by Phil Collen
Although we had only recently gotten married, we had previously been together for about five or six years. The first few years of being together before we were married were harmonious and lovely. As the relationship continued, a few cracks began to appear. Still, in spite of what little things might have occurred, we tied the knot. But instead of getting closer, we actually drifted further apart, no matter how hard we tried to fix things—so much so that we began to live separate lives in separate homes. With my house in ruins, Anita started spending more time in our condo in L.A., and I was spending more time at the rental in Laguna Beach. I realized having all this deep philosophical knowledge that I was acquiring actually didn’t make my real-life situations any better, because I wasn’t really using any of it. Around this time I started seeing a new girlfriend, Michele, since Anita and I were on again, off again, although technically I was still married. I had actually become my dad, so to speak. Not that my dad was having those kinds of relationships with women in his life, but he was definitely exhausted trying to please and look after everyone to the point of neglecting himself.
I was also paying more attention to my dad. After twenty or so years of my being in Def Leppard, my almost eighty-year-old father had a proposition for me. Could he come out on the road and travel with us for a bit? He had faced some difficult times recently. Auntie Grace and my mother had died, and my dad’s girlfriend, Doris, whom he had lived with for the past twenty-five years, had also passed away. All of a sudden he was on his own. He also asked me for the only thing he’d ever asked for—a caravan/trailer that would become his home. So I bought him a caravan. He was ecstatically happy. He would park up and camp out in various campgrounds around the country. I felt he seemed truly liberated. He could read and drink tea, all on his own time.
One really funny incident happened when he was parked up in a field just outside Brighton. He noticed that there seemed to be a lot of activity in the next field over. Some of the people said they were having a Christmas party. They felt sorry for my dad and invited him over, but they warned him that they were “naturalists.” My dad thought that meant they were “hippie tree-huggers” but soon found out they were without clothing. It was a nudist colony. The amazing thing was my dad also soon found himself without clothing, too. Although he didn’t consider himself a naturalist, he had no problem with being stark, bollocks naked. This whole period for my dad was what I like to call “The Liberation of Ken.” I was so happy for him. We shifted to a higher phase of our relationship. He was so happy that all of a sudden he had no commitments, he even left the house in Holland Park, London (which I had originally bought my mum in 1989), to chill in his caravan. My dad also came out on the road with us for the X tour in the summer of 2002. And having been a truck driver his whole life, he loved being on a truck or a bus or anything like that, so being on the road seemed to really be like home for him. He would often ride up front, talking to the driver, swapping shop stories about what it was like to drive for a living. One day our tour bus broke down in a roundabout in West London. The bus rolled back into a wall and wouldn’t move, so we all got out and pushed. I was pissing myself laughing as everyone watched my dad and Rick Allen trying to push this bus. We ditched the bus and walked about a mile to the Hammersmith Odeon, where we headlined a show that night.
On the X tour, I’d hang with my dad as much as I could. We had a ball. After it wrapped up in late 2003, he stayed with us for a bit in California. I remember Anita, Rory, and I took my dad to Las Vegas to see a Cirque du Soleil show, and he reacted almost the same way Rory did when he was just a young boy, as if he were witnessing real magic. It was great to see my dad enjoying life—and he was hanging with his only grandchild, too. Three generations of Collen men, having a good time—priceless.
All was well with my dad until I got a phone call from Liz, who had been taking my dad to his doctor visits. This time she said, “I think you should come home.” This was weird because we had been here before with my mum. Liz was great. Once again she took on the burden. I got the news that my dad had two months to live. He had pancreatic cancer. Now it all became clear why my dad had been complaining about stomachaches about six months earlier. I dropped everything and traveled from L.A. to London.
In the midst of all this, my romantic life was getting full-on complicated again. I found out that Michele was pregnant and I’d have to break the news to everyone. I’d been selfishly, narcissistically juggling relationships and was hurting all the wonderful people around me, but on top of that, my dad was physically fading as cancer got the upper hand, so that became my immediate focus. He was razor sharp, and we had some of the best conversations of our lives. Yet the role reversal between my dad and me was interesting. I’d never thought I’d be in the position of having to care for an ailing parent. It was very different from when my mum died, because then I’d been out of the country. Liz was there with my mum to take the brunt of the weight and was there for my dad as well. But I’m so glad I got to spend the time that I did with my dad.
