"Have you worked with anybody famous?" which invariably elicits a one word answer, "Yes" (although in the case of the hygienist it was more like "Hauwughah" as I recall).
Recently I wrote about expertise and how it's a quality conferred upon us by others (rightly or wrongly) and to a great extent I tend to think that the same could be said of success, although it is in many ways a far more abstract commodity. In our industry and elsewhere there are over-achievers too numerous to mention, who are portrayed to us as the epitome of success, by dint of having achieved wealth or fame, more often than not the yardsticks by which much of success is (in my opinion incorrectly) measured. Money and adulation are very nice things to have in your life, and I feel happy for those who have them, but I suspect the definitions of success are far more varied and nuanced than these two rather broad points of reference. After all, history is littered with all kinds of casualties from the ranks of the rich and famous who to the casual observer might appear to 'have it all', but fail in their search for lasting contentment. So really it's in the eye of the beholder and far more to do with the outward perception than how we feel inside. So it's fair to start with the premise that the endless feed of celebrity vacuity might not be everything it's cracked up to be, and that success can manifest in many forms other than mansions, limos and eight digit bank balances, so it might be worth thinking about what it is you are truly after, and furthermore recognising it as and when it arrives.
It's no secret that I have been playing drums since infancy, and by the time I was in my early teens I had sufficient ability and experience to hold down grown up gigs with grown up musicians three and four decades my senior. Interestingly this made me sound a little bit middle aged myself. Check the video link for what does not resemble the typical teenager drumming style of the late 70s and early 80s.
This is of course the renowned Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra which was such a pivotal chapter in my development as a player but even before joining the band I had been doing local gigs for quite some time.
This was a much bigger deal altogether though and this clip dates from early 1980 when I had won the Jack Parnell Drum Award in the much missed BBC national big band competition, which was unceremoniously scrapped about a decade ago. I was actually working in the band at an international circus at the NEC Birmingham when the BBC called there to tell me I had won this prestigious trophy. I thought this would be the beginning of everything, and even have an old pocket diary in which I wrote a note on the train home from my gig (too young to drive even) about how excited I was about the news. I was interviewed on local radio a couple of times, appeared in several local papers, did the TV appearance above and rounded it all off with a Radio 2 broadcast from Golders Green Hippodrome.
The band won the competition again the year after, and though I didn't win another drum award, here nevertheless is an extract from the broadcast, as the producer in my winning year cut my feature from the subsequent transmission as they were over on time. A free-form trombone solo feature (imaginatively titled 'Bone Free') remained in the final programme. I'm not bitter though.
Listen here....
So anyway, doors remained shut and I stayed where I was. A brief brush with notoriety soon died down and what I had hoped to be the gateway to pastures greener found me pretty much in the same place as previously.
Why?
All sorts of reasons why but having learned over the intervening years to take responsibility for my own actions the truth is
a) I wasn't good enough to progress a whole lot further than I had already got at that point, and didn't have sufficient range as a player to excel at a whole lot outside of the big band/mainstream jazz sphere, which brings with it another problem...
b) There wasn't really any kind of a viable career path for a teenage big band and mainstream jazz drummer at the time. There were, in fact, fewer opportunities to play that sort of music professionally than there are now, and perhaps more significantly far fewer opportunities to study.
Also, in my adolescence I was foolish enough to overestimate the power of luck and the value of merit. Being the best young drummer in your street, neighbourhood, town might have been all very well but at that age I had little understanding of what it would take to get a foothold in the big, bad world of the professional musician.
If you are reading this and you, or a member of your family is in this same situation, find as many good musicians you can and ask their advice. If only there had been social media and the internet back in 1979!
So, anyway, I stayed right where I was and slowly, by trial and error, continued to broaden my skill set in whatever ways I could in order to be more useful to as broad a range of people as possible. The noted Birmingham drummer Garry Allcock, known to many as one of the founding fathers of the vintage drum 'scene' in the UK, had a big band but he liked to front the band rather than play, so he gave me the drum chair which was a great grounding in the high end function gig scene, and it would be some years later that a two week relief band gig for Garry on the QE2 would mark the door into the upper leagues finally opening. That's not to say that there weren't fleeting glimpses of success prior to this, about which more later. About the same time I got hooked up with a lot of very good traditional/mainstream jazz musicians and again my playing range and musical knowledge would broaden with each new experience.
The big band jazz thing was still at the forefront too, and I was playing with 10 different bands of one sort or another by the time I took my first steps as a bandleader in 1982.
It might surprise you to know that there were quite a few originals bands too, both back then and after I moved to London. Some of these had great potential (Hearts and Minds) some were awful and way beyond parody (Strange Behaviour) but these recollections will have to wait for another day. Suffice to say the one thing common to them all was that none of them made any impact, as was the case with about 99.8 per cent of such bands at the time. The internet and more recently social media have changed all that forever, but again, for another day.
