The Soundtrack to my Life: The Drums & I, Part One: Origin Story, and Peccadilloes
No matter what else is happening in my life, there is one place where I can really come alive, one place that allows me to connect with my pure, inner self, and that's behind a drum-kit.
If I’m going to talk about music, I have to talk about the drums, so consider this a series within a series. There’ll be another one later in the week.
Like all great love affairs, I can remember exactly where I was when I first felt it. I was sitting in front of the television with a couple of digestive biscuits coated in Bournville chocolate spread on a pleasant early summer’s evening, when The Who came on the television.
It was that famous Smothers Brothers performance which ends with the explosion that did so much to damage Pete Townshend’s hearing. I sat bolt upright. “That!”, I said to the empty living room while pointing at the screen (a habit I persist with to this day), “That is what I want to do!”
I later saw an interview with the magnificent Mike Portnoy of Faith No More in which he told the exact same story; the same clip, the same reaction, everything. Drummers truly are joined together by lengths of invisible string. Like goalkeepers, we have a union.
I was, for reasons that I can’t fully explain but which were probably related to embarrassment at wanting to create so much noise, ashamed of this desire to play the drums (I was 13 years old, so I think allowances can be made), so I quietly went about assembling the requisite parts so that I could have a go myself.
Long pencils would do for sticks for now, and there was this three-part fold up single bed that doubled up as a seat already in my room which, when turned on its side, made a perfectly good bass drum. Various biscuit tins and pots were assembled as a snare and some tom toms. I even tried to make a bass drum pedal out of a ruler, some tape and a spring, but I was not a very practical kid, in that respect, and I failed.
There was a book about the drums in Hatfield library, which I essentially took out on a long-term loan over that summer, simply renewing it every couple of weeks. It explained what each constituent part of a kit did, and how it all fitted together. I got a pair of drumsticks. The book told me I could use a pillow as a practice pad, and I ended up bruising my right thigh as a result.
The book taught me that the drums have their own written music, and how to more or less read it; not that I’d ever be taking notice of that. It told me that there were 26 ‘rudiments’, sticking patterns which are put together to form the longer patterns that drummers play. I read that book from back to front.
I started to get records by bands who had good drummers, according to the magazines I’d started buying. On holiday in France that summer I bought the outstanding documentary about The Who, The Kids are Alright, which only played in black and white on our TV, though this didn’t matter to me in the slightest to me. I listened to a lot of jazz; Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa and Art Blakey, though Rich always gave me the creeps. Still does, as it goes.
And then it happened. It was shortly after my birthday and my mum had asked me to pop to the Gateway supermarket in Hatfield, a couple of miles away, to pick up some food for that evening’s dinner. I wandered round this supermarket and picked up this food, but on the way out I was drawn toward the “For Sale” board, onto which you could put a card selling anything you wanted - including, more than once that I saw, some that would very much nowadays be transacted online - free of charge.
It wasn’t something I did often, but I’m not surprised that I did, so I’m not going to claim that I’m psychic. My birthday had just gone, and there was £40 sitting in my little metal box in which I kept money, when I had any. That’s £148.89, adjusted for inflation to April 2025. I had money burning a hole in my pocket, and no idea what to spend it on.
One card immediate got my attention in a chokehold. “Drum Kit For Sale”. “£50 ONO”. My heart stopped and a small croak emerged from my mouth. I took the card, shoved it in my pocket, and cycled back home faster than I ever had done before or would again. I needed to play this cool. Who was the best parent to ask? It had to be my dad. He played the trumpet. He loved playing the trumpet. My mum had no discernable interest in music. Dad it was, then.
I don’t know why I’d got myself so uptight about it, but by the time I got home I could see no way in which they were ever going to agree to it. But he’d been in from work for a while and when I got back he was cuddling the dog, as was their wont when he got in from work for years. I asked, he said yes. I mentioned about needed the extra tenner, he said fine, we phoned and they said “come over”, so off we went.
It all happened in the in the blink of an eye. I was amazed at how pleased dad was that I really, really wanted this - why on earth hadn’t I talked to him about it before? - and we were at this house on a typical new town estate in Hatfield within half an hour. It was laid out on the floor in the living room, a silver, four-piece, Premier drum kit, the same brand that Keith Moon had played.
