Drummers - fit and they know it
Scientists have found that drummers have the stamina of athletes.
Trouble is, their lifestyles are rather different. Keith Moon, anyone?
By Nick Hasted
Friday, 25 July 2008
Getty
Tony Allen - Fela Kuti
When Fela Kuti decided to blend James Brown with jazz, high life and
Nigerian polyrhythms for his Africa 70 band, Allen put it into
practice, creating Afro-beat. Now helping Damon Albarn with The Good,
the Bad & the Queen.
More pictures Print Email Search
Search
Go
Independent.co.uk Web
Bookmark & Share
Digg It
del.icio.us
Facebook
Stumbleupon
What are these?
Change font size: A | A | A
At Blondie's triumphant Latitude Festival set last Sunday, most eyes
were on Debbie Harry. Hammering away at the back, though, their
drummer, Clem Burke, was not only driving the band through one of
rock's more rhythmically exotic back catalogues; he was also helping
the cause of international science.
It turns out that he has spent the past eight years having his
physiology while drumming monitored by the universities of Chichester
and Gloucester****re, who care more about his heart's bpm (a high 150
when playing) than that of "Heart of Glass". The Clem Burke Project,
dedicated to "the dissemination of information leading to increased
enjoyment, health and well-being of all participants involved in
drumming", will be unveiled on Monday.
"When you consider the implications of touring on top of the
performance requirements for high profile drummers," Chichester
University's Dr Marcus Smith explains, with a straight face, "it is
clear that their fitness levels need to be outstanding." Those who
witnessed the lifestyles of The Who's Keith Moon and Led Zeppelin's
John Bonham in their riotous pomp will greet this news with surprise.
Those who carried their coffins when both were just 32 may laugh a bit
less.
The attrition rate of rock's most muscular instrumentalists was
famously satirised in This Is Spinal Tap, on their fourth drummer
after incidents including "a bizarre gardening accident" and
spontaneous human combustion. But real life has not been much kinder.
Def Leppard's Rick Allen had his left arm lopped off in a car crash in
1984, showing extraordinary fortitude by learning to play an
electronic drum-kit one-armed and continuing for the band's greatest
successes. Rock's two most notorious drummers, Moon and Bonham, were
already dead from lifestyles that would cause Dr Smith's monitoring
equipment to melt from the strain.
Moon was the template for self-destructive rock drummers, seemingly
intent on a sort of humorous but sometimes unpleasant carnage. His
bass drum was rigged with explosives and smoke bombs, permanently
damaging Pete Townshend's ears. He drove his Lincoln into a pool,
bashed out two front teeth in a drunken fall on his 21st birthday, and
tipped TVs out of hotel windows. He carried a briefcase to gigs, the
singer-songwriter Roy Harper recalled, like a "drug salesman's kit" of
uppers and downers. In 1971, he was injected with morphine before
going on stage to counteract the brandy and barbiturates.
It was a largely amusing life lived unrelentingly, expressed in every
beat of The Who's violently joyful records. But one look at the photo
of him out on the town on 7 September 1976, with the bloated pallor
and overstretched skin of a corpse, shortly before being found dead of
a prescription-drugs overdose at home, makes you wonder.
Bonham modelled himself partly on Moon, and in many ways bears out
Smith's thesis. The son of a carpenter, at 16 he was carrying hods
round building sites, and he retained enormous strength and an ox-like
constitution through most of Led Zeppelin's career. He was able to
keep something in reserve even when giving the band its unprecedented,
walloping beat, and gave the others a rest during his live solo set-
piece "Moby Dick".
But Smith's line about "the implications of touring on top of the
performance requirements" could have been written about Bonham. He
loved playing but loathed leaving home, so drank and later injected
heroin, until one pre-tour binge finished him on 24 September 1980.
It should be borne in mind just what peculiar people many drummers
are. The Beatles' Ringo Starr, the Stones' Charlie Watts and The
Kinks' Mick Avory held the beat on m***** of 1960s hits with minimal
fuss, as if in a separate universe from the riotous fans. All had
their demons later, but such Zen calmness would please Smith and his
batteries of monitors. The ability to be a band's reliable motor
without worrying about the egos around them has kept these veterans
alive.
Deeper creativity than just holding down a beat has rarely been a good
idea in rock. The windy jazz time-signatures and science-fiction
lyrics of Rush's drummer-auteur Neil Peart live on in many people's
nightmares. But then, there are the examples of Art Blakey, who led
ground-breaking jazz bands into his seventies, and Tony Allen, the
originator of Afro-beat in the 1970s, whose subtle physicality and
calm rhythmic innovations are a universe away from Bonham and Moon.
