Or: trying to catch a break in swinging London. How hard can it be?

I gotta get out of this place. But how? It certainly won’t be via London Assurance, despite my dad’s strenuous efforts to persuade me to carry on the family tradition. I am a time-serving child of the sixties and the nine-to-five is very much not for me, daddy-o.

So via what route do I escape, and by what means? Music is my passion, and London is the global center of the whole scene. Stuck here at the end of the Piccadilly Line, my skill on the drums improving with every practice, it feels like I am so near yet so far. I need an exit strategy, and ideally I need someone to come with me. Luckily, I know just the fellow.

In early 1966, aged fifteen, word reaches me of a kid who’s apparently as much a whiz on the guitar as I am on the drums. He’s from Hanworth, straight down the road from Hounslow, and he attends a rival performing-arts establishment, the Corona Academy. The inter-drama-school rumor mill has made each of us aware of the other, with each of us considered “cool” by the cliques at our respective song’n’dance alma maters.

I find out where this alleged guitar-slinging hepcat lives, and one summer morning I briskly walk the couple of miles to his house. I knock on the door of his semi-detached, and his mum answers.

“Is Ronnie there, please?”

“Ronnie! There’s a boy with a blond fringe and a pink shirt at the door for you!”

A thunder of feet on the stairs and there, looking at me quizzically, is this kid, a little younger than me, with dark curly hair and an interesting mouthful of teeth.

“Yeah?”

“Hi, I’m Phil Collins, do you want to join a supergroup?”

“Well, who else is in it?” comes Ronnie Caryl’s reply. I’m instantly impressed. He’s not querying the very idea of a supergroup being formed by a couple of adolescents in boring, mid-sixties Middlesex. Conceptually, he’s already on board. I like that attitude.

“Just you and me,” I reply confidently.

Within a few days, Ronnie and I have started playing in my front room at 453 Hanworth Road, messing around, trying to re-create our fave raves of the day: Cream’s “Cat’s Squirrel,” “Spoonful” and “NSU,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe”—you name it, we’re mangling it.

Actually, if I do say so myself, we’re pretty quickly pretty decent. I have a tape of Ronnie and I playing for hours on end, and it still sounds rather impressive. Despite the fact that there are only two of us, we’re both good players and the combination is full and bluesy.

In due course we add a bass player, a friend of a friend called Anthony Holmes. But it soon becomes clear that while he owns a bass, he can’t actually play it. This doesn’t deter Anthony, though. He just plays very quietly so it’s hard to tell whether he can or can’t. With our performances confined to my parents’ front room, this isn’t much of a problem, nor is our lack of a band name. Soon we’ve learnt almost the entire track listing of Fresh Cream. We’ve also picked up on John Mayall and an impressive collection of old blues tunes. If we’re not quite a supergroup, we’re certainly a tasty trio.

That said, Lonnie Donegan thinks we’re rubbish. The “king of skiffle” becomes the first pop star I ever meet when he comes round to our house one Sunday afternoon to visit my sister Carole—now that she’s a professional ice skater, they’ve met on the road somewhere. I think they’re seeing each other, or at least he’d like them to be. He has a listen to one of our practice sessions, sitting on a chair in an extraordinarily long fur coat. He seems a little out of place in this very suburban setting, as does his coat. But when you’re the king of skiffle you can do, and wear, what you like, I suppose.

Donegan proceeds to tear us apart. His critique of Anthony is particularly brutal. He asks our hapless bassist: “Can’t you sing either?” This does nothing for his confidence but confirms what Ronnie and I already know. Anthony likes the idea of being in a band and not much more.

Then Donegan mentions that he might be looking for a drummer, and for a second I see a glittering future ahead of me, helping to prolong a musical revolution that is already, if truth be told, past its skiffle-by date. Unfortunately I fear that in truth Donegan has no intention of hiring Carole Collins’ fifteen-year-old brother, if only because I’m too young for the hurly-burly of his frenetic gigging schedule. He does, however, think I’m good enough to offer to shop around for a band that might hire me. But despite his enthusiasm, nothing presents itself.

Shortly thereafter Anthony hangs up his bass forever, but Ronnie and I plow on undaunted. Best pals till we die, our relationship is honest to the point of combustibility. We are no strangers to the horrendous argument, usually after we’ve had a beer or two. Sometime in the late sixties, Ronnie will find himself minus one tooth, courtesy of my fist. It’s not something of which I am proud, nor something I ever do to anyone ever again.

As musical comrades and brothers-in-bands, Ronnie and I will go on to have many adventures together over the ensuing fifty years. At one end of the time spectrum, both of us will try out for Genesis. Further down the line, when I’m making my sixth solo album, 1996’s Dance into the Light, I am conscious I need a second guitar player to accompany the long-serving Daryl Stuermer. I invite my oldest friend to come to rehearsals in Switzerland.

