by Phil Collins
I’m a Yardbirds fan, and when they become The New Yardbirds, I’m also a fan of their drummer, John Bonham. Alongside Roger from The Action, he’s my drumming hero. I go to see Tim Rose—I have a soft spot for the American singer-songwriter, and I love his cover of Bonnie Dobson’s “Morning Dew”—because Bonham is his hired drummer for the tour. My oldest friend Ronnie Caryl and I still talk about that show at the Marquee—“My God, what was he doing with his foot?” Bonham was incredible.
Being a serious regular, and a serious fan, I am often in the right place at the right time: by following Bonham’s progress, at the Marquee I see the first London show by The New Yardbirds, soon to be renamed Led Zeppelin. I witness some floor-shaking, maximum R&B Who shows. I experience Yes in their earliest days, around 1968, when they were good. As with my future friendship with Clapton, I never could have conceived that I would become a close collaborator with teenage heroes such as Robert Plant and Pete Townshend, or that Yes’s Bill Bruford would one day help me become a reluctant frontman by taking over the drums in Genesis.
In my mid-teens in mid-sixties London, that present from Santa Claus to the three-year-old me is the gift that keeps on giving. That first child’s drum put me on a path that has taken me to the epicenter of a revolution. The drums will continue propelling me, onward, upward, sometimes even sideways. But right now they’ve kick-started something that’s thrumming deep inside my head with increasing agitation.
At this stage I am still a kid. A schoolboy. And a schoolboy who lives way out west, in the increasingly claustrophobic sticks. This starts to get on my pip when it begins interfering with my gig-going. The Marquee evening performance schedule usually goes like this: support band, headliner, support band again, headliner again. I can usually see the first three, but have to leave before the final headliner’s set so I can catch the train that gets me home in time for my curfew of 10:30 p.m. Then, on January 24, 1967, Jimi Hendrix plays the Marquee for the first time. The first of the tyro American guitarist’s four legendary shows there, this will go down in the annals of rock history as one of the epochal rock shows of the sixties. He is one of the first acts to do one long set instead of two.
As is increasingly usual, I’m first in line to get in, nab a front-row seat…but then in frustration have to leave before Hendrix comes on. The last train to the end of the line is calling.
The sooner I can get out of there, the better.
Or: trying to catch a break in swinging London. How hard can it be?
I gotta get out of this place. But how? It certainly won’t be via London Assurance, despite my dad’s strenuous efforts to persuade me to carry on the family tradition. I am a time-serving child of the sixties and the nine-to-five is very much not for me, daddy-o.
So via what route do I escape, and by what means? Music is my passion, and London is the global center of the whole scene. Stuck here at the end of the Piccadilly Line, my skill on the drums improving with every practice, it feels like I am so near yet so far. I need an exit strategy, and ideally I need someone to come with me. Luckily, I know just the fellow.
In early 1966, aged fifteen, word reaches me of a kid who’s apparently as much a whiz on the guitar as I am on the drums. He’s from Hanworth, straight down the road from Hounslow, and he attends a rival performing-arts establishment, the Corona Academy. The inter-drama-school rumor mill has made each of us aware of the other, with each of us considered “cool” by the cliques at our respective song’n’dance alma maters.
I find out where this alleged guitar-slinging hepcat lives, and one summer morning I briskly walk the couple of miles to his house. I knock on the door of his semi-detached, and his mum answers.
“Is Ronnie there, please?”
“Ronnie! There’s a boy with a blond fringe and a pink shirt at the door for you!”
A thunder of feet on the stairs and there, looking at me quizzically, is this kid, a little younger than me, with dark curly hair and an interesting mouthful of teeth.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, I’m Phil Collins, do you want to join a supergroup?”
“Well, who else is in it?” comes Ronnie Caryl’s reply. I’m instantly impressed. He’s not querying the very idea of a supergroup being formed by a couple of adolescents in boring, mid-sixties Middlesex. Conceptually, he’s already on board. I like that attitude.
“Just you and me,” I reply confidently.