The British health care system was wonderful to my dad. They sent a nurse around to help bathe and shave him. They supplied special beds and all sorts of stuff. I was always on hand. I’d go to the pharmacy and wherever I was needed. At one point he was in a hospital in Fulham, London, and Liz and I would visit him. One day I came in and noticed that the bed opposite my dad was empty. Its previous occupant had been an old Indian man who was in pain and obviously suffering. Now he was gone. My dad said, “Can you take me home? I don’t want to be here anymore.” So I took him home to the house in Holland Park, where my dad and I spent the last months of his life together. My dad was about eighty-one years old then, and it was funny how he had never really stopped growing as a person. We would sit at home and I would give my dad his morphine treatments and we would have these great conversations about life. In all honesty, one of the happiest times for my dad was after all the women in his life had died. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish death upon anyone, and I know that’s a pretty strong admission, but I get it. My dad was certainly devastated that everyone had passed on, but sitting butt naked without a care in a field drinking tea alone wasn’t such a bad alternative. These are the sort of things I spoke to my dad about in his last days, and we couldn’t help but laugh our asses off at the seriousness and the epiphany of what one discovers on one’s deathbed.
It was so hot that summer—very unlike most British summers. I had a fan going and all the windows open. My dad would get tired a lot and sleep, so I put a baby monitor in his room. Rory and Anita came over to visit, which he loved very much. I’m really glad my son had a chance to spend that kind of time with his granddad. A lot of my family got a chance to say their farewells directly to my dad during this time period—his brother Eric; my cousin Elaine; her husband, Bart, and their two children, Leah and Joe; Elaine’s sister Judy; and many good friends like Rudi and Simon. My dad passed away on July 31, 2004. I missed him slipping away. A doctor was in the house who woke me up and said my dad had gone. I guess that was the weird part, with him being so alive in that state, and then all of a sudden he wasn’t there anymore. I can remember while waiting for the ambulance to show up I closed my dad’s eyes. I had an odd feeling about not having my parents here anymore—there was a feeling of being orphaned, like I now had to be the adult in charge.
Joe flew over from Dublin for the funeral, but he went to the wrong funeral home. Odd coincidence: the funeral director there happened to be the brother of Steve Priest, bass player from the Sweet, a ’70s glam rock band Joe and I loved. He recognized Joe and told him who he was. Joe was interested to hear that, but he was also stressed that he was about to miss my dad’s funeral. The director told Joe in a posh British accent, “You’d better hurry. The funeral starts in twenty-five minutes and it’s an hour away.” Joe made it. He didn’t catch the whole service, but he did arrive before it ended, rushing in and making an entrance like only Joe can do.
I buried my dad’s ash
es at the City of London Cemetery near Wanstead, East London, a day after my daughter Samantha was born. I’d been in Germany the night before, doing a TV show with Def Leppard. I called Michele at the hospital in Anaheim, California. Michele said, “It’s a girl and she’s got bright red hair.” This shocked the hell out of me. Although I didn’t actually get to see for myself until two weeks later, when I returned to California, her hair was indeed bright red, very much like my mum’s. I didn’t expect Samantha to have my mum’s hair. I was delighted. After Samantha was born, Michele and I called a truce on our relationship and I tried to make my marriage work with Anita. Eventually, amazingly, Anita and Michele sat down together and helped work things out with me to create as comfortable a situation as we could have for Samantha (whom Anita wound up adoring, by the way). Unfortunately, it was too late to fix my relationship with Anita, so although we didn’t divorce immediately, we split up after a few months. With all of that going on, it was a bit complicated when I started yet another relationship with a girl I met named Kamilah.
