by Phil Collins
I can see the end is coming, so I start putting my nose about, seeing what else is out there. I’ll take Ronnie with me if I can find the right thing for both of us. But, equally, I’ll go it alone if I find the right drummer-only opening. So far my professional musical career, such as it is, has involved a lot of me saying yes to any and all opportunities, only to be frustrated at the outcomes. It’s time to get a bit more pushily proactive.
I become a professional auditioner, forever scouring the “musicians wanted” notices in the back pages of Melody Maker. If the ad is in there, the act has some integrity. I try out fruitlessly for Vinegar Joe, future home of Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks. I fail to impress Manfred Mann Chapter Three, serial bandleader Mann’s jazz-rock experimentalists. I even give it a go with The Bunch, a working but nondescript band based in Bournemouth.
Well, in the case of the latter, I don’t quite give it a go: when I find out over the phone that they’re based on the English south coast, I tell them I can’t come because my mum doesn’t like me to travel. Lord knows what they thought of me. “London ponce” or “mummy’s boy,” probably. I couldn’t think of a better excuse. It didn’t occur to me that I’d just been to Holland. In truth, I didn’t fancy the long train journey with my drums.
There’s a sense of jittery urgency about me, but also a sense of not knowing which way to turn. I’ve been first in line, I’ve been down the front at the Marquee, I’ve seen all the top acts of the day. I’ve been that close to all these incendiary new talents—The Who, Hendrix, Page, Plant, Bonham, Beck—and often at the beginnings of their careers. I’ve touched the hems of their bell-bottoms. So near yet so far.
I’ve put myself about and stuck my neck out. When Yes play at the Marquee in front of fifty hardy souls, I go backstage during the intermission because I’ve heard Bill Bruford is about to go back to Leeds University. Frontman Jon Anderson gives me his number, but I never bother to call. I don’t know why, but I often wonder: how would my life have been if I’d said yes to the Yes audition?
As the seventies dawn, and with it the end of my first year of adulthood, I’m foraging for food, money and a future. I’ve been in a few bands, none of which have come to anything. I’m hungry, but I’m still stuck in Hounslow and all that goes with living at the end of the line. Underlining the emptiness of my existence is the fact that I’m by now home alone.
While my life has been inching along, there have been major changes at 453 Hanworth Road. Not to put too fine a point on it, but everyone’s buggered off and the Collins family has disintegrated. Clive and Carole have their own grown-up lives, and my parents’ relationship has ground to a halt. Mum has been spending increasing amounts of time at Barbara Speake’s house, closer to work. Dad is looking forward to retiring, and the moment when he can finally grow a beard. He is a frequent visitor to Weston-super-Mare, and is spending long weekends there. It’s a place he grew to love during the war, when the family were relocated by London Assurance and he was stationed there as part of the local detachment of Dad’s Army, the Home Guard.
So, while I technically have a place to stay, my soul has no fixed abode.
I gotta get out of this place. But how?
Then a Beatle throws me a bone.
Or: (don’t) meet The Beatles
When opportunity knocks, I’m just climbing out of the bath in the house I grew up in. It’s a quiet Thursday afternoon, I’m living alone most of the time in the otherwise deserted Collins family home, and the most I have to look forward to is Top of the Pops on the telly and beans on toast for tea. I might watch TV and eat my dinner in my underpants. Because I can. It is May 1970, I am nineteen, and the swinging sixties have very much ended. Roll on the soggy seventies.
Still, I remain a minor star in Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley’s orbit. They’re friendly with a guy called Martin, another acquaintance from La Chasse, who happens to be Ringo Starr’s chauffeur. One night at the club Martin asks Blaikley if he knows any good percussionists. “Sure,” says Blaikley, “I’ll find someone.”
Blaikley calls me as I’m still dripping from the bath. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Well, Top of the Pops is on…” I reply, hedging my bets. Right now, seeing bands promoting their singles on the televised weekly chart rundown is the closest I’m getting to live performance.
“Forget that. Do you want to go to Abbey Road for a session?”
