: 11 February 2004 :

It was sunny and warm in my flat last weekend, and my flatmate was out at work, so I sat around wearing just a pair of shorts, beating the skins till my wrists ached. Yeah, I’ve taken up an unsavoury teenage habit – playing the drums. Steve, my flatmate, uncle and mentor, bought a hi-hat and a snare before Christmas, and rigged a bass drum pedal up to an empty cardboard box. The whole lot’s set up in the front room, in front of the stereo, so I can just stick a record on and accompany it with my amateurish banging and clanging. Hurrah! Fuck the neighbours. Turn that shit up to eleven and batter the kit.

Some people scoff at drummers, and say things like “at least pretend to be a percussionist”. Not me. Not any more. I’ve only been teaching myself for a short while, and I’m still finding it quite hard. I like the challenge, though – going from an instrument you’re good at to one you can’t play at all is pretty invigorating. I can tear a guitar apart without breaking a sweat, but as soon as I’m on that drum stool the tongue’s poking out of the corner of my mouth in concentration. Weird thing about listening to punk, too – the guitar parts are normally dead easy to play, even for a beginner, but the drumming’s well complicated.

I was in a bar last night with a mate from university – he’s working in A&R and he asked if I wanted to go see a couple of new bands. Anyway, he’s jamming with someone else I know, and he asked if I knew any drummers. My eyes lit up. – My flatmate’s good, but he’s moving to Brighton, I said. – But I can play the drums. There’s a kit in our flat.

“Yeah?”

Well, there’s a snare, a hi-hat, and an empty cardboard box with a bass pedal.

“Are you any good?”

I’m good enough to be in the White Stripes...

“Hmmm. Tell you what, come back to me in a few months if you can actually play. Oh, and get a proper kit.”

Aye, whatever. The offer he made me was that I could switch to bass. I think I’d be a good bassist – I’ve been playing the guitar long enough to know my way around it, and my attention span’s short enough that I’d be making a load of weird noises to keep myself entertained. There are no rhythm sections around, though. This is part of the reason I was never in a band when I was at college. (Apart from the fact that I'm catastrophically lazy.) Everyone wants to be a guitarist. I bet this is why Glenn Branca formed a guitar orchestra. It wasn’t out of any kind of No Wave experimentalism. He just couldn’t find any fucking drummers. If I have kids, they’re going to learn to play drums and bass. They’ll thank me later.