by Phil Collins
I don’t care, and I don’t wobble. I have my head stuck in the back pages of Melody Maker, or down the front of Lavinia’s cheesecloth shirt, or sometimes both at the same time.
I embark on the life of the jobbing drummer. Or, rather, I set about trying to establish myself as the kind of person who might be viewed as a jobbing drummer.
Some of my earliest professional engagements are courtesy of Ronnie. His parents are in real show business. His dad, also called Ronnie, is pianist and leader with a little band, the adventurously named The Ronnie Caryl Orchestra. His mum, Celia, is the singer, and they regularly play the Stork Club and the Pigalle, both in London’s West End. When I have some time and no money, I join them.
The Caryls also have a nice routine playing cruises and the holiday camps run by Butlin’s and Pontin’s. In the sixties, before the seventies package-holiday boom and long before the cheap-flight revolution, a holiday-camp vacation is a staple of British life. For teenagers everywhere it’s also a sexual rite of passage, the absent parents and the rows of chalets offering possibilities galore.
One Christmas the Caryls ask me to join a band they’ve put together to play at Pontin’s in Paignton, Devon. I try my best to fit in. I learn to Brylcreem my hair and tie a bow tie, wear the band jacket, and I find my feet playing waltzes, rhumbas, two-steps, a bit of rock’n’roll. Our repertoire is all kinds of standards and all kinds of genres.
Mrs. Caryl is a lovely lady with a great voice and a charming manner with a roomful of patrons. Mr. Caryl is a polished, mustachioed bandleader, armed with all the tricks of the trade. He can bollock you while he smiles at the audience, something he does to me countless times. With a wink to the punters enjoying their chicken-in-a-basket, mid-set he’ll lead the band offstage so they can slake their thirst at the bar, leaving me to single-handedly entertain the crowd with the meager show of drum trickery I have at my disposal.
“Do you want a drum solo, Phil?”
“No!”
“It’s all yours…”
At such moments the stage is mine for what seems like an eternity. As the band merrily raise their pint glasses in my honor, I’m frantically gesticulating to get them back to help me out of my misery. And gesticulating is a challenge when you’re holding the beat and two drumsticks.
The solo stage, it’s obvious, is far from my comfort zone.
Talk about learning your trade: this is an apprenticeship in the boozy raw. But then, after the final set of the evening, Ronnie and I excitedly roam the holiday camp, playing with some relish the “we’re in a band” card to all the girls we can find. Then, on a good night, we might repair to a chalet with a couple of suitably impressed fellow teenage babes.
There are more rites of passage in another regular gig I have around this time. Through another friend of a friend, I hear of a band in need of a drummer. The Charge are a semi-professional R&B combo who play American soul music, led by an extremely unlikely frontman in the shape of a singing Scottish bass player called George. I’m the best player by some distance, but the least experienced in the ways of gigging at the sharp end.
The Charge have a lucrative if perilous line in gigs at American army bases in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. We drive all over those counties, crammed into a battered Ford Transit, playing the Motown, Stax and James Brown hits of the day, the faster the better. As the evening wears on the GIs become more excited, more enthused and more pissed (in both the British and American senses of the term). If you’re the entertainment it’s better to stay onstage, because it’s safer onstage. It’s U.S. army regulation that a fight will break out at some point, so the longer you can keep playing and keep them distracted, the less likely you are to be dragged into the fray. The Charge play James Brown’s locomotive version of “Night Train” with suitable vigor.
Aged seventeen and not long out of school, I am fast developing some kind of staying power onstage. I also develop some leaving power, which comes in useful when The Charge’s keyboard player introduces me to a chap of his acquaintance named Trevor. He too plays keyboards—among other things, most notably perhaps “the pink oboe,” as Peter Cook put it. This Trevor frequents a Soho amusement arcade, a gay pick-up joint with added slot machines. He tells me that The Shevelles, a very popular gigging band in the fashionable London clubs, are looking for a drummer. Dennis Elliott is leaving them, and will in fact end up as the drummer in Foreigner.
