by Phil Collen
At this time, London was exploding with music and culture. You’d bump into Billy Idol, the Pistols, the Damned, and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead or hear Elvis Costello and the Police playing live in a pub on any given night. Music was just oozing out of every bar and club. As such an exciting musical period was happening, I felt that we had kind of run our course. I was driven and ambitious. I didn’t feel that we were going to move forward anymore. In 1978 I hit my twenty-first birthday and said, “Fuck! I’m still not doing anything.” I felt old for the first time in my life and like I was missing out.
Shortly thereafter, I answered an ad in Melody Maker magazine for a “peroxide guitarist.” The band was called Girl. Phil Lewis and Gerry Laffy looked different from anyone else I had ever met. They looked like they were famous androgynous rock stars. I found out that they were into exactly the same things I was into. It was hard rock, but they had fused all the elements of glam and punk the right way. Also, I had never met anyone who could manipulate people with their sexuality, which these two did naturally and effortlessly. I fit straight in. They kind of looked like I did—long blond hair and eyeliner. And they had a plan. I showed up to the audition with my Les Paul and Marshall amp. The rest is history. . . .
GERRY LAFFY: Philip Lewis and I had various lineups before we met Phil. We had listed an ad in Melody Maker (the music forum at the time in the UK) for “a peroxide guitarist.” At the time, we rented a restaurant in Camden Lock to rehearse in. We had spoken to this real East End bloke, Phil, who said he was in a band called Dumb Blondes but was very ambitious. An old bashed-up Cortina pulled up, a smiling handsome bleach-blond lad strode up. “ ’Ello, I’m Phil.” Yes he was, indeed. Together we lugged up his Marshall 4x12, head, Les Paul. By the time we’d rolled a spliff, he was set up—BANG! Fuck me. Philip and I looked at each other: “This is the guy. His playing was a cross of Ritchie Blackmore and Al Di Meola. This was 1979! I hadn’t yet heard of this new bloke Van Halen. He wanted in, fa sure a done deal. Girl proper was born. He brought a song, “Spiders Web,” nice, but not quite us. He had “Hollywood Tease” in there somewhere and soooo much more yet to come. I have never met a straight man so comfortable in pumps! Later, after the “My Number,” “You Really Got Me,” “Doctor Doctor,” “You Take Me Dancing” demos were done, we did a video at a porn studio in Muswell Hill. Two cameras, cheap. We thought, Labels need to see us as well as hear us. Phil strode in wearing a Chinese blouse and red suede stilettos. Good on him, we thought. He just so wanted to be a guitar hero, a bit a slip ’n’ camp didn’t bother him at all. As with all bands, we bonded as family.
We would hang. Basically we’d go out to network and make connections. The band would end up in clubs like Legends, Monkberry’s, and the Embassy meeting all sorts of people—movie directors, models, actors, the whole nine yards in a completely different circle that I had no idea existed. Gerry and Phil would work it like pros. All of this was for the greater good of the band.
We wanted to get attention because we looked different. We decided to do a cheap performance video so we wouldn’t have to slog around the live venue circuit doing gigs. We were creatively skipping a step up the ladder. The studio we managed to blag was actually a gay porn studio in Muswell Hill, complete with bondage and torture accoutrements. It only cost a hundred quid, so it worked out perfect. We filmed about five songs that were to become our résumé. Phil Lewis’s then girlfriend was Britt Ekland, a Bond girl and Swedish screen legend. Phil convinced Britt we were the best thing since sliced bread, and she secured us a record deal. We hadn’t even done a gig yet. Between her connections and our nonpornographic porn videos, we got a deal with Jet Records, which was owned by Sharon Osbourne’s father, Don Arden.