There was never any doubt whatsoever that it came with almost everything I needed, even a couple of utterly horrible cymbals. We scooped it up, took it home, and I set it up right in the middle of the living room. Fortunately, nobody stopped me. It didn’t really take that long to set it up. I really had read that book a lot. I sat down behind the kit, took the sticks in my hand, and tapped the hi-hat. It worked. Chick-chick-chick-chick-boom-chick-tchah.
Bloody hell. I could do it. This wasn’t like Bill Bailey in Black Books, realising that he could play the piano for the first time. I hadn’t suddenly transmogrified into Elvin bleedin’ Jones or anything like that. But I had the basis of a framework that I could work around. Just mess around with these rudiments that I’d discoloured my leg over.
The kit itself was an unusual set up, though this won’t mean anything to non-drummers, but it had smaller tom sizes than you might have expected, the sort that you’d expect with a jazz kit, but the bass and snare were normal-sized. But with a new set of heads it sounded fine.
Next came cymbals. There was a music shop in about the most inconvenient part of town possible who could order Paiste cymbals from a catalogue. The saving started again, and when I came good with the money it was for a combined crash/ride cymbal and a pair of fairly low-rent hi-hats. And then, after I’d sat around practicing for a couple of years, came the small matter of joining a band. Another story for a whole other day.
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Playing the drums gave me an identity that I’d never had before and which still forms a central part of me to this day. And that’s strangely paradoxical, really. My acoustic drum kit, a blue sparkle Peace kit which sounds gorgeous, is in the spare room at my dad’s house, along with the cymbals and more or less everything else. I don’t have room for it. I had an electronic kit, but that gave out after about ten years, a couple of years wgo. Go well, Alesis. You served me well.
There was a time when I would book an hour in a rehearsal room in town and just play for an hour to let off steam and keep my eye in, but without my cymbals - which I’m without for reasons largely to do with how much they weigh and how much of a pain in the arse it would be to carry them all the way back from my dad’s - it didn’t quite feel right and I drifted away from it just over a year ago. It’s on the to-do list, though I do still feel as though I want to play my drum kit, rather than borrowing someone else’s for an hour.
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I ended up having two Premier kits - the second of which had a very rakish two bass drums for a while - and a Pearl One before the current one, which I’ve had for just over twenty years, came onto the scene as a result of the closing down sale of a drum store in Birmingham which had reduced its price from something like £800 to £300. I’ve bought Paiste cymbals ever since that first set, apart from one occasion when I built up a collection of frankly too many, from anywhere I happened to see them at a good price.
(Pro-tip: if you have to choose, buy cheaper drums and more expensive cymbals - you can’t re-tune a cymbal.)
Even now, if I’m listening to a song, I’m listening to the drums. Often, I’ll want to hear a song I like more than once, first time to concentrate on the drums, and then again to appreciate the full song. (I should point out that I don’t think this is something I inflict upon other people.)
And the fact that I don’t keep a drum kit in the house - though there is a bass drum pedal in the cupboard under the stairs - means that this doesn’t feature very heavily in other people’s perceptions of me, and certainly not as much as it does within me. There are few signs around my house that someone who plays a musical instrument lives here.
This, of course, is the limitation of the drums. Anyone can just have a guitar, bass, trumpet, violin, or set of bongos lying around, but if you play the drums, you need a kit, and they take up room; even those little fold-up or portable kits you can get nowadays properly scratch the itch. Not even the electronic ones do, really. Not quite. A lot of drummers will have been through these periods of enforced exile from their kit at some point or other, and it just feels a bit like part of you is just out of reach.
No small part of the reason why I love the drums is that they are all threads and screws, tightening and loosening. I like the fact that it’s mechanical and not reliant on electricity to work. I experimented for ages with tuning before I found a sound that I really liked, and I’m fairly confident I could replicate it today. For potterers and tinkerers like myself, there’s always something that you can being doing to change the way it sounds or plays.
And I have my peccadilloes. I always play a slightly smaller hi-hat pair, at 13”, for example, while I am also very wary of hi-hat clutches - the things that attach a top hi-hat cymbal to the rod on the stand - because on several occasions in the past I have had unfortunate incidents with them disintegrating or otherwise not doing their one allocated function properly at extremely inopportune moments.
So if I’m going to write about the soundtrack to my life, and I do consider music to be something that flows through your soul like blood, then I have to talk about the drums because they’re the heartbeat. They’re how I process music, what gives it a structure that I can understand. It’s just that I don’t talk about it very often. Until now.
Accompanying image by wal_172619 from Pixabay