Before my dad passed, during the time I was taking care of him in London, I had a chance to reconnect with some old friends. Simon Laffy, my former Girl bass player, would come over and see my dad, but we always got to talking about music. Liz had played me some demos by him and was really impressed. Simon and I had never really written songs together when we were in Girl, but we had always appreciated the same types of obscure music—from dub reggae and fusion jazz rock to full-on punk. So we started writing songs, two of which in particular I remember being pretty good. I remember saying to Simon, “Wouldn’t Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols be perfect on these songs?” Two days later, I had a meeting with my dad’s doctor. As I left, I saw Paul Cook getting into a car somewhere in Chelsea not far from where my dad was in the hospital. That was strange, I thought. I’d known Paul to say hello to for years—in London, musicians constantly bump into each other—but who would have thought I would run into him outside a hospital? “Your ears must’ve been burning,” I said, and told him about the music Simon and I had been making and asked him if he’d like to come down and rehearse. He said, “Sure.” And that’s how Manraze was born.
The three members of Manraze (me, Paul Cook, and Simon Laffy) were really getting excited over the sound we were creating. We had absolutely no restrictions musically. We were all huge fans of soul, Motown, and ’60s reggae along with punk, rock, and whatever kind of music tickled our fancy. After the first few times we played, it became apparent that being in a three-piece band was a liberating experience. You could go off on musical excursions without sticking to the structures of four- or five-piece bands. We really got into the concept of the classic three-piece bands like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Police. The music we created seemed to bear their trademarks. So we started playing small gigs. This was strange for a number of reasons. I can remember standing among the drum cases after our first-ever show at the Spitz Club in East London. We let Jeni, Paul’s wife, sit in the passenger seat. It was a real déjà vu throwback to when we first started playing in bands. We didn’t have management or road crew taking care of everything. The other thing was that I would be singing lead vocals. The singing part was not a problem, as I’ve been singing since I was a kid and for years doing backing vocals with Def Leppard, but with the main focus being on my guitar playing. This was completely different. I had to change the plan a little bit because all of a sudden the guitar playing had to take a backseat, since I had to focus on the singing part first. Add on top of that, I’m the classic lyric forgetter. Many a night I’ve hummed and mumbled, Bob Dylan style, through classic Def Leppard songs, even ones I’ve written. Now I was faced with singing lead vocals without three other great singers to hide behind. I was still playing lead guitar but I’d have to sing first, relying on lyric sheets scattered about the floor. The first year of shows was interesting to say the least but amazing fun and great energy. I’m not sure if anyone actually noticed that I was singing the wrong words.
We recorded our first album, Surreal, at Joe’s studio in Dublin with Ger McDonnell engineering and producing. It was a fiery stew of all the influences we never got a chance to pay homage to in our other bands. You could definitely hear the Clash, the Pistols, the Police, Hendrix, and even bands like Nirvana and Linkin Park thrown in there. It may not have lit a huge fire commercially, but it was as artistically fulfilling as almost anything else I’d done up until that point. That’s what mattered. We were creating a musical hybrid, blending differing styles of music into one new sound, and I was reveling in it.
In 2005 I had some time off, so I decided to go to India in the spring with Kamilah. Def Leppard was gearing up to release a second greatest-hits album, a double best-of called Rock of Ages. I think because the industry had started to slow down, everyone was feeling it, so record labels started circling the wagons and releasing more albums by established bands. It was becoming a crap time to be a new band on the scene unless you had super buzz or optimum support from a label. Q Prime suggested we tour. It would be a double-headliner act, with us and Canadian rocker Bryan Adams. Initially, a pairing like this would have seemed out of context, although we’d played with Bryan in the past, but the inspiration for this type of tour was when Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson went out as a package to rave reviews and packed houses. It was the “one plus one equals three” theory. This concept of double billing prevails and even dominates to this day. It’s become essential. Even really big artists go out on the same tour as opposed to the old headline-and-support-act combo.
This tour was to be played in minor-league baseball stadiums across America. Although it was a good tour, I still had the feeling we could be doing a lot better. This was also the first tour we’d ever done not promoting an original album, which always bothered Joe because he didn’t want us to become a nostalgia act relying on the hits of yesteryear.