My band at this time are top-drawer Los Angeles players, shiny with excellent chops and an acceptable level of smoothness. Ronnie at this time is as he always was: an all-drinking, all-smoking, occasionally farting rough diamond. The culture clash is as swift as it is inevitable. The LA contingent embark on a silent mutiny; on a short journey in my car back to their hotel, I’m told Ronnie “doesn’t fit in.” I retort, “Either Ronnie’s in the band, or you’re not.” Such is my love and appreciation of his skills and musicality, to say nothing of his much-needed humor.

Within a few weeks Ronnie is fully integrated and harmony reigns, as I trusted it would. I tell my oldest friend, “As long as I’m working, you’re working.” Whenever I need a guitarist, he’s my go-to guy. Same as it ever was. Such are the soul-solid bonds that are forged in the furnace of first musical loves. Those bonds will support me throughout my sixties musical finishing school, from bedroom practice sessions to pubs, clubs, holiday-camp gigs and beyond.

Come 1967, The Real Thing are less of a sure thing. The wild enthusiasm we had for our first school combo has morphed into the serious business of becoming professional dancers or actors, albeit less so for me than for my erstwhile band mates. But being a cocksure sixteen-year-old I’m sure a clear path will open up ahead of me. To be honest, I’m not yet convinced this still-new pop group “thing” will last that long. If it does, it certainly won’t involve me. But I’ll ride it until it burns itself out; then I’ll do some recording sessions for other people. Following a successful run of session work I’ll plug into a show band/big band/jazz world. I’m already ears-deep in Buddy Rich, Count Basie and John Coltrane, so this feels like a natural progression. I will then spend the twilight of my life playing in the orchestra pit for one of the top London theater shows. Those players I met doing Oliver! all seemed happy enough.

Again, this seems a logical course to take. But it will mean learning to read music. I’ll get round to that sometime soon.

Ah, the naivete of youth. It’s ’67 and I have my sixteen-year-old mind blown by The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These albums, cornerstone moments in the history of rock, are cornerstones of my young life, too. They come out within five months of each other, and everything changes. I start collecting Technicolor dream posters, paint my bedroom black—by now it is solely mine, Clive having left home to get married to a lovely lady, Marilyn, and to concentrate on being a professional cartoonist—and cover one wall in aluminum foil. The freak flag is flying high at 453 Hanworth Road. Getting itchy feet and an itchy attitude, I will gladly sign up for the psychedelic revolution, if they’ll have me. Unfortunately I have a prior engagement with a cow on a farm in Guildford, Surrey.

With some experience under my belt, and now that I’m a senior student at Barbara Speake’s, I’m receiving quite a few acting offers. Most of them I decline, much to my mum’s frustration. But I decide to take a cinema job I’m offered by the Children’s Film Foundation, wholesome purveyors of wholesome films for the Saturday morning picture clubs. These have exploded in popularity by the mid-sixties, not least as places parents can safely leave their children while they do their shopping. So what if the little movie is called Calamity the Cow and is unlikely to feature much in the way of groovy psychedelia? It means I’ll be seen on the big screen by kids up and down the country. It also means I’ll earn some money to buy more records, gig tickets and cod-military clobber. Plus, I have the biggest part—other than the cow, obviously.

The filming location is in Guildford, which funnily enough will become my stomping ground some years later, when Eric Clapton and I are country neighbors. But in ’67 all Guildford represents to me is a place that seems miles away from Hounslow, and that’s the setting for a pig farm so noxious I can smell it to this day.

That balmy Summer of Love it is quickly apparent that I have made an error of judgment in accepting the lead part in this film. As this is a CFF production, intended for Saturday morning entertainment, we have to play things young. Very young. Enid Blyton young. The plot can be summed up as: boy finds cow, boy loses cow, boy finds cow. I should be tuning in, turning on and dropping out. Instead I’m getting cozy with cattle.

To a too-cool-for-school sixteen-year-old drummer and Sgt. Pepper’s “head,” this is mortifying. It’s a sensation that doesn’t bring out the best in my behavior. Still carrying something of a wide-boy Artful Dodger accent, I decide to play my part with some cocky East End swagger. This doesn’t thrill the director. Complicating matters is the fact that the director is also the writer. Not unsurprisingly, he feels proprietorial over his script, and isn’t so keen on having his “vision” messed with by a snotty-nosed teenager with his head in Haight-Ashbury and his tongue lolling somewhere within the sound of Bow Bells.

