Watch and Learn

I read (and later saw) an interview with Charlie Watts where he said that one of the great regrets of his life was that he hadn't taken drum lessons or learned music and that was why, in his opinion, his drumming is so poor. If only I could drum so badly! Anyway Charlie said that he would go to the clubs in London to watch British jazz musicians and when Americans came over he would go and see them in either London (at Ronnie Scotts for example) or in Paris in one of the legendary left bank clubs such  as The Club St Germain where he watched and would later copy the style of Kenny "Klook" Clarke one of the greats of jazz and a man who was at the front of the Be-Bop revolution.

Anyway Charlie said that he had been listening to a recording Clarke had made and couldn't understand or work out how Clarke got a particular sound, there obviously wasn't any Internet, there was barely any television at that time (1958) so when the chance came to see "Klook" Charlie took it and watched and learned.

Why I have started a post with two paragraphs about Charlie Watts? Well I've been listening to an album by the Welsh  band The Joy Formidable. Much like Warpaint, who I posted about last month, TJF are a throwback, to my ears, to the late 1970's early 1980's when labels such as Rough Trade and 4AD offered us a sound that was a musical sorbet to rinse our ears of the cloying New Romantics and the  Ladyboy pop of Boy George, Marilyn etc. I've been enjoying their album "The Big Roar" and became fascinated by the drum sound on the track 'Buoy', so fascinated in fact that if I knew I was making a journey that involved several sets of traffic lights I would try and 'sync' the music and the journey so that when I stopped at a red light I could practice the drum pattern.

Yeah, I know, this is sounding really weird isn't it? I'm a 51 year old accountant who plans his car journeys to coincide with drum riffs. "Quick Matron, the screens."

Anyway, unlike Charlie and Klook I have the advantage of the interweb and I found a video of the TJF playing live in a bicycle shop in Austin, Texas as part of the 2011 SXSW Festival.. The drum part that intrigued me is near the end of the song. from about 5:20.  On the album it sounds like it is played on the hi and lo toms and the bass drum. On the screen it appears that the drummer, Matt Thomas, is using snare, bass and cymbals to recreate the sound.

Well it made sense to me!





p.s - the other thing that I noticed from this video is the way Ritzy Bryan (lead guitar and vocals) moves. Much like every photographic model I have ever met has one generic pose that she can't explain, Ritzy does that swaying towards the mic that every girl singer with a guitar from Joan Jett to Chrissie Hynde and onto Justine Frischmann from Elastica has done but which is very rare among male singer/guitarists.