At this point I’ll explore any, and every, opportunity. In The Charge I’m a professional musician in a semi-professional band. The other guys have day jobs; this is my day job. So the meager income—perhaps a fiver a week—has to be supplemented by my mum. She helps with the odd backhander so I can keep myself in gig tickets and take out girlfriends. Unlike my vow-of-silence dad, she’s very supportive. Still, my lack of a reliable source of income points to an uncomfortable reality: I’m stuck in a twilight zone between childhood and adulthood, between unemployed school leaver who still lives with his parents and occasionally busy drummer.
Not yet knowing the decadent side of Trevor, I decide to give him a go. He takes me to the Cromwellian Cocktail Bar & Discotheque in Kensington. Upstairs there’s a casino and bar, but the basement is a swinging sixties in-spot for the in-crowd. Up-and-coming musos fill the small stage—Elton John, when he’s plain Reg Dwight, gigs there with Bluesology—while visiting players will readily hop up for a jam. It’s also another gay pick-up joint, and I’m about to be firmly inducted into London’s sleazier side in one alarming evening.
As I’m sitting there in the buzzy gloom, waiting to jam with The Shevelles, The Animals’ Eric Burdon clambers up for a spot on the mic. I’m still reeling from the thrill of hearing the charismatic voice of “House of the Rising Sun” when a lanky dandy I immediately recognize as Long John Baldry slides up to our table.
“Hello, Trevor,” he purrs, taking a long, slow look at me, “who’s this?” A few minutes later, over wanders Chris Curtis, drummer with The Searchers. He says the same thing, and I begin to wonder if I’m really here for an audition of the musical kind.
Sure enough, The Shevelles come offstage and pack up. No audition. Trevor tries to sweeten the disappointment by inviting me back to his flat in Kensington. I’m dubious, but it is late, and it is a long way to the end of the line.
I go back to his place. One thing leads to another—that is, innocence develops into awkwardness. Because he has a flatmate, I have no option but to share Trevor’s bed. Terrified, I try to sleep, fitfully and fully dressed on top of the blankets. Presently, the fidgeting begins, and soon a hand is creeping over.
I’m out of there quicker than you can say “paradiddle.”
At this time I’m always open to an offer. I play the odd gig with The Cliff Charles Blues Band, who are pretty good but not about to set the world on fire, and I have a brief stint in a group called The Freehold. Another jobbing band with no real fixed talent.
The Freehold base ourselves in a small, seedy hotel in Russell Square in Bloomsbury. This is a bit of a muso hang, full of interesting permanent boarders such as the road crews for Jimi Hendrix and The Nice. Jimmy Savile also maintains a room here. A well-known face on TV and radio—he’d presented the very first episode of Top of the Pops in 1964—he’s rarely unaccompanied at the hotel. A stream of girls seem to ebb and flow around his room.
This hotel is also the place where I run into Tony Stratton-Smith for the first time. A decade earlier, in his former life as a sports journalist, he’d flown with Manchester United to play a European Cup fixture in Belgrade. The morning after the match he missed his alarm call and the flight. The plane crashed after a refueling stop at Munich airport, killing twenty-three of the forty-four people on board, and from that day onward Strat would always take the flight after the one that was booked for him.
He and I quickly become good friends, despite him insisting on calling me “Peelip.” Strat is a great and generous man, and becomes instrumental in my future, and the future of Genesis.
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br /> My time in The Freehold draws to an end almost as soon as it’s begun, mainly out of boredom on my part. I press on, chasing that elusive big break. Ronnie and I attend an audition for a band to back a British Four Tops–type outfit. We both get the gig, me on drums, Ronnie on bass, joining a keyboard player called Brian Chatton and a guitarist named “Flash” Gordon Smith.
The four of us call ourselves Hickory, while the vocal group are dubbed The Gladiators. It soon becomes apparent that the players are better than the singers, so us players decide to hive off and make a go of it on our own.
Via a lot of graft and some luck, it looks like I am finally in a real band with real prospects. Suitably inspired, I embark on something I have studiously avoided until now: trying to write a song.
One day at home in Hounslow I start messing about on the piano in the back room. I hover around D minor—which, as any Spinal Tap fan knows, is the saddest chord of all—and pick through some lyrical ideas. I am wracked with imaginary heartbreak at the prospect of losing Lavinia.
