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2Beatles.ru:
Из книги "Not Dead Yet". Copyright © 2016 by Philip Collins Limited
When opportunity knocks, I’m just climbing out of the bath in the house I grew up in. It’s a quiet Thursday afternoon, I’m living alone most of the time in the otherwise deserted Collins family home, and the most I have to look forward to is Top of the Pops on the telly and beans on toast for tea. I might watch TV and eat my dinner in my underpants. Because I can. It is May 1970, I am nineteen, and the swinging sixties have very much ended. Roll on the soggy seventies.
Still, I remain a minor star in Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley’s orbit. They’re friendly with a guy called Martin, another acquaintance from La Chasse, who happens to be Ringo Starr’s chauffeur. One night at the club Martin asks Blaikley if he knows any good percussionists. “Sure,” says Blaikley, “I’ll find someone.”
Blaikley calls me as I’m still dripping from the bath. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Well, Top of the Pops is on…” I reply, hedging my bets. Right now, seeing bands promoting their singles on the televised weekly chart rundown is the closest I’m getting to live performance.
“Forget that. Do you want to go to Abbey Road for a session?”
He offers no details of the artist hosting the session, but at just the mention of Abbey Road, I’m suddenly not so uninterested. Doesn’t matter who it is. I can see where The Beatles recorded…McCartney announced that he was leaving the band only a few weeks previously, and his first solo album, McCartney, has just come out. The end of the Fab Four is all anyone is talking about. Let It Be, The Beatles’ swan song, is barely in the shops and already there is feverish discussion in the music press of the first post-Beatles solo album.
But thinking on my feet while dripping in my towel, my mind isn’t going there. At this point in my stop-start, still stubbornly embryonic music career, this is a chance to demonstrate my drumming chops to an artist good enough to be booked into Abbey Road. I’m a jobbing drummer without a job, and this is a job.
“What time do you want me there?”
I get dressed for the occasion, which means a T-shirt over jeans. I am a nineteen-year-old long-hair, and this is my look. I call a cab, jump in and am extraordinarily pleased to be able to utter the immortal line: “Abbey Road, please, driver.”
When I arrive, Martin the chauffeur is standing on the steps of the studio in St. John’s Wood, northwest London. “Come in, come in, we’ve been waiting for you.”
“Really? Me?” I wonder. “And who’s this ‘we’ he’s referring to?”
He takes me in and we make small talk. “They’ve been here four weeks,” he says. “They’ve spent a thousand pounds. And they haven’t recorded anything.”
I’m thinking, “Wow, this must be serious.”
I walk into Abbey Road Studio Two, and into a scene that is now famous. The cast of this mystery session are in the middle of a photo shoot, meaning everyone involved is lined up: George Harrison with his long hair (I’m feeling good about my hair at this moment); Ringo Starr; producer Phil Spector; legendary Beatles road manager Mal Evans; a couple of members of Badfinger; artist-turned-bassist Klaus Voormann; Hammond virtuoso Billy Preston; stellar pedal steel guitar player Peter Drake; and Beatles engineers Ken Scott and Phil McDonald.
Later I will memorize the personnel on these sessions, and realize that there’s no Ginger Baker at this point. I also learn later that Eric Clapton probably left as I was arriving.
The penny drops: George is in the process of making that first post-Beatles solo album, and I am suddenly in the middle of it. Well, on the edge of it.
Everyone stops talking as I come in. I’m on the receiving end of a collective quizzical frown: Who’s this kid?
Chauffeur Martin pipes up: “The percussionist’s here.”
