Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  Green already has his June: Julie Walters, the talented and much-loved British actress and comedian. She won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, and was Oscar-nominated, for the title role in 1983’s Educating Rita. Her involvement is a mark of approval on this project, and overcomes any lingering doubts I have.

  One of my first tasks is to take a false nose for a test-drive. The real Buster had terrible cosmetic surgery when he was on the run in Europe. The idea is that I’ll start the film with a fake nose, then it’ll come off and my real nose will act as the post-surgery nose for the bulk of the action. Still with me? This makes sense for the filming, but does suggest that my real nose is deemed to be rather comedic. I try not to take offense. We actors have to have thick skins, darling.

  Immediately after I emerge from make-up, a lunch is organized at Wembley Studios for producer Norma Heyman, David Green, Julie and me. Still wearing the prosthetic nose, this is the first time I meet Julie, and the idea is to see if we can connect. She’s pleased to meet me and my fake nose, and I instantly fall for her. She’s so attractively funny, all her genius Acorn Antiques and Wood and Walters sketches flooding fondly back. But a little bit of “falling” is OK, because leading men and women need to have chemistry, right? Enthralled by such an experienced actress, and a lovely one at that, I’m secretly anxious as to whether my old acting skills will be up to scratch. I don’t want to let Julie down.

  As if the mortification of having to meet her wearing a dodgy false nose isn’t enough, Green and Heyman suggest that we dive into a rehearsal. Specifically, the rehearsal of a kissing scene. Under normal circumstances this would probably please me no end. But as there wasn’t much kissing required in Oliver! or Calamity the Cow, I don’t know how you stage-kiss. What are the parameters? Are there tongues? And what happens if my nose falls off?

  As I’m trying to get my head, and my lips, and my nostrils, round this, the director is leaning in, barking instructions: “Harder…closer…you’re married, remember…watch the nose!” Green and Heyman are shouting at me from about a foot away. This is all very intimidating.

  Finally, we’re done, and without Julie being too traumatized. Luckily, the nose is blown and we do the film without it.

  This is when Danny Gillen enters my life. Belfast-born and a big man with a big heart, he’s hired to pick me up every morning at 5:30 in West Sussex, drive me to the locations in various parts of London and look after me throughout the day—not least to make sure none of Buster’s old “pals” decide to come say hello—then drive me back home. We become inseparable friends throughout all this, and remain watertight to this day. From Buster onward there will be many experiences, and not a few scrapes—involving everything from paparazzi to over-eager fans to junkie Australian burglars—that I will only manage with the tireless help of Danny.

  I must confess that I find the part of Buster Edwards easy to play. I suppose he’s an extension of The Artful Dodger, a cockney wide-boy. But there are tempests off-screen.

  Overnight between October 15 and 16, 1987, a huge storm batters England. That night at Lakers Lodge I feel the sturdy Georgian house shaking and the apocalyptic crashes of trees being blown down. I lose about twenty in all, but other people are far, far worse off—across the country an estimated 15 million trees are felled and, in modern money, £5 billion-worth of damage is done.

  The next morning Danny and I can’t drive to the film set in London as most of the roads in rural Sussex are blocked by fallen trees. Finally, late in the afternoon, we manage to find a way through, and the scenes that meet our eyes are horrific: trees broken like matches, even in central London, destroyed houses, flattened cars, lives uprooted everywhere. We try to do our best with the scenes that day, but everyone’s head is somewhere else: most of the cast and crew have suffered damage to their houses and they’re trying to reach relatives, emergency services, utilities companies and insurers.

  In the end we reshoot the scene a few months later, by which time Julie is almost seven months pregnant. But we manage to act around the elephant in the room.

  The producers didn’t want me to meet Buster himself before filming, lest I become confused in my portrayal; the script is, after all, a bit of a fairy-tale-cum-sitcom telling of his life. I do, however, briefly encounter him before we start, at the pre-shoot soirée where the cast and crew get to know each other. That lack of familiarity does mean there are a couple of key missteps in the film. I play him as a keen smoker, as it seemed everybody smoked in the sixties; plus it gives me something to do with my hands when we’re filming. But I discover that Buster was the only one not smoking in the sixties. Much worse, there’s a scene in Mexico where I smack June/Julie. When he sees this, Buster is appalled. “I’d never do that to my June,” he says to me, rightly offended.