Around this time, a new subculture was emerging in England. Influenced by the punk explosion but having nothing to do with it, the new wave of British heavy metal started producing bands such as Iron Maiden, Saxon, etc. They were hard-rock metal bands but without the overindulgence and twenty-minute-long songs that classic rock bands were producing at the time. These were like four-minute songs played with a renewed fervor. The audience was mainly pubescent boys in leather jackets. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (or NWOBHM, as it would come to be known) movement was basically pimply-faced seventeen-year-old boys discovering a music that they could call their own. Unlike their older brothers, who were into hard rock like Zeppelin and Purple, all of a sudden there was a style of music that they could call their own. This was similar to when my generation discovered Bowie and T. Rex. Girl was a hybrid of hard rock and extreme glam. This didn’t go over well with sexually frustrated pubescent boys in leather jackets. So when Girl came mincing about onstage and in the press, it really upset a lot of these rock fans. We never felt like we had anything to do with the movement. We just happened to come out at the same time as Def Leppard, who unfortunately got lumped in with NWOBHM, even though they had nothing to do with it. It was just the time and the place.
Contrary to popular mythology, I didn’t really hang out in that whole beer-drinking, leather-jacket-wearing NWOBHM environment unless we happened to be playing in one of those venues. My scene was quite different from where people may have thought I was hanging. We were hanging out in gay nightclubs—not because we were gay per se, but because it was the complete opposite of a male-dominated homophobic rock movement and a lot more fun.
It wasn’t long before our audiences, especially in the London area, morphed into that pseudo club scene of really hot model-type girls. Unlike the Dumb Blondes, Girl didn’t look like truckers with makeup on. The more feminine we looked, the more females turned up at our shows. Tons of girls, including hordes of Japanese females who actually traveled from Japan after seeing us in their magazines, would show up at our London Marquee shows. We were there quite often and in fact did a residency twice. There was also a band called Japan that was out at the same time. We all loved that band, but the rock audiences hated them because theirs was an eclectic blend of various styles of music. We kind of modeled our look on Japan-meets–New York Dolls. But we were actually a hard-rock band. So for some reason it definitely gave us credibility with girls, not to mention we came over as being pretty sexy.
Our very first showcase rehearsal was at a soundstage in Shepperton film studios with a full lighting rig and sound system. We performed for all of the record company executives and they loved it.
Now it was time to do our first gig. We played our first live show at the Music Machine, located in Camden Town. A lot of the British rock press turned out because our record company had already generated a lot of hype about us, which coincided with the release of our first single, “My Number.” We got slagged off for that because apparently people felt we hadn’t paid our dues. Then, after recording about half of Sheer Greed, we left for my very first tour, opening for UFO in Europe.
My first tour was an education in everything. It was like being thrown in the deep end. I had never done the city-to-city thing, seeing all of these new places like France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. We were driving in a station wagon with Liam, our tour manager, through the snow and rain. UFO really took us under their wing. We got fucked-up every single night. There were all of these European women I had never seen before. By this time, Simon Laffy, Gerry’s older brother, had become the bassist in Girl. Simon actually played bass on our first album, Sheer Greed. Simon’s bass style was more elaborate. He could play funk, jazz, and finger-style bass. His musical tastes were varied, like mine. He could listen to George Duke one minute, then the Police the next. He definitely added another dimension to the band. We were a lot more musical. I’d met Simon before he was in the band. Since he was Gerry’s brother and flatmate, we’d already been hanging out.
SIMON LAFFY: I first met Phil during the summer of 1979, at a Girl rehearsal in Camden Lock. I wasn’t in the band at that time but was always closely linked to its development because it was started by my brother, Gerry. I was particularly blown away by Phil
’s ferocious soloing—I felt it sounded like an intoxicating blend of Jimi Hendrix, Ritchie Blackmore, and Al Di Meola (Return to Forever period). He seemed to effortlessly combine shameless attention-seeking with virtuoso lead playing and, to me, was clearly a natural-born rock star.
One of my fondest memories of this period was of visiting Phil’s adorable mother, Connie. After gigs or rehearsals, we would all pile back to her house in East London to eat a takeaway curry (“Ruby Murray,” in Cockney rhyming slang) and watch the latest horror movie on pirate video (then known as “video nasties”). Fortunately, the actual quality of these videos was so nasty that poor Connie was spared the worst of the blood and gore—you literally could not see through all the distortion and blur! It seems quite laughable now, in the context of present-day illegal downloading and the plethora of pirate websites, but at that time, we thought we were such rebels watching pirate movies.