Soon I think I have something. “Can’t you see it’s no ordinary love that I feel for you deep inside? / It’s been building up inside of me and it’s something that I just can’t hide / Why did you leave me lying there, crying there, dying there…”
This is “Lying, Crying, Dying,” and it is the first song seventeen-year-old Peelip Collins has ever written. I’m pretty pleased with my creation, so much so that I make another leap: I decide I want to sing it, too.
Hickory book a recording session at Regent Sound, a cheap basement studio in Denmark Street. We record four tracks, including my ink-still-wet-on-the-page composition.
Back in west London, I visit Bruce Rowland. He’s the son of my old elocution teacher, Hilda; a year from now he’ll play with Joe Cocker at the era-defining Woodstock festival and thereafter become the drummer with Fairport Convention. I will buy his Gretsch drums, a kit I have to this day.
As he’s a drummer, a few years older than me and clearly destined for great things, I regularly visit Bruce for words of wisdom and encouragement. He plays me “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” by The Four Tops, instructing me to “listen to the groove. Beautiful. Just beautiful.” He introduces me to The Grateful Dead’s double live album Live Dead, which features two drummers, something else that will come to play a role in my life some years later.
Cautiously, I play Bruce a tape of Hickory’s recording of “Lying, Crying, Dying.” To my huge relief he announces that he loves it. More than that, he loves my voice. “You should sing, not drum,” says Bruce. No one has previously commended me on my singing voice, probably because hardly anyone has heard it post my Oliver! days. This is a lovely aside, but that’s all I view it as. I’m a drummer, not a singer.
And I am, temporarily, a songwriter. Not that I know it at the time, but with my very first song I’ve shown my hand: I’ve demonstrated that I have a talent for writing sad songs, and that I enjoy dwelling on matters melancholy. The lyrics are fairly average but they’re straight from the heart.
Through another friend of another friend, we come into the orbit of a pop group called Brotherhood of Man. With a different line-up they will win the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest with “Save Your Kisses for Me.” However, in 1969 John Goodison is a member and writer. At his encouragement, we go into a studio owned by CBS Records, and record a nondescript pop ditty, “Green Light.” It’s our first experience in a proper studio, and we’re recording a single. It looks like I’ve finally hit the big time.
If only. “Green Light” hits a brick wall but, undaunted, Hickory continue gigging around London, playing dodgy clubs and performing mostly covers like Joe Cocker’s “Do I Still Figure in Your Life,” “I Can’t Let Maggie Go” by Honeybus and Tim Hardin’s “Hang On to a Dream” and “Reason to Believe.”
Hickory rehearse on Eel Pie Island, in the ballroom of the hotel, near the Converted Cruiser Club’s premises. Just as Mum’s friendship with the hotel’s owner facilitated this choice berth for the club, so it gives our band access to the best sprung dance floor in all of England. We can’t dance, but we do rehearse a lot.
One day two distinguished, rather spiffily dressed older gents come to see the four of us. Songwriters Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley are Hampstead-dwelling habitués of the swinging London scene. These movers, shakers and ravers have written all the key songs for The Herd, featuring a young Peter Frampton, and for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Hits, lots of hits—“The Legend of Xanadu,” “Bend It” and many more. They’re regulars at a club on Soho’s Wardour Street, La Chasse. It’s a musicians’ drinking haunt, popular because it’s a few doors down from the Marquee. All the guys from the bands gather there, crowded into a modest, living-room-sized space in front of the bar—or, in the case of Keith Moon, behind the bar.
When he isn’t drumming with The Who, Moonie seems to like playing barman in La Chasse. I buy a round from him one night, and he gives me back more money than I’d handed over. Another reason to love him.
Brian Chatton, Hickory’s keyboard player, a very good-looking chap from Bolton, lives in the West End and is a regular in La Chasse. Always possessed of an eye for fresh talent, Howard and Blaikley gravitate toward him.
One night over their gin and tonics, Howard and Blaikley mention to Brian that they’re writing a concept album. Ark 2 concerns the evacuation of a dying Earth, which is a very current topic here at the twilight of the sixties: men are flying to the moon; the space race is in full flight; a lot of people are very high. This rocket-powered pair have the songs; they just need the musicians to perform them. Brian does the decent thing and invites them to come see his band.
