“Yeah, I swore at a Beatle!”: Phil Collins recalls how George Harrison’s prank left him “angry, depressed, sad”
Nowadays, the Beatles are renowned as a pivotal piece of rock history – but, regardless of their very serious impact on music, their colourful, unserious personalities were what really made Beatlemania explode. Their entire history is coloured with sarcastic quips and pranks… and nobody was safe from their antics.
In a new interview with MOJO, singer Phil Collins recalls the time when George Harrison pulled a particularly cunning prank on him. At age 19, Collins had accepted a £15 session to play congas on Harrison’s 1970 record, All Things Must Pass – and, when Harrison dug into the archives to piece together a 30 year anniversary edition in 2000, he decided to send Collins a tape of an unused ‘studio session’.
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When the tape arrived in the post, Harrison had attached a note reading: “Dear Phil, could this be you? Love George.”
However, when Collins popped in the ‘demo tape’, he was horrified. The recording seemed to capture conga playing that sounded like a “hyperactive toddler” having a field day. “At the end I heard George’s voice saying, ‘can we try one without the conga player?’” Collins says. “I rewound it and played it again and again, and thought, ‘Fuck… I was sacked and I never knew!’”
The shock was so great that it left Collins feeling a little upset. “I went back to the house feeling angry, depressed, sad,” he admits.
While Collins is a well-respected drummer, he had accepted the job without any clue how to play the congas. In fact, during a 2016 interview with Classic Rock, Collins recalled that the studio session was very rough on his hands. “I’m not a conga player, so my hands started to bleed,” he said. “[I was also] cadging cigarettes off Ringo Starr – I don’t even smoke! I just felt nervous!”
With that in mind, it makes sense that Collins just accepted the recording as his own efforts. However, as Collins tells Mojo, he wasn’t actually as god-awful as the tape suggested. When he received a call a few days later a from a mutual friend, Harrison asked to have a word with Collins. When the Beatle asked whether Collins had received the tape, Collins exclaimed: “You fucking bastard (yeah, I swore at a Beatle!)… You sent me this take and it turns out I was sacked!”
Hearing Collins’ frustration, Harrison was laughing on the end of the line. Confused, Collins went quiet… and Harrison revealed the truth. “Oh no, no, no, that was Ray Cooper on the congas,” Harrison said. “We did the tape as a joke for you!”
While Collins initially wasn’t very pleased with the ‘joke’, telling Harrison “it isn’t funny!!”, Collins admits that he eventually saw the humorous side. “We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he notes.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