Phil Lewis and I were twenty-two years old. Simon Laffy, Gerry’s brother, was twenty; Gerry was nineteen; and Dave Gaynor, our drummer, was also twenty-two. It was pretty hard-core driving around Europe getting to the next gig. I had never really stayed in a hotel before. We were throwing up, drunk off our asses, and still performing all over Europe. It was a brand-new experience that I was living that I had only heard about. I can remember being in Germany at a hotel when Phil Mogg, UFO’s lead singer, and someone else broke into a kitchen, stole a shark’s head out of the fridge, and tried to put it into someone’s bed à la The Godfather. We got caught because a food fight ensued in the kitchen. It’s all a little bit blurry, but I’m sure it happened. Even though there were tons of laughable moments, UFO gave us lots of great advice about performing, like pacing ourselves, set lists, and all the little nuances that can make a show better for the audience. The UK leg of this tour is also where I met the photographer Ross Halfin, whose photos you can see in this very book. Ross and I are friends to this day.
Around this time, I met my longtime girlfriend, Liz, at the London nightclub Monkberry’s. Monkberry’s was a bizarre mix of models, actors, and Arab princes, and had a heavily gay overtone. It was very hip and very chic, and was the first venue where Grace Jones played in London.
Liz was holding court and was the hottest girl I had ever seen in the flesh up to that point. I couldn’t quite figure out what her ethnicity was. I thought she was a mixed black girl. She had really full lips, brown skin, and a mass of curly black hair. I was trying to figure out how to approach this person who was talking to all these people. I finally got her number and found out that she was a North London Jewish girl, as she says to people when they start speaking to her in Spanish. We started going out. Liz became very important in my life early on because she would always have my back. No matter how well things seemed to be progressing, I was still a broke-ass musician. Liz would always make sure I had enough money to put gas in my car. She would work and put money toward me getting my career going. Even though we had this on-again, off-again relationship through the years, she would always be there if I needed her. In fact, it was Liz who took care of my mum and held her hand as she died while I was on a plane on my way in from the States to London. She was also instrumental in getting my dad to the hospital when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Liz raised hell for my dad in that hospital, and to this day she is one of my dearest friends. She’s now happily married to a wonderful guy named Gary. I’m so glad that she has finally found the peace she deserves. All it took was Gary letting Liz be amazing Liz, something I couldn’t quite seem to do.
Girl’s debut single, “My Number,” premiered on the John Peel show on BBC’s Radio One. Our second single, “Hollywood Tease,” made it into the UK charts. When Sheer Greed came out in January 1980, we found ourselves on my favorite TV show, The Old Grey Whistle Test. We also performed on Top of the Pops. How strange it was to be standing on that stage, playing that show that I’d watched so many times as a kid. It was hard to fathom that our band really seemed to be taking off.
In 1980 we did a club tour of England. This was after we did the European tour with UFO. We had TV appearances and an album in the charts, so now it was time to strike out on tour on our own. This would have been from the Marquee in London to the Mayfair in Newcastle and everywhere in between. It seemed a little strange showing up to gigs in Britt Ekland’s white Rolls-Royce. I can clearly remember me, Phil, Britt, and Doris Tyler, who looked after Britt, rolling up to a tiny club in this car. We didn’t do the whole tour in the Rolls, but it was absolutely a blast and completely out of context. But that was really what this band was. We were contrary to what everyone else did. Because of the circles we were moving in, it would always attract really cool people and really sleazy people.
In the summer of 1980, we played the Reading Festival, before 35,000 people. Obviously the biggest crowd I’d ever played in front of. Bryson Graham was on drums. Bryson had played with George Harrison, Peter Frampton, and Spooky Tooth when he was very young. So here we were with our biggest crowd ever. These British rock festival audiences at the time were notorious for throwing giant beer cans filled with piss and all sorts of stuff onto the stage. The first thing that came onstage, I remember Bryson wanting to dive into the audience to start fighting. Gerry screamed for him to sit down and carry on. We realized that if we completely ignored the audience, they would stop throwing stuff and we’d have a cool show, and we did. This is something I definitely keep in mind to this day while performing. Def Leppard got it the next night.
