The moment Phil Collins met Princess Diana in Birmingham & the surprising gift he gave her

Like many famous musicians, Phil Collins, the drummer and singer of Genesis, also met the royal family during his heydays. One of his tours brought him to Birmingham where he met one of the most popular members of the royal family.

He met the beautiful Princess of Wales, Diana, in 1984 at the National Exhibition Centre in Solihull. The singer and his band toured in the UK in 1984 with their MAMA tour. At their West Midlands performance, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were the special guests.

He gave the princess a special gift at the event, but the gift was not for her at all. The rock band frontman gave Princess Diana an embroidered jacket with a gold crown on it for Prince William.

Collins, who worked with The Prince’s Trust had become close to the royal family because of it, he wrote in his memoir, according to Us Magazine. He was invited to Prince Charles’s birthday in 1988 where he made a huge mistake.

“The first is to approach the Queen and introduce myself. One has to wait for the Queen to approach one,” he writes. “I also address her as ‘Your Highness’ instead of ‘Your Majesty.’ Neither faux pas seems to bother her, and she’s quite friendly, referring to me as her son’s ‘friend,’ which tickles me to no end.”

He wasn’t the only Collins’ to make a faux pas. His daughter, Lily, who is now an actress and the lead in the Netflix series Emily in Paris, revealed that she had also met Princess Diana.

The actress met the princess when she was a toddler and was giving flowers to her. However, it didn’t go smoothly. “...The second that she went to take them, I then tried to pull them back. So as you can imagine, all the air was sucked out of the room,” Lily said on The Late Late Show, according to Today.

Chance encounters

By 1991, he was part of the royal couple’s inner circle and he wrote about how he ran into Diana once when visiting his dentist in London.

“A BMW pulls up and the window slides down,” writes Collins, as per Us Magazine. “It’s Diana and, sitting in the driver’s seat, an officer-class chap I recognized as James Hewitt.” Hewitt, a former officer in the British army, was reportedly a close friend of Diana.