Within a few days, Ronnie and I have started playing in my front room at 453 Hanworth Road, messing around, trying to re-create our fave raves of the day: Cream’s “Cat’s Squirrel,” “Spoonful” and “NSU,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe”—you name it, we’re mangling it.
Actually, if I do say so myself, we’re pretty quickly pretty decent. I have a tape of Ronnie and I playing for hours on end, and it still sounds rather impressive. Despite the fact that there are only two of us, we’re both good players and the combination is full and bluesy.
In due course we add a bass player, a friend of a friend called Anthony Holmes. But it soon becomes clear that while he owns a bass, he can’t actually play it. This doesn’t deter Anthony, though. He just plays very quietly so it’s hard to tell whether he can or can’t. With our performances confined to my parents’ front room, this isn’t much of a problem, nor is our lack of a band name. Soon we’ve learnt almost the entire track listing of Fresh Cream. We’ve also picked up on John Mayall and an impressive collection of old blues tunes. If we’re not quite a supergroup, we’re certainly a tasty trio.
That said, Lonnie Donegan thinks we’re rubbish. The “king of skiffle” becomes the first pop star I ever meet when he comes round to our house one Sunday afternoon to visit my sister Carole—now that she’s a professional ice skater, they’ve met on the road somewhere. I think they’re seeing each other, or at least he’d like them to be. He has a listen to one of our practice sessions, sitting on a chair in an extraordinarily long fur coat. He seems a little out of place in this very suburban setting, as does his coat. But when you’re the king of skiffle you can do, and wear, what you like, I suppose.
Donegan proceeds to tear us apart. His critique of Anthony is particularly brutal. He asks our hapless bassist: “Can’t you sing either?” This does nothing for his confidence but confirms what Ronnie and I already know. Anthony likes the idea of being in a band and not much more.
Then Donegan mentions that he might be looking for a drummer, and for a second I see a glittering future ahead of me, helping to prolong a musical revolution that is already, if truth be told, past its skiffle-by date. Unfortunately I fear that in truth Donegan has no intention of hiring Carole Collins’ fifteen-year-old brother, if only because I’m too young for the hurly-burly of his frenetic gigging schedule. He does, however, think I’m good enough to offer to shop around for a band that might hire me. But despite his enthusiasm, nothing presents itself.
Shortly thereafter Anthony hangs up his bass forever, but Ronnie and I plow on undaunted. Best pals till we die, our relationship is honest to the point of combustibility. We are no strangers to the horrendous argument, usually after we’ve had a beer or two. Sometime in the late sixties, Ronnie will find himself minus one tooth, courtesy of my fist. It’s not something of which I am proud, nor something I ever do to anyone ever again.
As musical comrades and brothers-in-bands, Ronnie and I will go on to have many adventures together over the ensuing fifty years. At one end of the time spectrum, both of us will try out for Genesis. Further down the line, when I’m making my sixth solo album, 1996’s Dance into the Light, I am conscious I need a second guitar player to accompany the long-serving Daryl Stuermer. I invite my oldest friend to come to rehearsals in Switzerland.
My band at this time are top-drawer Los Angeles players, shiny with excellent chops and an acceptable level of smoothness. Ronnie at this time is as he always was: an all-drinking, all-smoking, occasionally farting rough diamond. The culture clash is as swift as it is inevitable. The LA contingent embark o
n a silent mutiny; on a short journey in my car back to their hotel, I’m told Ronnie “doesn’t fit in.” I retort, “Either Ronnie’s in the band, or you’re not.” Such is my love and appreciation of his skills and musicality, to say nothing of his much-needed humor.
Within a few weeks Ronnie is fully integrated and harmony reigns, as I trusted it would. I tell my oldest friend, “As long as I’m working, you’re working.” Whenever I need a guitarist, he’s my go-to guy. Same as it ever was. Such are the soul-solid bonds that are forged in the furnace of first musical loves. Those bonds will support me throughout my sixties musical finishing school, from bedroom practice sessions to pubs, clubs, holiday-camp gigs and beyond.