He offers no details of the artist hosting the session, but at just the mention of Abbey Road, I’m suddenly not so uninterested. Doesn’t matter who it is. I can see where The Beatles recorded…McCartney announced that he was leaving the band only a few weeks previously, and his first solo album, McCartney, has just come out. The end of the Fab Four is all anyone is talking about. Let It Be, The Beatles’ swan song, is barely in the shops and already there is feverish discussion in the music press of the first post-Beatles solo album.
But thinking on my feet while dripping in my towel, my mind isn’t going there. At this point in my stop-start, still stubbornly embryonic music career, this is a chance to demonstrate my drumming chops to an artist good enough to be booked into Abbey Road. I’m a jobbing drummer without a job, and this is a job.
“What time do you want me there?”
I get dressed for the occasion, which means a T-shirt over jeans. I am a nineteen-year-old long-hair, and this is my look. I call a cab, jump in and am extraordinarily pleased to be able to utter the immortal line: “Abbey Road, please, driver.”
When I arrive, Martin the chauffeur is standing on the steps of the studio in St. John’s Wood, northwest London. “Come in, come in, we’ve been waiting for you.”
“Really? Me?” I wonder. “And who’s this ‘we’ he’s referring to?”
He takes me in and we make small talk. “They’ve been here four weeks,” he says. “They’ve spent a thousand pounds. And they haven’t recorded anything.”
I’m thinking, “Wow, this must be serious.”
I walk into Abbey Road Studio Two, and into a scene that is now famous. The cast of this mystery session are in the middle of a photo shoot, meaning everyone involved is lined up: George Harrison with his long hair (I’m feeling good about my hair at this moment); Ringo Starr; producer Phil Spector; legendary Beatles road manager Mal Evans; a couple of members of Badfinger; artist-turned-bassist Klaus Voormann; Hammond virtuoso Billy Preston; stellar pedal steel guitar player Peter Drake; and Beatles engineers Ken Scott and Phil McDonald.
Later I will memorize the personnel on these sessions, and realize that there’s no Ginger Baker at this point. I also learn later that Eric Clapton probably left as I was arriving.
The penny drops: George is in the process of making that first post-Beatles solo album, and I am suddenly in the middle of it. Well, on the edge of it.
Everyone stops talking as I come in. I’m on the receiving end of a collective quizzical frown: Who’s this kid?
Chauffeur Martin pipes up: “The percussionist’s here.”
I don’t really know my expected role in the proceedings, but “percussionist” sounds OK to me, even if I don’t really consider myself exactly that. Anyway, there’s no time to quibble, because now George is actually speaking to me: “Sorry, man,” he drawls in that familiar Scouse burr, “you haven’t been here long enough to be in the photograph.” I laugh nervously, a little embarrassed.
Am I quaking in my bell-bottom jeans? Let’s just say I’m confident but I’m not cocky. I know I have a job ahead of me, firstly impressing this gang, and secondly playing percussion well—a skill that has nothing to do with playing the drums well. Percussion can mean a lot of different things, encompassing as it does congas, bongos, tambourine and more. It’s not just a question of hitting something different; they each have an art to them. I already know that, but I’ll soon find out the finer points.
The vibe is…relaxed. No highly trained EMI boffins in white lab-coats, yet no sign of anything being smoked either. I later read about ho
w George had set up an incense area, but I don’t smell anything unusual.
The photo shoot completed, everyone resumes their positions. I’m led upstairs to the control room, the very same one in which George Martin sat during the landmark Our World broadcast in 1967, when The Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” to 400 million viewers. Sitting in the same producer’s chair is Spector. We’re introduced, and he’s polite if hardly chatty. The shades stay on. At least there’s no gun. Not that I can see anyway.
Back down the stairs and Mal Evans, with his big glasses and his early mop-top fringe haircut—even The Beatles’ roadies were heroes—shows me to my spot. “Here’s your congas, kid, next to Ringo’s drums.”
I’m looking at those drums. I want to touch those drums. Feel those drums. If I thought I could have got away with resting my cheek on the skins, I would have. How does Ringo mic his kit? Ooh, towel over the snare—that’s interesting.
