by Phil Collins
That said, I am privy to some insider’s intel: I would recognize Ringo Starr’s Ludwig drum kit anywhere. But I wouldn’t have guessed that The Beatles were making a film.
Suddenly, a commotion in the wings. As if by magic, the stage is busy with Ringo, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, togged out in their fabulous gray mohair suits with the black collars. The Scala Theatre erupts.
This is a performance scene in the film that will become the finale of the Fab Four’s debut cinematic feature, A Hard Day’s Night. When they’re shooting us kids in the audience, there are stand-ins onstage. But when John, Paul, George and Ringo are playing, they’re only about thirty feet away from me. As a fully-paid-up member of The Beatles fan club, I can’t believe my luck. Not only am I out front and center at an intimate gig (of sorts), I am being immortalized on celluloid alongside my first musical heroes.
If only. Master Philip Collins is conspicuous by his absence from the film released in cinemas that summer. My performance that day ends up on the cutting-room floor. Was I not screaming enough?
Fast-forward to the early nineties. The film’s producer, Walter Shenson, visits me at Genesis’ recording studio, The Farm, in Surrey. It’s the thirtieth anniversary of A Hard Day’s Night and he asks me to record the narration on a “making of…” documentary being released on DVD. He sends me the out-takes of “my” scenes.
I freeze-frame several times, intent on finding thirteen-year-old me. Because I know I was there: I’d received my £15 fee and cashed the check; this was not a sadly deluded Fab Four fan’s dream. By repeated viewing and peering intently, I find someone I’m convinced is me. I remember the tie I was wearing (red and diamond-studded; thank God the film was in black and white) and a pink tab shirt. The same shirt, incidentally, I’m seen to be wearing on the Going Back sleeve. I’m convinced enough for them to put a circle round me on the finished DVD. Here’s this young lad just sitting there, transfixed, in among all these kids who are standing up, screaming and quite possibly wetting themselves with excitement.
That’s probably the reason I’m not in the film: because I’m not displaying enough Beatlemania. You can imagine the director, Richard Lester, shouting to the editor: “Get rid of that frame, that daft kid’s sitting down!” But it’s not like I was trying to be cool. I was just utterly flabbergasted to be listening to—watching—experiencing—The Beatles. I wanted to see this. I didn’t want to scream through it.
This was “Tell Me Why,” “She Loves You,” “All My Loving,” the songs that were firing my fast-forming musical synapses. This, I knew, was the future, my future, and I wanted to enjoy it. Forget bloody acting. That may have been the reason I was there in the first place, but in the scheme of things, I was wholly uninterested.
Later in life I tell this story individually to Paul, George and Ringo (I never met John). The time I presented Paul with an American Music Award at London’s Talk of the Town supper club, he said, “Were you really in A Hard Day’s Night?” Yes, I was. I might not have made it to the final cut, but I was. Little did I know that ending up on the cutting-room floor would become something of a theme for me. Fortunately you can’t be edited from a West End show. Well, you can, and I will be, but not for a while at least.
The show timings for Oliver! are such that I have to travel to the West End straight from stage school each day. Still, I usually arrive in Soho around 4 p.m. with time to kill. Often I slide into one of the little cinemas scattered all over central London that show cartoons on an hourly rotation. I think they’re intended for commuters with some spare minutes before the next train. Unknown to me they have another use. In a Britain where homosexuality is still illegal, men use them as discreet(ish) pick-up joints. One time a guy sidles up during a Loony Tunes ’toon and places a tentative hand on my schoolboy knee. I snarl a “fuck off,” and he exits faster than the Road Runner.
Over the coming months I become quite used to this murky side of the West End, and these overtures become almost boringly ritual. My afternoons and evenings develop a happy routine: train from Hounslow, cinema, a mooch around the Soho coffee bars and record shops, and a quick burger in Wimpy. Then I head for the stage door of the New Theatre on St. Martin’s Lane, not far from Trafalgar Square.
I hit the ground running in Oliver!, because I have to: this is a huge, ongoing and usually sold-out show. There’s no time for first-night nerves, even for a thirteen-year-old.