Come 1967, The Real Thing are less of a sure thing. The wild enthusiasm we had for our first school combo has morphed into the serious business of becoming professional dancers or actors, albeit less so for me than for my erstwhile band mates. But being a cocksure sixteen-year-old I’m sure a clear path will open up ahead of me. To be honest, I’m not yet convinced this still-new pop group “thing” will last that long. If it does, it certainly won’t involve me. But I’ll ride it until it burns itself out; then I’ll do some recording sessions for other people. Following a successful run of session work I’ll plug into a show band/big band/jazz world. I’m already ears-deep in Buddy Rich, Count Basie and John Coltrane, so this feels like a natural progression. I will then spend the twilight of my life playing in the orchestra pit for one of the top London theater shows. Those players I met doing Oliver! all seemed happy enough.
Again, this seems a logical course to take. But it will mean learning to read music. I’ll get round to that sometime soon.
Ah, the naivete of youth. It’s ’67 and I have my sixteen-year-old mind blown by The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These albums, cornerstone moments in the history of rock, are cornerstones of my young life, too. They come out within five months of each other, and everything changes. I start collecting Technicolor dream posters, paint my bedroom black—by now it is solely mine, Clive having left home to get married to a lovely lady, Marilyn, and to concentrate on being a professional cartoonist—and cover one wall in aluminum foil. The freak flag is flying high at 453 Hanworth Road. Getting itchy feet and an itchy attitude, I will gladly sign up for the psychedelic revolution, if they’ll have me. Unfortunately I have a prior engagement with a cow on a farm in Guildford, Surrey.
With some experience under my belt, and now that I’m a senior student at Barbara Speake’s, I’m receiving quite a few acting offers. Most of them I decline, much to my mum’s frustration. But I decide to take a cinema job I’m offered by the Children’s Film Foundation, wholesome purveyors of wholesome films for the Saturday morning picture clubs. These have exploded in popularity by the mid-sixties, not least as places parents can safely leave their children while they do their shopping. So what if the little movie is called Calamity the Cow and is unlikely to feature much in the way of groovy psychedelia? It means I’ll be seen on the big screen by kids up and down the country. It also means I’ll earn some money to buy more records, gig tickets and cod-military clobber. Plus, I have the biggest part—other than the cow, obviously.
The filming location is in Guildford, which funnily enough will become my stomping ground some years later, when Eric Clapton and I are country neighbors. But in ’67 all Guildford represents to me is a place that seems miles away from Hounslow, and that’s the setting for a pig farm so noxious I can smell it to this day.
That balmy Summer of Love it is quickly apparent that I have made an error of judgment in accepting the lead part in this film. As this is a CFF production, intended for Saturday morning entertainment, we have to play things young. Very young. Enid Blyton young. The plot can be summed up as: boy finds cow, boy loses cow, boy finds cow. I should be tuning in, turning on and dropping out. Instead I’m getting cozy with cattle.
To a too-cool-for-school sixteen-year-old drummer and Sgt. Pepper’s “head,” this is mortifying. It’s a sensation that doesn’t bring out the best in my behavior. Still carrying something of a wide-boy Artful Dodger accent, I decide to play my part with some cocky East End swagger. This doesn’t thrill the director. Complicating matters is the fact that the director is also the writer. Not unsurprisingly, he feels proprietorial over his script, and isn’t so keen on having his “vision” messed with by a snotty-nosed teenager with his head in Haight-Ashbury and his tongue lolling somewhere within the sound of Bow Bells.
“Ah, Philip,” he sighs in his broad Australian accent, exasperated at yet another overly cockney take, “could you perhaps say it like this instead…”
In the end he becomes tired of me and writes me out: midway through the action, the leading boy mysteriously disappears on his bike.
“Oh, Michael, do you really have to go on that bicycle holiday?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do…” I reply lamely. Exit, pursued by a cow.
No plausible reason for my departure is given to the audience; I simply vanish from the screen. Accordingly I’m discharged from filming halfway through, but still have to come back in time to film the nail-biting climax to Calamity the Cow (spoiler alert: cow wins first prize in county show). Disgruntlement is compounded by embarrassment and amplified by frustration. I sigh to myself: I’ve had enough of this.