To me, Ringo’s a great drummer. In this period he’d been taking a lot of flak. But I always thought, and still do, that that stuff he played was magical. It wasn’t luck. He had an incredible feel. And he knows this. Years later, when I properly meet him, I’ll tell him that I’m a supporter. Back then though, Buddy Rich was dissing him, and even Lennon was putting him down.
That was great, eh? The world hearing that you’re not even the best drummer in The Beatles. I remember reading an interview in Modern Drummer—I used to get it religiously—where Ringo said how people would refer to “Ringo’s funny little drum fills.” He’d get annoyed at that, quite rightly. “They aren’t funny little drum fills. They’re quite serious,” he’d say. You listen to “A Day in the Life,” and it’s really fantastic, complicated, unusual, unorthodox. Not nearly as simple as he makes it appear. So I’ve got my Ringo hat and I will gladly put it on when needed.
Anyway, Abbey Road, a Thursday evening in late spring/early summer 1970. I’ve got my congas, and Ringo’s on my right, and Billy Preston’s on my left. And somewhere over there are George and Klaus. We’re going to record a song called “Art of Dying.”
“Well, shall we play Phil the song first?” No one says that. Not George, not Ringo, not Spector. Something else no one says: “Here’s the sheet music, Phil. That’s how it goes, and that’s where you come in.” George doesn’t come over and do that. He doesn’t hand me anything. He’s over there, doing his thing, getting his head together, whatever.
Instead, all I hear is: “One, two, three, four!”
After an initial, fairly tentative take, I make a mistake. Unfortunately, it won’t be my last. I don’t really smoke cigarettes anymore but I’m that nervous, and that keen to fit in, that I say to Billy Preston, “Could I have a fag?”
“Sure, kid.”
Soon I’m chain-smoking. I take a couple from Billy and ponce a couple from Ringo. I don’t feel so good, and not just because I’m quickly puffing my way through the best part of a packet. I sense I’m really getting on everybody’s nerves. Years later I was due to present a gong to Ringo at the Mojo Awards, and I had a packet of Marlboros ready for him. Unfortunately I fell sick and couldn’t make the ceremony. So I still owe Ringo those fags.
Before long Billy is yelling at me. “Fuck, man, buy a pack of cigarettes!” Well, that’s what his look says. It’s the only really awkward moment during the whole thing. At least, I thought it was.
The evening wears on. We’re playing and playing, and I’m puffing and puffing (and poncing and poncing). I have headphones on, and hear Spector’s instructions: “OK, let’s hear the guitars, bass and drums only…Now the bass, keyboards and drums only…”
Presumably this is how he made those wonderful records. And every time he says “drums,” I play. I prefer to err on the side of caution than risk having the famously combustible (not to mention trigger-happy) Spector shout at me: “Why aren’t you playing, man?” So I play, and keep playing. Because I’m not a percussionist, and because of the anxiety, I probably over-play. So I’m giving it. After an hour my hands are in some state. Red raw, blistered. I’d have similar session experiences much later, with Elton John’s preferred percussionist Ray Cooper, a great player who can really push it, then push it some more. There was blood on the walls. No wonder Elton loves him.
A dozen takes, and I’ve still not been asked to play something particular. So I’ve just played what I thought was appropriate. I keep playing, and playing, and playing. All this time I’m not getting any feedback from Spector, which is a little bit disconcerting. But I’m just trying to fit in, look cool, not drop the ball, or the beat.
At one point Chauffeur Martin comes over. “Everything all right, Phil?”
“Yeah, yeah, great…Got a cigarette?”
Finally, after running countless times through “Art of Dying,” I hear the fateful words from Spector. “OK, guys. Congas—can you play this time?” I don’t even have a name. Worse, he’s not even heard me. Not once.
I’m standing there, looking at my bleeding hands, probably a bit dizzy with all the cigs, and I’m thinking, “Spector, you bastard. My hands are completely shot, and you haven’t even been listening to me.”
Billy and Ringo, positioned each side of me, laugh. I can see they feel for me. They know how hard I’ve been working, and they must understand how nervous this teenage kid is. How nervous he must have been all evening. To be so enthusiastic, and then to be so cruelly shot down.