On top of that, this is a big part. The entrance of The Artful Dodger is the moment when the show lifts. This tale of Victorian workhouses and grinding poverty is pretty much doom and despair till the chirpy, light-fingered urchin comes on and sings “Consider Yourself.” Then the Dickensian East End of Lionel Bart’s picaresque, exuberant imagination bursts into glorious life. Consider, too, that the Dodger also sings wonderful, now-timeless songs like “I’d Do Anything” and “Be Back Soon” with his gang. They’re my first lead vocals, and I relish performing them eight times a week, night after night (with matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays).
There are fringe benefits, too. While I’m treading the boards at the New Theatre, my girlfriend Lavinia is appearing in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Wyndham’s Theatre just yards away. Their stage door backs onto ours. Our intervals don’t usually align, but before the shows go up, there’s usually enough time to nip out and meet the love of your teenage life for a quick snog and a cuddle.
I pass my fourteenth birthday while on Oliver!, and change is afoot. One night I’m in the middle of “Consider Yourself,” belting it out with the requisite cheery, cheeky gusto. Then, from the back of my usually golden throat, a squawk and a croak and my singing voice suddenly gives out. I struggle on manfully, but at the interval I rush to the stage manager. I can’t understand what’s happened to my voice. I don’t have a cold, I’ve never had any problems singing before, not even an off night, and it can’t be the fags. Courtesy of petty larceny from the off-license in Charles Salmon’s dad’s pub, I’m a pro-smoker of several years’ standing.
The stage manager, experienced West End wrangler of many a child actor that he is, gives me the lowdown: my voice is breaking.
Forget any heartening sense that I’m becoming a man, my son. Right here, right now, in the wings, huddled behind the safety curtain, I’m devastated. I know what this means.
I soldier through the second half, but my voice is shot. The entire theater knows it; from beyond the stage-lights, I can sense a shuffling in the stalls. It’s a terrible feeling. I hate letting down an audience, a pathological worry that I will carry with me forever. I can count on one hand the number of shows I canceled with Genesis or on my solo tours. Over the course of my career I will do whatever I can to ensure the show goes on—even if that means dodgy doctors, dubious injections, catastrophic deafness and sustaining injuries that will require major, invasive, flesh-ripping, bone-bolting surgery.
Yet that, there and then, is the end of my time playing The Artful Dodger, the best part for a kid in all London. With sentiment-free efficiency, I’m immediately off the show and cast out of the West End and back to the end of the line.
For a hormonal teenage lad ragingly obsessed with all that an increasingly swinging mid-sixties London has to offer, Oliver! has been a trip both on- and offstage. During my seven months’ happily indentured West End service I get to know the house musicians at the New Theatre. The bandleader is a drummer, and fortuitously he and I take the same train home. We chat. Well, I chat, pumping him for information about the life of a musician, and he patiently replies. I soon see that being a jobbing player, in show bands, in the orchestra pit, in clubs—that’s a great career. I’ll have that.
At this point I am an entirely self-taught musician. But I realize I need to sharpen up my act if I’m to have any hope of becoming a professional.
I start taking piano lessons with my Great-Auntie Daisy at her musty Edwardian house in Netheravon Road, Chiswick. She’s charming, patient and helpful and, to the surprise
of both of us, it comes to me easily. Once I hear something, I never have to look at the page again. I have what they call “big ears,” which is great for learning songs, less good for learning to read music. This frustrates Auntie Daisy, but she doesn’t hold it against me. On her death, I inherit her 1820 straight-strung Collard & Collard. I will record all of Face Value, my first solo album, using that piano.
I never do learn to read music, and still can’t to this day. If I had, things might have been very different. When I form the Phil Collins Big Band in 1996, to communicate with the brilliant, seasoned jazz players in that combo I have to invent my own phonetic way of doing the charts. They’d certainly be forgiven for thinking, “How can this untutored clown hope to work with the likes of Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones?”
But at the same time, not being able to read music is absolutely liberating for me. It gives me a wider musical vocabulary. There are learned, technically accomplished players who sound regimented, taught and clinical. Maybe a more traditionally schooled player couldn’t have come up with an unorthodox song like “In the Air Tonight.” If you don’t know the rules, you don’t know what rules you’re breaking.