The first time I ever tried coke was sometime during 1979 or 1980. I was petrified because I’d never done anything before that besides drinking. But after that it seemed pretty easy, and plus this shit was flowing everywhere. There was heroin, acid, Mandies . . . I tried it all. The first time I snorted heroin, I threw up all over the floor. I was at someone’s house (can’t recall whose). But it wasn’t the last time. I’d get carried away doing this stuff. I can remember doing heroin on the beach in Blackpool and then throwing up onstage. I never missed a beat. I totally understood the buzz with heroin, because it made you feel great—numbed you out. But the projectile vomiting wasn’t much fun. An incident like that at Blackpool, although extreme, was rare. I did a massive line of what I thought was cocaine once, but it turned out to be Chinese white heroin. Once I did some acid in the afternoon whilst recording, and it didn’t kick in till the show that night in Gravesend. I got through it, but I don’t remember too much except I laughed a lot. I definitely mellowed out onstage after this tour. It’s not cool going out and playing like that and not remembering anything.
I wasn’t really a druggie or an alcoholic, although I enjoyed the getting fucked-up part with anyone who was around me. Over the years, I found out the difference between addicts, alcoholics, and the occasional user. I feel fortunate that I got out fairly unscathed. Unfortunately for a lot of people, once they start going down this road, they can’t stop or turn off. As for me back then, of course, there were lots of drug and alcohol “binges,” most of which I can’t even remember, so don’t expect a lot of details about them, because in those days it wasn’t like I was getting fucked-up to remember anything years later.
Through all the insanity, we played on. And we gradually noticed a shift in our audience, as we became known around town. Our best gigs, I think, were when we did residencies at the London Marquee. There would be all these luminaries—actors and models—showing up. We’d think, Oh, this is really cool. Everyone really likes us. Then we realized they were coming for the booty. I may not have got into rock and roll for women, but in Girl there was really no choice. Women were everywhere. Phil Lewis’s on- and offstage magnetism created this dynamic whereby we would have dozens of gorgeous girls waiting for us after every show. There’d be guys from Thin Lizzy and Queen. Ritchie Blackmore’s band came one night and he was ogling Liz, so we invited him onstage. I got to jam with my guitar hero. We played “Born to Be Wild,” and he played my black Fender Strat, a twenty-first-birthday present from my mum. Even
tually, it was to be the main guitar on Hysteria.
It was around this time that we started working on our second album. We hooked up with Peter Maddock and Danny Secunda as our managers. Their plan for the band seemed to have more drive. The Maddock/Secunda plan took us further away from what we did on the first album. The second record wasn’t that good. When we were with the major label (Jet was affiliated with CBS in the States), everything was classier. Girl needed structure. I really do believe Girl could have done something really special had we been nurtured as a band in the way Def Leppard was nurtured by Mutt Lange, Peter Mensch, and Cliff Burnstein. We didn’t have that with Girl, and everything started slipping away.
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The first time I heard Def Leppard was when I was in Girl and they were played on the radio. It sounded a lot different from all the other bands that were out at the time, because there were really rich harmonies to go along with the catchy songs. The first time I met Def Leppard was when they came to the Music Machine in Camden Town to see our first Girl gig. I think the whole band was there—Joe Elliott, Steve Clark, Rick Allen, Rick “Sav” Savage, and Pete Willis—and they came backstage to say hi. The fact that we were all coming out in the music papers at the same time meant we all knew who the other was. It was competitive, but as far as the guys in Def Leppard, they seemed genuinely nice, and although they had funny accents—well, Sheffield is a long way from Hackney—I was pulling for their success. Interestingly enough, when I first joined the band, I would find myself lip-reading Rick Allen because his accent was so strong. It’s funny what thirty years will do to each other’s accents, as we all have blended into one while somehow managing to keep a version of our original accents intact.
When they headlined the Lyceum, we made sure to send them a congratulatory telegram. Remember those? And we ended up having some really interesting experiences together. There was the time after Girl opened for Pat Travers at Sheffield City Hall when Joe and Steve Clark joined me and Phil Lewis at a local club and went up onstage to play a bunch of classic rock covers. Then we all ended up sleeping in Joe’s mum and dad’s spare room, inspiring that now famous quote from Joe’s mum, Cindy Elliott, “Ohhhh! There was makeup in the bed this morning when I changed the sheets!” Another night in London at the Music Machine, Joe and Steve joined me and Phil again onstage with future Iron Maiden front man Bruce Dickinson, who was then in a band called Samson. We did a killer version of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”