“Ah, Philip,” he sighs in his broad Australian accent, exasperated at yet another overly cockney take, “could you perhaps say it like this instead…”

In the end he becomes tired of me and writes me out: midway through the action, the leading boy mysteriously disappears on his bike.

“Oh, Michael, do you really have to go on that bicycle holiday?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do…” I reply lamely. Exit, pursued by a cow.

No plausible reason for my departure is given to the audience; I simply vanish from the screen. Accordingly I’m discharged from filming halfway through, but still have to come back in time to film the nail-biting climax to Calamity the Cow (spoiler alert: cow wins first prize in county show). Disgruntlement is compounded by embarrassment and amplified by frustration. I sigh to myself: I’ve had enough of this.

Except I’ve not, not quite. In early 1968 Mum gets me a job on another film. It’s also a kids’ movie, but this one is a serious production: an adaptation of a book written by James Bond creator Ian Fleming; scripted by children’s author Roald Dahl; songs by Disney’s Oscar-winning writers the Sherman Brothers (they did The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins); and directed by Ken Hughes, who’d just worked on a Bond film, 1967’s Casino Royale. I don’t have any kind of speaking part—it’s extras work, as on A Hard Day’s Night—but it means being out of school for a week, and it means filming at the famous Pinewood Studios.

All things considered, for a seventeen-year-old chafing against the limitations of his childhood, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a great gig. On paper at least.

At Pinewood there are hundreds of kids who’ve been sent on this casting call, all from different stage schools. There are chaperones and tutors everywhere, and everyone is trying to artfully dodge them as best they can. In your time out of class, you’re intent on doing as little schoolwork as possible.

I don’t remember meeting any of the cast. We were only extras, so no mingling with the stars—not Dick Van Dyke, not Benny Hill, not James Robertson Justice. I do remember having some kind of cyst on my forehead, which is dressed, on doctor’s orders, with a bandage. Us kids, captives of the terrifying Child Catcher, are meant to look beaten, bedraggled and dirty. But in the cutting room my pristine, medically applied bandage catches the eye of director Hughes and he snips me out of the film. Exit stage right, Collins, again.

This is a further nail in the coffin of my enthusiasm for acting. And quite frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck. We are now in 1968, another massive moment for music, and something has to give.

In the year of The Beatles’ White Album, The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets and Cream’s Wheels of Fire, I leave school. I have GCEs in art, English language and religious knowledge. I just get by. Even if I was, God forbid, set on a career as an insurance salesman in the City, with those scant qualifications I would struggle.

Such were the benefits of an education at Barbara Speake’s. In my whole time there my head wasn’t present, or I wasn’t present, or both. What early enthusiasm I had for the place was mostly predicated on the chance to escape Chiswick Grammar, and the prospect of all those girls. The object of the school was to morph you into a young adult theatrical star. For me, that was never going to happen, so I couldn’t wait to get out of it. For sure, the acting opportunities it helped to present did push me out on a stage in front of people, but it never felt like a glittering start to any sort of career.

But through financial necessity I give the acting one more shot, appearing at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1969 in that previously mentioned latest staging of Oliver! (Barry Humphries is Fagin). Carol Reed’s film adaptation came out the previous year and there’s renewed excitement around the production. On top of that I am, at this point, that rather pitiable figure: the jobbing drummer without a job as a drummer. Acting will, again, have to put a bob or two in my pocket.

A twenty-two-year-old Cameron Mackintosh is the show’s assistant stage manager at this time. These days he’s perhaps the most powerful man in theater, an impresario with a £1 billion empire, the man behind Les Misérables and Miss Saigon and many more. But at the tail end of the sixties, at the Piccadilly Theatre, I’m higher than him in the pecking order. I tell him this years later, at Buckingham Palace. Sir Cameron, Sir Terry Wogan, Sir George Martin, Dame Vera Lynn and I have been chosen to meet the Queen and Prince Philip on their way to a celebration of British music that also features Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Brian May.

As we stand in line waiting to bow and scrape before their royal majesties, I whisper out of the side of my mouth, “You realize, Sir Cameron, that we worked in Oliver! at the same time?”

“No!”

“Yeah! So, what have you been up to since then?”

—

Back in 1968 my sights are firmly set on music. I tell Mum I want to give up acting and make a living as a drummer. She tells Dad. Within the hushed walls of London Assurance it has been a matter of fatherly pride that Greville Collins’ youngest son is a star of stage and screen. But playing with one of those pop groups? In short order I’m sure to be a long-haired destitute, raping and pillaging my way across the world, the father of a fistful of illegitimate children, or worse.

Dad sends me to Coventry for a few weeks. He simply stops talking to me, just to demonstrate his anger.

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.

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 1936.

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.

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.