not-atypical adolescent boy, to me this is heaven. It’s only later that I will wish I’d had a little bit more traditional learning and a bit less ballet. However, I would have liked to have studied tap dancing. It’s something that all the great early drummers, legends such as Buddy Rich, knew how to do. Likewise, great dancers like Fred Astaire were also great drummers. The two skills are close rhythmic cousins, and I wish I’d been more interested. Who wouldn’t have loved a bit of tap at Live Aid?
When I enroll at stage school I am thirteen. My teenage years start with a bang, in every sense. I’m a drummer, which is hip at school. I’m in a big West End show, which is the envy of my acting peers. And I am one of only two boys in a class literally teeming with girls—girls of an extrovert, artistic bent.
I hesitate to say that I squired my way through the entire pu
pil body in my four years at drama school, but I suspect there are probably only one or two girls who escaped my attention. I’ve never been so cool. I’ll never be so cool again.
History suggests that I am fourteen when I first have sex. I say “suggests” because it is over so quickly that it might not, in the intercourse scheme of things, count. But as a horny teen in a close-knit suburban neighborhood, your options are limited. By the time you’re in a situation where it might happen, you’ll already be in trouble and out of the starting gate. So it comes to pass that Cheryl—like me, fourteen, and also, like me, a wannabe Mod—and I get down and dirty in an allotment. I didn’t intend it to be outside in the mud, in the midst of small plots of potatoes and carrots, but I didn’t have much choice.
I had, of course, had a lot of experience of sex as a solo artist. I am embarrassed now to even think about this, as it must have been so blatantly obvious to the other family members. Without going into any more detail than needed, I will say that I would often retire to the toilet at 453 Hanworth Road with my big collection of Parade girlie magazines. I’m pretty sure everyone must have known what was going on. The paper rustling, if not the other noises, would have been a giveaway.
Resuming normal service: at Barbara Speake’s I meet two girls who will play significant and ongoing roles in my life, personal and professional, for a long time hereafter. Over the span of my teenage years either I’m going out with Lavinia Lang or I’m going out with Andrea Bertorelli. The three of us seem to date on heavy rotation, and that back-and-forth will reverberate down the decades.
That first year of my teens is a significant one. In early 1964 I’m told by my acting agent—my mum—to make my way to the Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street in central London. As I travel in on the Piccadilly Line that afternoon, I have no idea what the job is. I guess that’s part of the plan, as none of the hordes of teens assembling inside the theater seem to know what’s going on. If you want a genuine audience response, you corral a bunch of kids in front of a stage that’s empty save for some musical instruments and don’t tell them who’s about to appear.
