OCCUPATION: WORLD’S BEST DRUMMER
You’ll usually see Phil driving alone, the reason being everyone is too scared to get in the car with him. You see, Phil thinks all the other cars on the road are there for his entertainment. The rest of the lads would make all kinds of excuses; mine was, “Sorry, mate, I’ve got to stay home and rearrange my fridge magnets.” Undeterred, he would venture out looking for other band members. Angus’s excuse was that he’d forgotten the riff to “Highway to Hell” and had to practice it again. Cliff feigned endless nausea attacks, and Mal just said, “You’re fucking joking.”
Phil loves racing, though, and has a saloon race car in New Zealand, one of the big V8 jobs, but we’ll get to that later. Phil’s first exotic was a Ferrari 308 GTB—red, of course. I was riding with him (he’d used ether to get me in) and we were ripping up the A1. It was a chain drive, and something was wrong with it; it sounded like Big Ben on acid, steroids, and a large dollop of cocaine—until it broke. He sold it broken, and bought a series of exotics that were legend then. But Phil being Phil, he wanted them now.
One night in 1983, we were going to do a big show at the Birmingham NEC, a huge monstrosity of English design. It looked a bit like a Second World War airfield, with no bombers and no war, and as charming as Idi Amin. One hour to showtime. “Where’s Phil?” someone asked.
“He’s driving up from London in his new car,” said Jones the Drum, Phil’s drum tech. (He was Welsh. Still is, actually.)
I said, “What kind of car is it?”
“He never told me,” said Jones the Drum.
“Holy crap! Thirty minutes to showtime—where the hell is he?” The crowd was getting revved up; it was a sellout gig. What worried us was the weather. There was the mother of all rainstorms out there, and the M6 is notorious for its switchbacks.
Then, suddenly, the back doors opened and in roared Phil, in a genuine red Ford GT40, tires completely shot and him soaked to the skin. The tires were shot because he’d been low-level flying at about 140 mph all the way. He was soaked because the doors on the beast retract into the roof so you can get in and they don’t have adequate rubber seals to keep water out. Boy, can that guy make an entrance!
The car just glistened backstage, as did Phil. No one really cared that we only had fifteen minutes to go; we just ogled, leered, cheered, sniffed tires and brakes—all cooking nicely. There was a heat haze coming from the engine. Then the huge AC/DC bell descended from the rafters. “DONG!” it went. “Shit, we’re on!”
Then there was the BMW M1. What a beautiful car! Phil bought one and immediately found its flaws: yeah, yeah, the driver got pretty much cooked. You received an engine enema while driving. But Phil didn’t care. We were recording in Paris—“I’m going to drive the M1 there,” he said. “I’ll be there by teatime.”
Once again, he was late, and we were getting worried. He got there about nine p.m. “Bollocks! Shit! Fuck! Piss!”
“Trouble?” I inquired.
“I was on the périphérique and stopped to get gas. I looked at the pumps: benzole or benzine, and I fill it up with benzole. It’s fucking diesel. FUCKING DIESEL!”
That one took a couple of weeks to fix. Phil went on to own a Ferrari Daytona 365 GTB, 512 BB; he’s raced Fiestas ’round Europe and now races in New Zealand in a V8 Commodore. Oh yeah, and he’s the best rock ’n’ roll drummer in the world.