  More broadly, ultimately Buster and June consider the film to be nothing like their real life—Buster confided in me that it was not as Lavender Hill Mob as it was written.

  Buster’s partner-in-crime Bruce Reynolds attends the same cast and crew party, and later occasionally drops by as we film on location. We become quite friendly and one day, when we’re shooting at a place similar to Leatherslade Farm, where the real robbers holed up after the crime, Bruce sidles over and whispers, “This is a choice place, Phil. I’ll have to remember this address.” It seems he’s still open for business.

  Meanwhile, the soundtrack to Buster has been encountering its own turbulence. The film-makers’ first thought is to ask me to sing the theme song. They want the Phil Collins package: actor, singer, writer. I’m firm. “No, I don’t want people to think of me as a singer when they see me acting.” I’m taking this job seriously. It’s going to be a tough enough gig without my band/pop persona elbowing its way onto the screen.

  I offer some alternatives. I know some people who can provide authentic period music. I’ve just met one of my heroes, Lamont Dozier of Holland-Dozier-Holland Motown fame, on the No Jacket Required tour. He came backstage in LA and we exchanged love and phone numbers, and vows to work together. Beatles producer George Martin is a good friend of mine, too.

  For some unknown reason the producers seem underwhelmed by the idea of George, but Lamont they like. So I ask the Motown legend and he agrees to write some songs. He flies to Acapulco, where we’re filming scenes from Buster’s exile, bringing with him a couple of musical sketches: an instrumental with a title, “Loco in Acapulco,” but no lyrics, and another piece which has neither title nor lyrics. Overnight I write the lyrics to both, give the second a title, “Two Hearts,” then go up to Lamont’s hotel room and sing them to him.

  “Well,” Lamont says, smiling, “you’re going to have to sing them now, they’re your songs…”

  As it’s to be placed in the middle of the film, I refuse to sing “Loco in Acapulco.” I eventually ask The Four Tops, and produce them with Lamont. I have the unnerving job of singing the melody to Levi Stubbs, one of the most incredible voices of the sixties. I come under heavy pressure, however, to sing “Two Hearts.” Eventually I say, “OK, but it’s not going to be before the end credits, is it? I want people to decide whether I can act before they hear me singing.”

  Then, I shoot myself in the foot. I say, “We also need a love song from that period somewhere, something Buster and June might hear on the radio—a crooner like Andy Williams singing a ballad like, say, ‘A Groovy Kind of Love.’ ”

  “Great idea, Phil!”

  “Yeah, but not me,” I clarify, panicked.

  “OK, but can you give us a demo of it, so we know what you mean?”

  I call Tony Banks and ask him for the chords of the song, record a quick half-hour demo version, then send it to the producers.

  “This is fantastic, Phil!”

  “But you’ll get someone else to sing it, right?”

  “Sure we will.”

  I go to see a rough cut of the film and there it is, my demo, playing over a romantic goodbye kiss between Julie and me. I protest. But because it works so w
ell in the film, I’m stuck with it. So we re-record “A Groovy Kind of Love,” with orchestral maestro Anne Dudley producing, and that version is released as a single.

  To paraphrase a far greater sixties-set British film: I was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off…Instead I end up with another number 1 single in the U.K. and the U.S., and a lot more stick for doing another middle-of-the-road sixties cover, even if it was just a project for a movie.

  But, in the scheme of things, so what? After the film comes out in November 1988, I’m pleased to see Buster Edwards become a different kind of folk hero. He and June are a lovely couple, and they become firm friends of Jill and I, visiting Lakers Lodge a couple of times a year. When Buster commits suicide in 1994, I’m devastated. The tabloids run terrible stories about him, but my feeling is he was just depressed and bored. He’d say to me, “Fuck, Phil, I’m selling flowers outside Waterloo Station. None of the excitement of the old days…”

  Buster is a classic minor Brit-flick: a nostalgic, romantic romp in a swinging-sixties period setting that does well at the U.K. box office. Julie and I paired together was great casting, and I’m thrilled at the experience. Finally, my first lead role.

