GEORGE HARRISON

Collins was just 18 when he got a call asking if he wanted to appear on a session for The Beatles guitarist’s third solo album, All Things Must Pass. “I can’t remember how it came about, but I just know that Ringo [Starr] and Eric [Clapton] and all these other people were involved,” says Collins. “I was fairly cocky at that point, but I was definitely overawed by it all.”

Collins was enlisted to play congas on the song Art Of Dying, a job he threw himself into – a little too much. After the initial run-through, his bands were so blistered and bloodied that he couldn’t hit the instrument properly during the actual recording.

“I really did give it my all, but my hands were fairly bashed up,” he says. “When I listened back to the album, I couldn’t hear any congas at all.”

The £15 fee he received for his part in the session was some consolation, but his relationship with Harrison didn’t end there.

“I got to know George later on,” he says. “He was a very funny man, very droll. And he loved to play jokes on people.”

Collins would be the butt of one of these jokes. In 2001, Harrison sent him a new reissue of All Things Must Pass, on which his congas had been restored. “And they sounded bloody awful,” says Collins. “I thought, ‘Was I really that bad? No wonder they didn’t use them!’ Then I found out that George had got [percussionist] Ray Cooper to purposely re-record them as badly as possible and sent me that version. I never did get my own back on him.”