Nine years after taking receipt of my first kit from Uncle Reg and Uncle Len, I finally decide to take some drum lessons. When I start attending Barbara Speake’s, my route to school from Acton Town station up Churchfield Road takes me past a drum shop owned by Maurice Plaquet. This place is a mecca for players from all over London, while Maurice himself is an in-demand session guy, quite a big name in the drummers’ world of which I am desperate to be a part. He’s too big a fish to school me, so I approach one of his lieutenants, Lloyd Ryan, who teaches out of Maurice’s basement.
Lloyd is a flash young guy. He tries to teach me to read music, but again my ears get in the way. Five years hence, in 1971, I’ll go back to him for a few top-up lessons after joining Genesis. We’re already doing gigs but I figure I’ll have another crack at trying to read music. Lloyd attends one of the band’s now-famous (among hardcore fans, at least) lunchtime shows at the Lyceum Theatre, just off the Strand. Onstage I have a Dexion frame supporting hanging bits and bobs: percussion, bells, whistles. A sophisticated but cheap array of noisy stuff. At my next lesson I notice that Lloyd now has the exact same set-up. This is the tail wagging the dog. I don’t go to him again.
At the end of the sixties, during another brief West End acting run (back in Oliver!, but in a more grown-up role this time, that of cowardly bully Noah Claypole), I take some lessons with a lovely man named Frank King. He teaches in historic drummers’ shop Chas E. Foote’s, located just opposite the stage door of my then day job in the Piccadilly Theatre. As far as my formal musical education is concerned, that’s about it. My lifetime tally of drum lessons has been approximately thirty.
For my teenage self it’s more useful to learn on the hoof, in the raw and in the moment, by taking advantage of the hip-and-happening environment that I come to view as very much my playground. As a wannabe drummer in mid-sixties London, I couldn’t have picked a better time and place in which to learn my craft. Music is everything and everywhere. By a little doggedness, a lot of luck and a liberal demonstration of enthusiasm, I find myself at the heart of the first great British pop cultural explosion.
The money I’m earning as an occasional actor—I was paid £15 a week for my second stint on Oliver!—is entirely spent on my all-consuming hobby. I become an avid collector of records and purchaser of gig tickets. After breaking my 45-buying duck with Joe Brown’s “It Only Took a Minute,” I swiftly move on to collecting anything bearing the imprimatur of Northern Songs, the publishing company founded by Brian Epstein and The Beatles: “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” by Billy J. Kramer, The Swinging Blue Jeans’ “Hippy Hippy Shake” and loads more. My ears burning at the torrent of fantastic music that’s suddenly pouring out of the radio, clubs, pubs and bedrooms the length and breadth of the country, I tune in religiously to Sunday afternoon’s Pick of the Pops, Alan Freeman’s hit-parade show, and Brian Matthews’ Saturday Club, both broadcast on the BBC Light Programme.
With changing tunes comes changing fashion. It’s 1966, and I go shopping at I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet at Foubert’s Place, off Carnaby Street, very much the boutique du jour. I’m seeking out the military gear that key faces on the scene are wearing, notably two musicians in a new band with which I’ve become obsessed. Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker are, respectively, cool-as-they-come lead guitarist and mad-as-a-hatter drummer in Cream, a trio history will recognize as rock’s first supergroup.
My introduction to Cream comes, ironically enough, in dear old Hounslow. One night in 1966 I’m waiting for the last bus at Hounslow bus station, and I can hear the sound of a blistering blues band punching through the walls of a local club called The Attic. I’m fifteen, and I’m hearing Cream playing songs that will appear on their debut album, Fresh Cream, which is released at the end of that year. I never imagine that in time I will become a great friend, sideman, producer and party companion with their already incendiary guitarist.
Yes, of course, 1966 is the year that England wins the World Cup. But for me it’s a banner year for another reason: I form my first band with some fellow Barbara Speake pupils. The Real Thing are me on drums, Philip Gadd on guitar, his brother Martin on bass and Peter Newton on lead vocals. On backing vocals we have both the key girls in my life, Lavinia and Andy.