  Before its release, my performance receives decent advance notices, so I’m pleased to be able to do something with this new-found (and no doubt fleeting) cinematic clout. In another part of my life, I’m still a trustee of The Prince’s Trust. Having become quite close to Prince Charles and the Princess of Wales, I do the obvious and invite them to attend the opening of the film in aid of the Trust.

  But then the tabloid press kick in. During the Great Train Robbery one of the gang coshed the train driver, Jack Mills. He died seven years later, but people said he was never the same after the robbery. The newspapers run stories along the lines of “Royal Film Glorifies Violence,” and suddenly there’s an embarrassed back-pedaling.

  One night I arrive home from performing “A Groovy Kind of Love” on Top of the Pops and Jill says, “There was a phone call for you. You have to call Buckingham Palace.” Blimey. Clearing my throat and putting on a shirt and tie, I dial the number given, ask for this or that equerry—“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Collins”—and am put through to Prince Charles.

  “I’m ever so sorry,” says Prince Charles in that Prince Charles way. “It’s stupid, a stupid fuss about nothing, but Diana and I can’t come.”

  Postscript: Buster tanks at the U.S. box office. They don’t know Buster Edwards from Buster Keaton, or the Great Train Robbery from Casey Jones. But the soundtrack gets some love at the Grammys—“Two Hearts” wins the award for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television and is also nominated for an Oscar. And at the Golden Globes in 1989, the year of A Fish Called Wanda, this means John Cleese is in the audience, nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

  Bounding onstage at the Globes in LA to collect the award for “Two Hearts” (Best Original Song), I say, “This is fantastic for me. This is actually from a British movie called Buster that sank without a trace, mainly because of the company that was distributing it. But as I always say, forgive and forget. Or at least pretend to.”

  Hearing this, one voice pipes up, laughing. It’s Cleese, recognizing one of his Basil Fawlty lines. That makes my night: I’ve made John Cleese laugh.

  Or: current affairs, and an actual affair

  My 1989 album …But Seriously has that title for a couple of reasons. For one thing, on March 18 that year, Jill gives birth to our daughter Lily. I’m suddenly enveloped all over again in feelings of parental responsibility and doting fatherhood. I’m looking inward at my family, but I’m also looking outward at the world in which Lily will grow up.

  These thoughts are mirrored in the songs I’ve been writing. “Another Day in Paradise,” “That’s Just the Way It Is” (both of which will feature the wonderful David Crosby singing with me), “Colours” and “Heat on the Street”: four socially and politically engaged songs about, respectively, the homeless, apartheid, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and inner-city unrest. You can divine my state of mind by my expression on the cover art, which, as ever, features nothing more than my face. I’m wearing my heart, and my seriousness, on my album sleeve.

  Still, when I look at that cover now, I think, “Why the long face, Phil? Did you perhaps have a sense of a gathering emotional storm?”

  In making these rare forays into “issue”-based writing, I wanted to sound like me. I didn’t want to sound like Paul McCartney sounded when we recorded his song “Angry,” a little self-conscious and barely committed.

  Post–Live Aid, I was invited down to Paul’s East Sussex farm to play on his new album. I didn’t know what he was looking for, only that Hugh Padgham, who was producing this new McCartney record, had suggested me to Paul to give the music a bit of a kick.

  Pete Townshend also got the call, so he and I arrive to guest on what would become Macca’s 1986 album Press to Play. I’m loath to use the dreaded eighties phrase “conscience rock,” but the three of us are switched on, engaged, mature men of the world. We’ve all been around the block, and around some of the planet’s biggest stadiums. Us millionaire musos, we know all about despair, poverty and injustice. We must do. We’ve all done Live Aid.

  In the studio Macca declares, “When I was doing Live Aid, I felt angry. And I wanted to write a song about it. I felt I should be angry about something. So I wrote this song. It’s called ‘Angry.’ ”

  At best, you might say it’s a very sixties attitude. I’m thinking, “Either you’re committed about something, or you’re not.” I like McCartney—he was a hero of mine growing up—but he’s got a few quirky issues. He’s very aware when you’re talking to him that he’s a Beatle, and that it must be hard for whoever’s doing the talking.