Similarly, Roni Size's follow-up project to his Mercury-winning
drum'n'bass album New Forms, 1999's Breakbeat Era, saw Toby Pascoe
replicate the music's skittering, digitally generated beats live, a
remarkable feat of athleticism. Even Razorlight's Andy Burrows, whose
recent solo album The Colour of My Dreams was better-liked than his
band's latest, may find such creative concentration helps his health.
The ability to take technology on, when synth-drums were supposed to
make drummers redundant, wins Phil Collins some respect. His use of
the compressed, "gated" drum effect on "In the Air Tonight" was a
defining moment of 1980s hubris. Collins wanted a "huge" sound and got
it, on a record whose inhumanly huge beat would go on to wreck most of
the decade's music.
Perhaps rock's greatest drumming polymath was The Band's Levon Helm.
One of two fine drummers (alongside Richard Manuel) in the largely
Canadian band that created Americana in the late 1960s, his thuddy
"tom-tom" sound, dry and warm, was the base of this new, rootsy sound.
He also helped out on mandolin, rhythm guitar and bass, inspired many
songs with his stories of medicine shows and moon****ne, and wrote
several himself. He was a raw-voiced white Southern soul singer, and
acclaimed actor as Loretta Lynn's dad in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980).
Though he was silenced by cancer until last year's Grammy-winning Dirt
Farmer, and went through the usual excesses, the old "rock drummer"
jokes fall flat faced with Helm. Whatever he's got, you suspect
science doesn't have a name for it yet.
One successor, though, does treat drumming with scientific respect.
Glenn Kotche joined the US band Wilco for their three most recent,
experimental and best albums, beginning with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
(2002). He's constantly adding to his instrument, jury-rigging hub-
caps, scrap metal, orchestral instruments and home-made contraptions
on to a weird monster unrecognisable from Starr's kit. You can imagine
him being the first into the drumming lab the Gloucester****re
professors plan. But on stage his job is the same as Bonham's.
Exactly what good the Clem Burke Project will do is hard to see. Smith
compares Burke's annual Blondie workload of 100 90-minute gigs to that
of professional footballers. But as anyone who has been on a rock tour
knows, there's little resemblance to modern athletes' strictly
monitored lifestyles. Little sleep or food, compensated for by large
amounts of drink, until the tour finishes and band-members collapse,
mentally and physically shattered, is the norm even today. Drummers
such as Gary Powell, the ex-Libertine and Dirty Pretty Thing whose
muscular fitness fanaticism sets him apart from his band-mates, are
rare.
The University of Gloucester****re will, I suspect, find several of the
drummers it intends to profile to have the upper-body strength of a
gorilla and the internal organs of a 90-year-old tramp. And slapping
health-risk warnings on that tempting drum-kit in the window won't put
off the next Moon.
DRUMMERS WHO LEFT A MARK
Tony Allen - Fela Kuti
When Fela Kuti decided to blend James Brown with jazz, high life and
Nigerian polyrhythms for his Africa 70 band, Allen put it into
practice, creating Afro-beat. Now helping Damon Albarn with The Good,
the Bad & the Queen.
Ginger Baker - Cream
Though, typically for a drummer, he was never confused by the public
with God, as his Cream guitarist Eric Clapton was, his notorious 13-
minute solo on "Toad" suggests Baker sometimes made the mistake
himself. Made the drum a rock lead instrument. Thanks.
Keith Moon - The Who
His off-stage excesses eventually defined him, but Moon was also the
great showman among drummers and the irreplaceable source of The Who's
violent energy, as they found when they tried with The Faces' Kenny
Jones and then split in despair.
John Bonham - Led Zeppelin
The sheer hardness of Bonham's drumming, achieved through strength and
sticks he called "trees", allied with delicate, swinging feel, gave
Led Zeppelin the edge over their rivals. His work on "When the Levee
Breaks" is a hip-hop text.
Gary Powell - Dirty Pretty Things
While his singers in The Libertines, Pete Doherty and Carl Barāt,
whose Dirty Pretty Things he now drums for, have had a series of
health and chemically addled misadventures, the muscular Powell can be
seen back-stage swinging from the ceiling. The indestructible rock of
current British indie.
Patrick Hallahan - My Morning Jacket
My Morning Jacket's third drummer (the previous two leaving before
Spinal Tap-style "gardening accidents" occurred to cut short their
careers) was on board for this band's current ascent towards major US
stardom. His thundering beat has been a crucial factor
|