Except I’ve not, not quite. In early 1968 Mum gets me a job on another film. It’s also a kids’ movie, but this one is a serious production: an adaptation of a book written by James Bond creator Ian Fleming; scripted by children’s author Roald Dahl; songs by Disney’s Oscar-winning writers the Sherman Brothers (they did The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins); and directed by Ken Hughes, who’d just worked on a Bond film, 1967’s Casino Royale. I don’t have any kind of speaking part—it’s extras work, as on A Hard Day’s Night—but it means being out of school for a week, and it means filming at the famous Pinewood Studios.
All things considered, for a seventeen-year-old chafing against the limitations of his childhood, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a great gig. On paper at least.
At Pinewood there are hundreds of kids who’ve been sent on this casting call, all from different stage schools. There are chaperones and tutors everywhere, and everyone is trying to artfully dodge them as best they can. In your time out of class, you’re intent on doing as little schoolwork as possible.
I don’t remember meeting any of the cast. We were only extras, so no mingling with the stars—not Dick Van Dyke, not Benny Hill, not James Robertson Justice. I do remember having some kind of cyst on my forehead, which is dressed, on doctor’s orders, with a bandage. Us kids, captives of the terrifying Child Catcher, are meant to look beaten, bedraggled and dirty. But in the cutting room my pristine, medically applied bandage catches the eye of director Hughes and he snips me out of the film. Exit stage right, Collins, again.
This is a further nail in the coffin of my enthusiasm for acting. And quite frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck. We are now in 1968, another massive moment for music, and something has to give.
In the year of The Beatles’ White Album, The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets and Cream’s Wheels of Fire, I leave school. I have GCEs in art, English language and religious knowledge. I just get by. Even if I was, God forbid, set on a career as an insurance salesman in the City, with those scant qualifications I would struggle.
Such were the benefits of an education at Barbara Speake’s. In my whole time there my head wasn’t present, or I wasn’t present, or both. What early enthusiasm I had for the place was mostly predicated on the chance to escape Chiswick Grammar, and the prospect of all those girls. The object of the school was to morph you into a young adult theatrical star. For me, that was never going to happen, so I couldn’t wait to get out of it. For sure, the acting opportunities it helped to present did pu
sh me out on a stage in front of people, but it never felt like a glittering start to any sort of career.
But through financial necessity I give the acting one more shot, appearing at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1969 in that previously mentioned latest staging of Oliver! (Barry Humphries is Fagin). Carol Reed’s film adaptation came out the previous year and there’s renewed excitement around the production. On top of that I am, at this point, that rather pitiable figure: the jobbing drummer without a job as a drummer. Acting will, again, have to put a bob or two in my pocket.
A twenty-two-year-old Cameron Mackintosh is the show’s assistant stage manager at this time. These days he’s perhaps the most powerful man in theater, an impresario with a £1 billion empire, the man behind Les Misérables and Miss Saigon and many more. But at the tail end of the sixties, at the Piccadilly Theatre, I’m higher than him in the pecking order. I tell him this years later, at Buckingham Palace. Sir Cameron, Sir Terry Wogan, Sir George Martin, Dame Vera Lynn and I have been chosen to meet the Queen and Prince Philip on their way to a celebration of British music that also features Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Brian May.
As we stand in line waiting to bow and scrape before their royal majesties, I whisper out of the side of my mouth, “You realize, Sir Cameron, that we worked in Oliver! at the same time?”
“No!”
“Yeah! So, what have you been up to since then?”
—
Back in 1968 my sights are firmly set on music. I tell Mum I want to give up acting and make a living as a drummer. She tells Dad. Within the hushed walls of London Assurance it has been a matter of fatherly pride that Greville Collins’ youngest son is a star of stage and screen. But playing with one of those pop groups? In short order I’m sure to be a long-haired destitute, raping and pillaging my way across the world, the father of a fistful of illegitimate children, or worse.
Dad sends me to Coventry for a few weeks. He simply stops talking to me, just to demonstrate his anger.