We are drama-school kids, used to slacking off in class and listening to the latest platters by The Beatles and The Byrds while we study, and we go for this with some gusto. Albeit within limits—we don’t travel or gig much farther than Acton. Even East Acton is out of bounds. It’s lethal for us drama-school kids, as it’s the location of Faraday School, which is full to the brim with hard nuts who like nothing better than duffing up a boy who’s known to wear tights. Poor Peter, who’s black, lives near East Acton station, which is in the danger zone. His skin color means he gets beaten up with extra regularity and extra relish.
Undaunted (mostly), The Real Thing absorb soul music and Motown, and perform cover versions of everything we can find. Essentially we’re ripping off the set-list of The Action. They’re a group of sharp-dressed Mods from Kentish Town, northwest London, whose slink-hipped 1965 debut single, “Land of a Thousand Dances,” was produced by George Martin. Peter and I consider ourselves their biggest fans. I’m still a fan come 1969, when they rename themselves Mighty Baby. In 2000, Mod guru Rob Bailey gives me the phone number of The Action’s Roger Powell, probably my biggest drumming influence. I call him and we become the greatest of friends. Due to our friendship, I have the good fortune of joining the reunited Action for a show at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street. Playing beside my hero Roger, I finally get to meet the entire band forty years after stalking them at the Marquee. I’m not exaggerating when I later tell The Guardian that for me it was like playing with The Beatles.
Throughout ’66 and ’67, Peter and I try to see every Action gig we can at London’s best venue, the Marquee. We’ll report back to our Real Thing band mates and try to play whatever we’ve heard: “You Don’t Know Like I Know” by Stax’s “Double Dynamite” duo Sam & Dave, “Do I Love You” by all-female American soul outfit The Ronettes, “Heatwave” by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas. The words of the songs that we can’t follow, we make up. The kids at the school, our usual audience, don’t know any better. As if that wasn’t enough excitement, in 1967 Tottenham Hotspur win the FA Cup.
We try to emulate The Action in every way. Roger has this fantastic blue nylon jacket. Fanboy and clothes-horse that I am, after some scouring of Carnaby Street’s key Mod outlets, I manage to find one just like it. I enjoy it for a couple of weeks, and then my mum washes it. Somehow it gets both shrunk and shredded. It’s ruined. For a young Mod, this is a dagger through the heart.
I recover fast. Here at the heart of the sixties, change is the only constant. Week in, week out, I buy all the music papers—New Musical Express, Record Mi
rror, Melody Maker. I pore over every page, notably the gig adverts in the back: I need to know who’s playing where and with whom. I even collect these adverts in scrapbooks, which also feature my own handwritten reviews of the shows. Living at the end of the line, what else is an eager, music-obsessed schoolboy to do? In distant adulthood I will show my Action scrapbook to Roger and the surviving members. They are touched to the point of tears. I may have got a little moist around the eyes myself. I will also fund the writing of a book telling their story, In the Lap of the Mods, just so I can have a copy myself.
I start frequenting the Marquee, at least once or twice a week, heading for Soho straight from school. I’m usually first in line. Soon the manager, John Gee, is letting me in for free, in return for sweeping up, putting out the chairs and putting up with his harmless advances (and those of his similarly inclined assistant manager, Jack Barrie). “Oh, Philip,” he’ll sigh, “how old are you again?” They become, over time, great friends to me.
At this stage in the Wardour Street institution’s many incarnations, the Marquee has no proper bar. You can only buy Coca-Cola, and that from a small stall at the back. The priority is space for the gigs—1,200 people can be crammed in. This is, I’ve no doubt, way above fire regulations, but no one cares about such safety concerns, just as they don’t care about car seat belts, cigarettes causing cancer and 100,000 men and boys packed on football terraces with no seating or crush barriers. Simpler times. If you survived them.
Presently the Marquee installs a proper bar, which cuts the capacity nearly in half, but not the excitement. These are the days when someone will join a band in the afternoon and be playing with them that night. Jeff Beck joins The Yardbirds one afternoon, Jimmy Page another. I’m in the crowd for both their debuts.
