Phil Collen - Adrenalized: life, Def Leppard, and beyond

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Copyright 2015 by Philip Kenneth Collen

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books hardcover edition October 2015

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Interior design by Renato Stanisic

Jacket design by Meat and Potatoes

Jacket Photograph Courtesy of Helen L. Collen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4767-5165-8

ISBN 978-1-4767-5167-2 (ebook)

For my dad, Ken, and my mum, Connie

I came into this world on December 8, 1957, in Hackney, a London borough located in East London. A day or so after being born at the Mothers Hospital of the Salvation Army on Lower Clapton Road, I was brought home to 223 Boundary Road, London, where I would spend a large chunk of my life until 1983, when I went on tour with Def Leppard. It was a small row house in a working-class neighborhood that was considered to be pretty rough. It didnt seem like that at the time because I had nothing to compare it to. My dad, Ken Collen, was actually born in Wales, even though he grew up in East London. He was a lorry driver (or a truck a driver, as theyre known in the States) his entire life. He loved driving, so even when he wasnt working, it wasnt a chore for him to drive us all over the place. Wed call it a busmans holiday. Thats an old British phrase that describes a vacation on which you still do the same kind of activity youd normally do in your job. My mum, Connie Collen (ne Wheeler), was from nearby Leytonstone. She became a housewife as soon as I was born, and we spent lots of time together while my dad was off on his frequent driving trips for work. I was the only child theyd ever have. As far as my mum was concerned, the sun rose and fell on my arse. My grandmother, my mums motherNan, as I called herstayed with us because my mum needed a bit more help. My mums two older sisters, Dorothy and Rosie, were really strong women. (My wife, Helen, and I recently went to visit my auntie Dorothy. She was ninety-two, vegetarian, and doing great.) My mum was weaker physically, suffering from a variety of ailments, including asthma (which I think I psychologically inherited from her) and scarlet fever. So my nan was there to lend a hand even after my mum got married.

All of East London was very working classHackney, Walthamstow, Leyton, and Leytonstone. Our small house and these surrounding neighborhoods became my universe as a youngster. I had a paper round, like a lot of other kids, so each day I would set off on foot around the neighborhood delivering a variety of different papers to dozens of families.

Early on, I lived what I think was probably a very similar experience for lots of other English kids of that period. I had a dog, Coffee, who was a Jack Russellbeagle mix. I was about four or five years when I got Coffee. I was always so paranoid that hed run out the door and get hit by a car. This compounded the asthma. As a kid in school I played a lot of football (or soccer) like everyone else, and we played in the huge area of grassland on the western bank of the River Lea called the Hackney Marshes. In fact, Hackney Marshes is where my dad first took my training wheels off my bike. The place was later to become a part of the 2012 Olympic stadium. Talk about expanding your universe. The West Ham (my team), Arsenal, and Tottenham teams were all within striking distance, and all the kids supported one of those. Leyton Orient, another football club, was walking distance from my house, but no one supported them because the poor fuckers were in the Third Division. My dreamlike that of all British kidswas to play professional football.

One of my fondest memories of growing up is of the weekends and holidays that we would take to Southend, Jaywick, Clacton-on-Sea, or Canvey Island, places at the end of the Thames Estuary, where the Thames filters into the North Sea. Even though these places were barely an hour away from home, people of limited means could escape there from the city and feel as though they had entered some exotic playground. Ive read recently that Jaywick is today considered one of the most deprived areas in the country, but at the time, those trips represented adventure, escapism, and my love of travel.

My parents smoked liked troopers. They were completely unaware of the hideous side effects this would have on their sickly child and how it was probably making my asthma worse. Swimming was suggested by my doctor to relieve my asthma because he refused to place me on an inhaler for fear of me becoming reliant on the drugs. I loved to swim and was swimming about a mile by the time I was eight years old. I actually became a fairly decent swimmer and diver and joined several swim teams while I was in school.

As I was growing up, my parents taught me (like many other postSecond World War kids) to appreciate what you have and not to harp on about what you dont have. They were very frugal and I know a lot of that stems from the lean years they spent during the war in England. That mentality seeped everywhere, even down to what we ate. As with most families at the time, our diet wasnt quite what I would call healthy, but then again, we managed to survive on British sustenance. That is to say, lots of braised beef, along with plenty of mashed and boiled potatoes. Then of course there was also what we Brits called pork scratchings or pork cracklings (also known as pork rinds), which were just basically fried and roasted pork fat; another pig delicacy was dripping, which was congealed fat spread on a slice of bread. So once again, I had nothing to compare all of this to until I had my first curry.

I would have conversations with my mum, sitting in our small kitchen while she peeled potatoes for dinner. I would sit there quietly as she told me stories about the war with a certain love and pride in her voice even as she recounted in great detail what it was like to be a child and live through the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, when the Germans launched massive and sustained strategic bombings all across the United Kingdom, when more than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged and more than 40,000 civilians were killed. My mum and her family would hop from bomb shelter to bomb shelter throughout her neighborhood, and by forces of both luck and common sense, they managed to survive.