Now, here they are on Eel Pie Island, watching Hickory go through our paces. We’re nervous to be auditioning for such well-connected chaps. Prior to now, my early optimism at the band’s prospects has quickly slid into pessimism—“Lying, Crying, Dying” was never anything more than a demo and, again, we seem to be going nowhere. But here are two Svengali figures with the potential to fly us to the moon.
Howard and Blaikley like what they hear and, with little fanfare it seems, Hickory have bagged the job of being the interstellar vehicle for their space-age song suite. We agree to climb aboard even before we’ve heard any of the songs.
Ronnie, Brian, Flash and I travel to a beautiful corner of old Hampstead to hear the demos of Ark 2. Howard and Blaikley’s home is quite the sixties luxury dwelling, an immaculate bachelor-pad townhouse with a rolling roof garden. It will prove the perfect vantage point from which to stare at the moon on the night of July 20/21, 1969, the night Neil Armstrong makes his small step/giant leap.
Their demos are, to say the least, rough, a fact not helped by Howard and Blaikley’s rather poor singing voices. The material sounds florid and camp in a “rock musical” way. It only adds to my rapidly growing skepticism—to my mind, the whole “concept” is a bit schoolboy. Next to The Who’s magisterial Tommy, released that May, Ark 2 risks looking a bit, well, daft.
But we are a no-hope band who’ve suddenly been thrown a lifeline by two guys with several number 1 singles under the belts of their chinoiserie robes. With Brian and Flash at the vocal helm—they’re both great singers—and Ronnie and I providing a finely tuned musical engine, Hickory are confident we can give this project lift-off.
We record at De Lane Lea Studios in Holborn under the watchful eyes of producers Howard and Blaikley. Arranger Harold Geller is second in command and has worked with the duo many times. Brian and Flash sing most of the songs, although I land one of the Planets Suite, a music-hall-style interlude called “Jupiter: Bringer of Jollity,” and am front and center on “Space Child.” Howard and Blaikley change our name to Flaming Youth, which is a phrase taken from a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The temper of our youth has become more restless, more critical, more challenging. Flaming youth has become a flaming question,” the thirty-second President of the United States told the Baltimore Young Democratic Club in 1
936.
Ark 2 is unveiled with a publicity-stunt launch at London’s Planetarium. The sixties scenesters come in two-by-two. By now I’m squirming at all this ultra-fab cod-psychedelia; it’s both pretentious and cartoonish. As a headstrong eighteen-year-old, I also bristle at Howard and Blaikley’s tendency to treat us as their creation, a prefab-four entirely of their making.
But to our pleasant surprise the record gets good reviews. In Melody Maker it’s even October 1969’s Album of the Month (“adult music beautifully played with nice tight harmonies”), beating the month’s other notable release, Led Zeppelin II. It won’t be the last time I’m blamed for spoiling things for Led Zeppelin.
It even does well internationally. Well, the Dutch like it, so much so that Flaming Youth travel to Amsterdam to record a five-song performance. It’s my first time abroad, my first time performing on-screen, but not my first time actually playing in front of cameras—the whole thing is mimed.
In Amsterdam, Howard and Blaikley take us round their favorite haunts. These bring their own surprises, including my first encounter with a transvestite. I thought London was swinging; it has nothing on Holland’s party capital. Despite my concerns about the music we’re being forced to play, I can’t deny that Ark 2 is propelling me into interesting new worlds.
Yet despite the good notices, and the enthusiasm from the Netherlands, Ark 2 doesn’t make much difference to the fortunes of Flaming Youth. We rehearse till we’re blue in the face, finessing a new direction suggestive of Yes-type arranged pop. But we’re also a good solid rock band, at our best onstage. However, we’re performing less and less, and what shows we do play are gigs of two halves: one half consists of smart arrangements of interesting things—The Vanilla Fudge version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “With a Little Help from My Friends” à la Joe Cocker, and one of my favorite Beatles songs, “I’m Only Sleeping,” plus some of our own material—and the other half is Ark 2. Live, the album is not so much rocket-powered as a damp squib. The audiences are as puzzled as we are. The future viability of Flaming Youth has become the flaming question.
