Before 1980

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 in Interview 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 in A Hard Day's Night in spring 1964, Collins' first major role arrived later that year as the Artful Dodger in the stage musical Oliver!, 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 and despair till the chirpy, light-fingered urchin comes on and sings 'Consider Yourself'. Consider, too, that the Dodger also sings wonderful, now-timeless songs like 'I'd Do Anything' and 'Be Back Soon' with his gang. They're my first lead vocals, and I relish performing them eight times a week.'

Collins retired from the role when his voice broke but returned as the bullying Noah Claypole in 1969. By then, he had formed his first band, the soul-influenced The Real Thing, and became a regular visitor to the Marquee Club in Soho.

Collins recalled almost fifty years later:

The Marquee evening performance schedule usually goes like this; support band, headliner, support band again, headliner again. I can usually see the first three, but have to leave before the final headliner's set so I can catch the train that gets me home in time for my curfew of 10:30 p.m. Then, on 24 January 1967, Jimi Hendrix plays the Marquee for the first time. The first of the American guitarist's four legendary shows there, this will go down in the annals of rock history as one of the epochal rock shows of the sixties. I'm first in line to get in, nab a front-row seat.but then in frustration, have to leave before Hendrix comes on. The last train to the end of the line is calling.

Hooking up with local musician Ronnie Caryl, Collins played a season at Pontins in Paignton, Collins performed at several American army bases in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire as part a semi-professional R & B band called The Charge and sat in with both The Cliff Charles Blues Band and The Freehold. Collins and Caryl formed a four-piece, Hickory, who recorded a few demos in early 1968. One of these, 'Lying, Crying Dying', was rediscovered in the 2010s.

By 1969, Hickory had been renamed Flaming Youth. They recorded one album, Ark 2. Keyboard player Brian Chatton would employ Phil Collins as a session musician in the 1980s.

Collins subsequently auditioned for Vinegar Joe and Manfred Mann Chapter Three and attended sessions for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. 'As the seventies dawn,' he writes, '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. I need a full-time gig, or a better gig, or preferably both.'

Meanwhile, the rock band Genesis had formed in 1967 at Charterhouse School in Surrey. They released From Genesis To Revelation in March 1969 with the line-up of Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Peter Gabriel, Anthony Phillips and a series of drummers. Phillips left in July 1970 after completion of recording sessions for their second album Trespass, which included the tour de force track 'The Knife'. Drummer John Mayhew was asked to step aside. 'We decided that if we were to continue after Ant left,' Tony Banks wrote on the Genesis' website after Mayhew's death in 2009, 'we had to find a more creative drummer, a hard decision because by this time, John had become a friend.'

'I just technically wasn't good enough,' Mayhew admitted, 'that's the truth of the matter'.

Genesis advertised for a drummer and guitarist in Melody Maker with contact details for their manager, Tony Stratton-Smith. Collins through his regular visits to the Marquee, knew Stratton-Smith and tracked him down with a view to talking himself into Genesis. He was invited to audition and, with pal Ronnie Caryl, headed to the Gabriel family's 'oversized, beautiful country pile'.

Collins describes what happened next in his memoirs.

I ring the bell, and a distinguished-looking, middle-aged woman opens the door. Somehow Mrs. Gabriel works out that we're not here to sell Encyclopædia Britannica or join her bridge circle. We must be here to try out for her son's pop group. 'Oh, do come in,' she says, smiling. 'You're a little early. Please feel free to have a swim while you're waiting.'

It's posh with a capital p. We've arrived a couple of drummers early and, as I'm splashing about, I hear my rivals go through their paces. The standard is decent and I quickly appreciate what I'm up against.

Collins was able to listen to the audition pieces and with his acute musical ear, he was ready when his time came.

Collins says: 'I later learn that Peter knew the moment I sat down that I was the guy; seemingly the assured way I set up my kit was telling. Mike was less convinced. Tony felt quietly confident. History does not record the opinion of Mrs. Gabriel.'

'By the time it came to Phil's turn,' Mike Rutherford writes in his own memoirs, 'he'd already heard and memorised the part we were using for the audition and, when he sat down at the kit, you just knew. He had confidence. All the other guys had fiddled around, moved the cymbals, shifted their seat about a bit, but Phil simply changed the snare round because he was left-handed and got on with it.'

Collins, recognisably a versatile and skilled drummer, received the call telling him he had got the job on 8 August 1970. Ronnie Caryl was not a good fit and wasn't taken on. Genesis would be a four-piece for several weeks and performed several gigs in this format: their first was at Medway College in Chatham on 2 October, promoting the newly-released Trespass. They recruited guitarist Mick Barnard later that month, and Ronnie Caryl also helped, but the band's 'classic' line-up was completed in early 1971 when Genesis enlisted Steve Hackett.

Hackett had placed a small ad in Melody Maker, which read: 'Imaginative Guitarist/Writer seeks involvement with receptive musicians, determined to strive beyond existing stagnant music forms.'

Trespass would creep into the lower reaches of the UK album charts. Subsequent releases would be incrementally more successful: Nursery Cryme (November 1971, UK number 39), Foxtrot (October 1972, UK number 12), Genesis Live (July 1973, UK number 9), Selling England By The Pound (October 1973, UK number 3; US number 70) and the ambitious double album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (November 1974, UK number 10; US number 41). During this period, Genesis were very much regarded as a key band in the UK progressive rock scene, alongside Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and others. Tracks such as 'Stagnation', 'The Musical Box', 'The Fountain Of Salmacis',...