But at least that breaks the ice, and we play it a few more times. And then everyone disappears. Just like that. I go out and I call Lavinia from the pay phone in the foyer. “You’ll never guess where I am? Abbey Road! With The Beatles!” What I’m really saying is: “I can’t believe my fucking luck. You’re really going to want to get frisky with me after this!” Sore hands? What sore hands?
I saunter back into the empty studio. It’s like the Mary Celeste in here. George, Ringo, Billy, Klaus, Mal—gone. Clearly there’s a party going on somewhere, and clearly I’m not invited. Then Chauffeur Martin appears. “Oh, I think that’s it for the night. I think they’re going to watch the football,” he says, indicating the lure of an England match on the telly.
I manage a saddened bleat: “I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone…” No opportunity to say, “Thanks, Ringo. Thank you, George, here’s my number. Billy, if you’re ever in town…” Nothing like that. It’s only Chauffeur Martin, saying to me, “Do you need a cab somewhere?”
It’s dark when I leave. I make the long journey home, remembering every note of the session clearly. My hands are still throbbing and bloody, but I am a nineteen-year-old wannabe musician and I have recorded at Abbey Road. With The Beatles. OK, with half of them. But still.
A few weeks later, I get the check in the mail. It’s from EMI, it’s for £15 and it’s for services to Mr. George Harrison, on the making of the album All Things Must Pass. I would have kept the check as a souvenir had I not needed the money so badly.
The next step is to pre-order the record. I go to my local record store in Hounslow, Memory Discs. “I want to order the George Harrison album, All Things Must Pass. I’m on it, you know?” I don’t say that. I don’t think I said it. But I wouldn’t have put it past me.
Then, after an interminable wait, late that November, the phone rings. “Hello, Mr. Collins? It’s Memory Discs. Your record’s in.” Yeah, it is my record. And it’s in the shops, at last.
I could walk there, but this is urgent. So I get the bus—110, 111, 120, doesn’t matter, all of them pass the record shop. I buy the record, and it’s beautiful. That lovely, triple-album, box-set packaging. I come out of the shop, and I’m turning it in my hands, thinking, “Inside here…is me…on a Beatle’s album.”
Standing on the pavement I open it up. I race through the credits. Klaus Voormann…Ginger Baker…Billy Preston…Ringo Starr…They’re all present and correct, the cats I saw in the studio that night, and more besides, from Eric to Ginger to future Yes drummer Alan White and Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys. Everyone
is there. Everyone but me. Must be some mistake. My name’s not there. They’ve left me off.
This is a crushing disappointment. I’m devastated. Then I perk up. Oh well, never mind, I’ll go home and have a listen. If I can’t see myself on the sleeve, at least I’ll hear myself in the grooves. But as soon as the needle hits the record and the song starts, I know I’m not on “Art of Dying.” They’ve not even used the arrangement I worked on. Oh my God. What’s going on?
At this time, the concept of recording different versions of songs is unknown to me. Yes, I’d made Ark 2 with Flaming Youth. But that aside, I’m a young shaver who’s barely been in any recording studios, far less the most famous recording studio in the world, with the most famous American producer in the world, with two Beatles. I didn’t know that multiple arrangements are meat and potatoes to Phil Spector. “We’re gonna have to abort last week’s session, I gotta new idea…”
I’ve gone from soaring high to crashing low.
It’s not like I’ve been thinking, “I’m going to hear from George Harrison daily. When he goes on the road as a solo artist, I’m going to be his drummer. Or, at least, his bloke on the congas.” But at least All Things Must Pass would be on my CV, surely?
That kind of experience, that kind of validation, is hugely important to me. Forget Oliver!, or the fact that I was on the books at an agency as a serious child actor. I coulda been a contender, but acting didn’t interest me. All I want to be is a drummer, and I duly have my life mapped out in my head: pop for as long as it lasts, then The Ray McVay Show Band every Friday and Saturday at the Lyceum. Maybe some recording sessions, if I learn to read music, then the orchestra pit.
Then: I get the call to play with a Beatle on his first post-Beatles solo album. Forget the pit, and the pendulum of show-band gigs and tea-dance bookings. I was going to be a proper drummer!
