Philip David Charles Collins was born on 30 January 1951 in Putney, west London, ten miles east of the family home in Whitton, not far from Twickenham. They moved to nearby Hounslow – at that time the last stop on the Piccadilly Line – when Collins was four years old. A precocious talent, he started playing on a homemade drum kit aged five.
He bought his first ‘real’ kit from Albert’s Music Shop in Twickenham in 1963. A thirteen-year-old Phil Collins is pictured sitting at that kit on the cover of the 2010 album,Going Back.
He said inInterview Magazine in March 1983:
My brother was eight or nine years older and he was always listening to Radio Luxembourg which played Bill Haley, Eddie Cochran, stuff like that, which didn’t interest me at all. I never ever liked that music, but when I started playing seriously, the English beat thing was just happening, the Shadows and bands like that. It was the very early ‘60s. I remember buying Please Please Me. I used to put the record player on very loud and set up my drums, so I was facing the mirror; that way you don’t look at what you’re doing. Then when I was fourteen, I went to a teacher to learn to read drum music. I figured when this rock-and-roll thing finished, I would have to make a living playing in a dance band or in an orchestra pit. So I learned to read drum music, but I found that my capacity for reading was not anywhere near as good as actually playing by instinct. I would have this chart in front of me and my teacher would have me play it and I’d play it very haltingly. I’d get exasperated and I’d ask him to play it and he’d play it and I’d say, ‘Oh you mean that!’ and I would repeat it perfectly. Give it to me written down and I had no idea. So I decided to abandon that area of learning and ever since, I’ve lived off my wits musically.
Collins was also developing an interest in acting and began professional lessons at the Barbara Speake Stage School in East Acton. His mother, June, established a talent agency around this time, supplying, as Phil recalls, ‘all-singing, all-dancing children to London’s West End, and to the blossoming commercial TV and film world’.
After appearing as an extra inA Hard Day’s Night in spring 1964, Collins’ first major role arrived later that year as the Artful Dodger in the stage musicalOliver!, where he replaced future Monkee Davy Jones. The musical had opened in 1960 and would run for over 2,600 performances. Collins would perform in the show for seven months, earning £15 each week.
‘This is a big part,’ he writes. ‘The entrance of The Artful Dodger is the moment when the show lifts. This tale of Victorian workhouses and grinding poverty is pretty much doom a