As the industry was moving in a new whole direction, we felt it was time for a change. Coincidentally, a friend of mine named Gavin introduced me to Trudy Green, who was from the UK and managed Aerosmith along with her then business partner Howard Kaufman. After meeting with Howard, it became clear that an association with Trudy and Howard should be the new direction for Def Leppard. Howard’s and Trudy’s ideas were a lot different from what we had been doing for the past few years. Now it was down to convincing the rest of the guys this was the way forward. That was a slow process. No one in Def Leppard is good with change. There were some obvious things that we weren’t doing, and Howard brought logic into the situation and handled things accordingly. I’m not sure if it was at the end of or during the tour, but we eventually made the switch from Q Prime to HK Management, which was definitely the right move at this point in our career.
Trudy’s assistant was Mike Kobayashi. Mike is half Thai, half Japanese, and 100 percent American, meaning one time we were in Tokyo, and although Mike looks like a local, people would talk to him in English, skipping any native tongue. Mike is super smart, super rational, very hip and up on everything. On top of that, he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. Although the band would later part ways with Trudy Green, we would still remain under the care of Howard Kaufman. Luckily, Mike would make that switch with us. We pretty much talk to each other almost every day. Mike handles most of our business and is involved in every aspect of our careers. For me that includes Def Leppard, Manraze, and Delta Deep (which I’ll talk about a little later). In 2006, the first tour we did with HK was to support Yeah!, an album of cover tunes by bands that influenced the Def Leppard sound. Our only boundaries were that they couldn’t be Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, or Queen. And even though we covered Bowie and T. Rex songs, they were deep cuts, not breakout hits by those artists. We wanted to keep it a little subtle, leaving some people to think they were original songs. Howard suggested that for the 2006 tour to support that album we should go out with Journey. He said, “Trust me. I think it will be huge.” We weren’t convinced, but all that changed on the firs
t date of the tour in Camden, New Jersey, when all 23,000 tickets were sold and 3,000 people couldn’t get in. The tour was a raging success, and Journey was awesome. They were so good, it really inspired us to raise our bar every night. On that tour I met Scotty Appleton, who was Neal Schon’s guitar tech. Our next tour after the Journey tour I was without a tech and Scott was without a tour, so it all worked out perfectly, especially since Scott is such a lovely guy. He defies any tech stereotypes . . . except for being a guitar geek. He’s got a wine collection and is also a great photographer.
SCOTT APPLETON: I first met Phil on the 2006 Def Leppard/Journey tour. I was working for Neal Schon of Journey at the time and was really enjoying watching the Leppard guys play after we finished our load-outs. I was sitting backstage by the crew room one afternoon after the Def Leppard sound check, playing a Thorn guitar that I had on the road with me. Phil came down the hallway and looked at the guitar and said “WHAT IS THAT??!!” I explained that a friend of mine had built the guitar and he asked if he could try it out. A few minutes later we were onstage and had it plugged into his rig, blasting away. All he could say was, “I LOVE the feel of this neck!!” The neck on the guitar is quite large, and I think I may have turned Phil into a “big neck” fan that day, as the ones on his guitars have been getting progressively larger every year. So fast-forward to 2007. Journey decided to take a year off and I was looking for a gig, and I got a call from the Def Leppard guys. Phil needed a guitar tech. I jumped at the chance and flew to Los Angeles to start rehearsals. As with any gig, there is a bit of a learning curve when you start, not only new equipment but new personalities as well. I was learning all the program changes during rehearsals and didn’t have all of them quite placed properly, and Phil was so cool about it. He never once was frustrated or flew off the handle. I honestly thought I was going to get fired because “this guy can’t possibly be this nice.” Working with Phil is a blast because we both are guitar geeks at heart. We are always looking for a way to improve upon what we have already done and push the envelope a little further. Not to mention that we are always laughing, and have built a level of trust with each other so that it is a no-stress environment. It’s always a joy to work with one of your best friends.
