There’s an old joke amongst musicians – ‘What do you call someone who hangs around on stage with musicians?’ The punchline? ‘A drummer.’ Well, I like drummers – most of them, anyway. I think that the first drummer that I became really aware of as a personality within a band was Charlie Watts of ‘The Rolling Stones’ . To start with he always appeared older than everyone else there, and looked more like an accountant who’d accidentally found himself sitting behind the drum kit. But by gum, he could drum! And as the rest of the band age, Charlie barely seems to alter. When his colleagues find themselves in the glare of publicity, Charlie stays behind the scenes. Solid. Reliable. Literally a safe pair of hands. And that’s how I regard drummers. There are exceptions to this rule – Keith Moon being the obvious one – but let me run with this!
When I went to University, I remember the death of John Bonham being announced on the radio. It was quite a surprise to me and I think it was possibly one of the few ‘Kennedy’ moments I’d had in my life up to that point – you know, those times when you can remember where you were and what you were doing when a particular news item breaks. The opening drumming of ‘Rock and Roll’ is quite something.
I suppose the thing that bought this train of thought to mind this morning was reading a review of a gig I attended a week or so ago – The Arctic Monkeys here in Sheffield. Specific mention was made of Matt Helders, the drummer, even to the degree of comparing him to Bonham. For me Matt pins together the whole Monkeys sound. Forget the pretty boy front-man Mr Turner – he may be talented but Matt is the Man. Solid, tight, disciplined and delivering the beat that everything else hangs from. Exactly what you want from a drummer. Whatever else happens with the Arctics, Matt will be kepeing it ‘High Green Real’.
My other favourite contemporary(ish) drummer is Sean Moore from the Manic Street Preachers. Sean was always the ‘forgotten Manic’ but he was absolutely critical to the sound. The drumming on ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ is up there with the best – brilliant.
I’d also say that one of the best tests of a sound system and the acoustics in a gig venue is what it does with a good, crisp, drum set. Is there a ringing noise just audible around the drums? Does it sound ‘mushy’? Does it break up or even start forcing feedback? If so, the chances are that the drum kit isn’t miked correctly or the sound system isn’t set up correctly; if the latter then the chances are strong that the rest of the band isn’t sounding it’s best either.
Of course, I couldn’t write about drummers without mentioning Phil Collins. And having mentioned him, I will move swiftly on…. Oh, and while I remember…no 12 minute drum solos!
One of my ‘guilty secret’ films is the 1982 John Badham movie ‘War Games’, in which a teenager inadvertently starts the countdown to World War 3 by hacking in to a military computer system. He thinks he’s playing war games, but the computer thinks that it’s the real thing and starts counting down to a real missile launch. At the end of the film, the youth and the computer’s inventor manage to convince the machine to stop it’s attempts to launch the missiles by telling it to try out various game scenarios in which the result is always the same – mutual destruction. The computer, smarter than most politicians, remarks that nuclear war is an interesting game; the only way to win is not to play.
…a thing as lovely as a tree, goes the poem. We’ve been blessed this year by squirrels in our garden. We live in a suburb of Sheffield with lots of trees which give a great playground for the squirrels, roosting places for birds, sources of sound effects when the wind blows through the leaves and variable satellite TV quality in the spring and summer when the leaves on a particular nearby tree get in the way of the incoming satellite TV signal!
When I was kid my main regret about our garden was the lack of a tree at the end of it. It was a loooong garden, just right for a long-wire aerial to support my interest in short wave radio. Unfortunately, there was no tree. the traditional supports for a long wire aerial for short wave listening, as portrayed in numerous books, was a house at one end – check! – and a tree at the other. Sadly, I had no tree, my parents objected to my plan of acquiring a telegraph pole and planting it at the end of the garden, and so my aerial stopped where the last washing line support pole was. Ah well….
I’m currently renovating a site of mine –
I have a client in Harrogate who I visit every couple of weeks, travelling by train. I went up there a couple of days ago, and as I’d had a particularly hectic couple of days before hand was able to reflect on something that I’ve thought about occasionally in the year that I’ve been visiting Harrogate. And that is that it’s really pleasantly slow compared to Sheffield.
I just came across this on my Twitter feed – a reference to a ” ‘Future of the web’ Turtle” at Open 09. Yup – a turtle. After some Googling about and learning more than I ever wanted to know about our green, aquatic co-travellers on Planet earth, I eventually went to 
No, nothing to do the 1970s TV series with Ricardo Montalban as a bloke who made wishes come true on an Island with a combination of technology, actors and smoke and mirrors. Although….. Nope, this is a review of a 
Not very pleasant reading – although there is a chapter that offers a couple of alternative paths to take. Learning to be frugal is something we’re likely to have to get used to over the next few years, anyway, so that will be easy medicine to take – the vast majority of us have no real alternative. And one other thing after reading this book – it reinforces the old saw that Labour are not fit to govern – which is a dreadful thing for those of us who once had such hopes for the Left in the UK.