  Here at the fag-end of the eighties, this is still very much the era of rock’n’politics. Sting, Bono, Peter: they’re known for flying the flag, beating the drum, fighting the good fight, for the right cause. Or causes, plural. Fair play to those guys, and huge respect to those causes.

  I’m happy to stand up and be counted when asked. My enthusiasm for, and commitment to, the work of The Prince’s Trust is a passion of forty-odd years’ standing. But generally I do not feel confident enough, or smart enough, to lead the charge on this or that campaign. To my mind, if you’re going to do that, you have to be prepared to offer ideas and solutions, and answer hard questions. To be an activist, you have to be fully engaged with the issue. That’s not what I’m good at.

  Case in point: during my 2004–5 First Final Farewell tour, I have consecutive gigs in Beirut and Tel Aviv. But due to the situation on the ground in the Middle East, we can’t fly direct from Lebanon to Israel; we have to fly via Cyprus. There are important issues at play here about a conflict that is both ongoing and millennia old. But I’m just a rock person, in town to play some tunes to the faithful. What am I going to add to the debate? Yet when we arrive in Tel Aviv, I’m reluctantly led into a press conference. Standing in front of popping flash bulbs, I feel out of my depth.

  “What did they say about Israel in Beirut?”

  “Um,” I pause, “they didn’t say anything.”

  The questions, and my responses, are all along those lines. It’s a ludicrous situation. So I scrupulously try to avoid any sense of offering my half-cocked tuppence-worth.

  I’d rather do it in my smaller, more personal way, in song. And I’m the first to hold my hands up and say that my lyrical jabs at this on …But Seriously are pretty basic, possibly naive. But then again, sometimes a clear-cut, straight-ahead viewing of things isn’t a bad way to go. It’s how a lot of people think. Occasionally, the obvious way is the right way, the last thing anybody thinks of.

  I can’t remember what the …But Seriously reviews were like. Probably not very good, as was coming to be the pattern. But I had a good time making the album: I said what was on my mind; I wrote “Father to Son” for Simon; Eric helped ou
t on “I Wish It Would Rain Down” (you could hear him this time, and he appeared in the video). Then “Another Day in Paradise” goes on to strike a global chord. It’s a hit all over the place.

  The origins of that song lay in Washington, DC, when Genesis played the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium during the Invisible Touch tour. We land from Pittsburgh in snow, and as we’re coming in from the airport I ask Myron—a preacher as well as our driver, a good man who becomes a good friend—about the cardboard boxes lined along the pavements in the shadow of the Capitol Building.

  “Homeless,” he replies.

  I’m gobsmacked. Homeless, so many of them, so close to all this wealth and power? An image is planted and fixed in my mind. I start to become aware of boxes—the homes of the homeless—wherever we play. Homeless charities all over the world ask to use “Another Day in Paradise” in their campaigns. Much later, we film the 1994–5 Both Sides of the World tour rehearsals—held at Chiddingfold’s Working Men’s Club—and sell the video on the tour itself. All the proceeds go to the local homeless shelters at each stop on the 169-date, thirteen-month tour. These organizations also collect at the shows and I match their takings. It’s the beginning of an important relationship.

  If I’m “political,” this is how I prefer to do it—very much with a small “p.” To this day all record royalties I earn in South Africa stay there. They go to the Topsy Foundation, which works with the HIV-affected poor in rural parts of the country.

  Back in the pop/rock world in 1989–90, there’s a feeding frenzy. “Another Day in Paradise” breaks through from “Phil Collins fans” to become one of those records that’s always on the radio and that everybody seems to have.

  I’ve been busy elsewhere, too. In 1989 I finally get the chance to try following the great Keith Moon. Pete Townshend having had no need of my services after Keith died in 1978, this year I finally do join The Who temporarily, for two special re-stagings of Tommy. At Los Angeles’s Universal Amphitheatre and at London’s Royal Albert Hall I take on the role of dodgy Uncle Ernie, first played by Moonie himself.