One originals project from the Birmingham years which is particularly fondly remembered was a couple, Jenny and Dave, who cohabited and wrote (some extremely memorable and catchy) pop songs and called themselves The Salamanders. If ever there was a band that could have gone the distance this was probably the one. Rehearsals were easy, efficient and effective with none of the grinding pointlessness and tedium that comes with the intuitive sense of being involved in yet another project that's going nowhere. A&R man Gordon Charlton (I think was his name) from CBS/Epic came all the way from London just to watch us rehearse, he was particularly complimentary about the rhythm section. I still have a cassette of a demo recorded straight to eight tracks, but following Jenny and Dave splitting up the band ground to an immediate halt, so that tape contains a couple of potential pop classics that never were. Anytime You Need A Friend was probably the best of the bunch and genuinely could have been a floor filler/pub chucking out anthem but it never happened, so we move on, like so many that for one reason or another don't go the distance. Of course with everything else that was going on I wasn’t left without options when the band broke up. No matter how much you love your originals band don't let it be your only roll of the dice where a music career is concerned.
Also, The Salamanders came with a surprise unintended consequence. We rehearsed and recorded at a popular Birmingham studio called Outlaw, run by a guy called Phil who had a rag tag, no brand house drum set that he could make sound fantastic, and always had a big spliff on the go. He liked me and I started doing a few jingles there, as well as booking some of the players. One time we did an up tempo, surf tinged piece for Unit Sales DIY store. The drum part was quite busy as fills and energy were required. The following day Phil called in a panic as there had been a fault on the snare channel and it looked likely that the whole track would have to be redone. However I managed to save the day by going back in and overdubbing an exact duplicate snare part, leaving the remainder of the existing drum track intact. Playing just the snare segments of the previous day's drum fills was a fun challenge to say the least, but we pulled it off and the track was saved. And in one take too!
I think Phil thought he owed me a favour, and not long afterwards he had his chance. Out of the blue he called me to say that Dexy's Midnight Runners were in residence in the studio recording demos for their third album and were having drummer problems. The problem was they couldn't find anyone they liked and the average duration of auditions was approximately 90 seconds before Kevin decided he had heard enough.
Phil put me forward for the gig, and when the day came I turned up at the appointed time. Expensive cars were parked outside. Bear in mind the band was huge at the time and with Come On Eileen they had just had one of the biggest chart hits of the era; a floor filler/pub chucking out anthem even (!)
Kevin Rowland had a reputation for being difficult and autocratic. Throughout the entire day I spent with the band he was never less than warm and friendly, and his suggestions for what he wanted to hear from the drums were both constructive and complimentary. The session wasn’t recorded in the studio but I do recall it was being documented on a cassette recorder. Somewhere, therefore, (if only in landfill) there are versions of several tracks from the album Don’t Stand Me Down that have me playing on them. The album was not well received, but is today considered a lost classic. Much of the day was spent on a lengthy composition at the time called 'What's She Like' (released with a slightly altered title). The only other tune I can remember was called 'The Waltz'. Helen (fiddle) commented that my playing on this sounded "a bit like Take 5", which I don’t think was meant entirely as a compliment.
About 4pm Kevin decided that we had done enough and called proceedings to a halt, thanking me very kindly.
I never heard another word.
Phil told me later that they really liked what I had done, but KR wanted to try someone who used two bass drums. All they had to do was ask. As far as I know the eventual album had a number of drummers on it and Dexy's opted not to have a band member per se.
So, my journey into the upper echelons of the 80s pop scene stopped right there. If the outcome had been different I often wonder where life might have taken me. Maybe one or two gold discs and even a nice portfolio of buy-to-lets in suburbs of North London.
Who knows?
Had things been different I very much doubt that I would have developed as a player to the extent that I have, and by now quite possibly might be out of music altogether.
It is of course entirely possible that significant success early in my career could have oh-so easily being sacrificed in an unguarded moment of post-adolescent arrogance. Maturing past this disposition is one of the key markers that will keep you busy and working for years to come. The one big lesson I did learn from this and a disproportionately long list of early life disappointments is the maturity that comes from adversity. Getting overlooked countless times just made me try harder.
So what's the point of this little trip down a part of memory lane you probably thought I had never travelled?
If your first single charts at number 47, your second is less successful and the best you can do performance-wise is a second support, that studying when you could have been partying might not seem like a bad idea after all when you contemplate having to do something only to pay your bills.
So you have it within your grasp to maximise the possibility of doing something in the industry that you will find satisfying, and in order to do so it's worth remembering the old saying to do with eggs and baskets.
It's good to be confident and to believe in what you are attempting to achieve, but why not have a contingency plan? You know what sod's law is like...if you've got it you'll probably never need it, but to know harmony and theory, write, record and produce your own (or someone else's) material as well as broadening your instrumental skills to add the greatest possible range to your playing, and thus maximise your employment opportunities, is shortening the odds on you having a long and satisfying career.
If you are thinking about studying why not come and join us at LCCM, where we'll give you a real-world skill set which will equip you for the modern music industry.
There are a quantity and range of music courses available now that offer something for virtually every player. I would have loved to have the opportunity to do something similar, but in the early 80s there were far fewer openings, and a place at Berklee had to be declined due to lack of sufficient funds. That said things have worked out completely fine even if the route I ended up taking was a touch circuitous, and this autumn I will be ticking a few more boxes which serve to remind me of why I got into all this in the first place. The childhood dreams of half a century ago have become reality a number of times previously, and are doing so again.
It may not be millions and mansions, but whichever way you look at it, it's a kind of success.
