On Drums
For most of the long summer of 1975, the person I most wanted to be was Sticks — a character from the children’s TV series Here Come the Double Deckers.
It wasn’t anything in particular about Sticks’ personality that I envied. He was American, smiley, and seemed to enjoy himself — all fine.
Mainly I wanted to be Sticks because he owned a drum kit and I didn’t.
We did have a Wendy House, and I would collect yogurt pots and toy pans, range them around the joists of the plywood walls, on the window sills and mini-shelves, and I would try to play.
By this point, my musical role model was Animal from the Muppets, so you can probably imagine my style.
I continued wanting to be a drummer throughout middle school.
This involved joining the school orchestra as a percussionist — required to count about fifty bars and then play two notes on the triangle.
At another school concert, I think I did a drum solo on the school kit.
I also — and this where it gets educational — had drum lessons.
Still no drum kit.
I owned drumsticks, a metal practice pad with a rubber circle to hit, and a Learn to Play Drums manual.
And somewhere along the line, I picked up the information that a real drummer — like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd — would be able to play different rhythms with each hand.
More specifically, they would be able to play 3/4 time with one hand whilst playing 4/4 time with the other.
This little learning was disastrous, and eventually destroyed my love of drumming.
Because how I adored bashing and bashing away.
I thought this was something I might happily do with my life.
Boom-tssk.
Along with skateboarding.
(I did get a skateboard.)
The different-time-signatures-with-different-limbs is, I now know, an avoidable part of percussion — if you’re playing most rock and pop styles — though it is definitely something there as a skill to be learned.
But not before you’ve done the rudiments.
Here is where the lesson broadens out.
I was put off because I heard rumour of something way beyond my level, and I believed that I should just immediately be able to do it, because it was something drummers did.
This was the threshold test of my talent. If I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t who I thought I was.
So I sat there with my drum pad, starting in 4/4 with my right hand, then trying to bring in my 3/4 left, and I’d lollop along for two bars before everything collapsed and I started to believe I had no co-ordination.
After a while, I gave up drums and took up guitar.
Now I could be intimidated by Dave Gilmour rather than Nick Mason.
All this may go some way to explain why, years later, I started writing the stories that gradually became I play the drums in a band called okay.
If I couldn’t be the drummer in a mid-level Canadian indie rock band, I could at least write about being the drummer in a mid-level Canadian indie rock band.
From wanting to be Sticks, I had become my main character, Clap.
And when I was very close to finishing the stories, I met a Canadian drummer, Adam Warner.
This was up at Edinburgh, during the Book Festival. We’d both gone to a taster meditation session run by the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. I think Adam already knew how to meditate, he just wanted somewhere quiet to sit.
Clap as well as a Canadian drummer was also becoming a Buddhist.
I am terrified by the cold-calling aspect of research, and avoid it, but very often — almost always — when I need to do some fact-checking, I meet the person I need to meet.
When I needed to research buying an illegal gun for my novel Corpsing, I ended up having a long cross-country ride in a limo driven by an ex-member of SO18, the armed branch of the Met. He sorted me out.
Adam was able to read the stories and put me right on where I’d got the drumming and the Canadianness and the Buddhism wrong.
Also, and few things in my life have been truly cathartic, but this was, we sat in an Edinburgh pub and I told him about me wanting to be a drummer but quitting because of the 3/4 4/4 thing.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you just have to write it down.’
He picked up a beer mat, flipped it over and started drawing vertical lines with x’s on the bottom.
Most of the time, in my experience, the solution to tricky technical problems is, Oh, you have to write it down.
All drummers do this. Despite the jokes about them.
The internet, along with everything else, is the absolute worst place for hearing rumours of something way beyond your level.
Or watching an entire YouTube series on something important and worthwhile but absolutely not what you need at that stage in your development.
Knowing the next thing you need to learn, and being disciplined enough to learn only that thing — this is vital.
Just because you can’t do it straight away doesn’t mean you’re not who you think you are, or that you’re not going to get to be who you want to be.
Because the flip side of this is that I do often think in terms of rhythm.
And where drummers might need to write something down to work it out, writers need to pick up their sticks — at least in their head.
Boom-tssk.
