BH: Well, let’s go on to number two, and so it’s Leo Sayer… And–

IM: I mean, this is almost a guilty pleasure, this one I guess.

BH: It’s good. I do own this record as well… And it’s Endless Flight, and it’s 1976… And I’m assuming the whole record, but you said one of the key tracks is When I Need You. And it’s a Porcaro, Gadd, Olsson, Shlosser?

IM: Yes, Rick Schlosser, isn’t it? Nigel Olsson, he plays with Elton John. He did the Glastonbury with Elton John this year. And, obviously Gadd and Porcaro… I think it’s Porcaro on this track. I know it’s a bit of a cheeseball. It was a cassette that was in the car that got played over and over again… And I, yeah, just got indoctrinated into this album. When I listen to it, it brings back memories, childhood memories… But unlike the Buddy Rich, the chaos of Buddy Rich, which on its own would give you the impression of how the drums need to be played, which is very much fill everything up, lots of stuff going on, drum beats, chops, fills everywhere. These are session musicians at their prime. And there’s a fill halfway through this song, which goes into– well, near the end, which is a massive build, but it’s just executed so beautifully. And it’s always struck me.

BH: All right, so here is, around halfway through, here’s When I Need You.

[When I Need You by Leo Sayer plays]

IM: That’s how you do that moment.

BH: Wow.

IM: And then the backbeat is right back. And it just always– even as a kid, that just always struck me. So that’s a highlight of that album to me, actually. It’s quite a moment.

BH: I mean, something like that, what do you bring specifically to Kasabian, or anybody you work with? Just simplicity, restraint, all that stuff?

IM: What just happened then is it was delivered. That feel was completely delivered. It was– I don’t know, I wouldn’t say, aggressive, but it was very defined, very sure. There was no notes given away. Everything was meant. So there’s, again, an aggressiveness in that. He was sticking his pole in the ground, you know, and going, this is where we’re at… And again, it’s probably had an effect on me when I’m with Kasabian, I’m telling the entire building this is where we’re at.

BH: Yes, you do.

IM: Basically, you know, everyone in the building is going to have this drumbeat right now, or this stop, or this build. And I definitely believe– probably that drum fill has definitely instructed me over the line through my career on how to build a band up.

BH: Yeah.

IM: That even builds into a stop.

BH: Well, speaking of Kasabian, because you guys– I mean, you’re talking to someone right now who you– who your drumming has influenced massively… But what conversations took place in the studio when you were talking about the overall direction of the drums for Kasabian?

IM: When I first met them, they were very young. They were cutting out what they wanted to do. They discovered the Atari ST. Serge, particularly, discovered the computer, and writing on the computer, not just being a band in a room and just having that sound… But recording and cutting up a band on a recorder, even just on an Atari ST, you could make something sound different. It’s not just another jangly indie band that everyone else has got up and down the land in all the rehearsal rooms and whatever, you know?  It gave them the opportunity of not only just sounding like another Oasis band or whatever, but to actually have crossovers into other styles
like dance music, hip hop, trip hop, you know? Bring all those other flavors in… And that’s the reason they came to Bristol, and that’s where they met me all those years ago before they were signed, because they found some money from– through a guy who was like a manager type, and he’d convinced some people to lend them some money… And from Leicester, which is in the middle of the country, they could have gone right and gone up to Manchester and gone to that sort of northern music, you know? Like the Manchester sound and all that kind of thing, which would have been cool… But actually, this is 2001. We’d just had the ’90s. We just had Roni Size, Portishead, Massive Attack, that sound coming out of Bristol… And Serge particularly was excited to come down here and drink the water down here. Yeah, that’s how I met them… So when I showed up to the session, I had my drum kit with me, but they– each track that they– I think we did three different tracks… And there were such different vibes that we started to rummage into the drums that were in the studio as well… So a different snare, a different bass drum, different cymbals… And that was doing demos. That was right at the beginning. And that’s never changed, really. The last album has been done on one drum kit– Mark Ralph, who produced the record at his studio. But I would take a different snare drum, literally, every time I went there. And we recorded it– recorded my parts over about six months… But it really fascinated Serge that they could create a rock band that just wasn’t just a rock band. That could bring in all these different elements with a computer. So they would get me to play, even in the early days, they’d go, ‘Oh, we found this really cool beat. Can you make this beat happen?’ And so they’d play me the beat, and I would play over the top of the beat, recreating the beat, so it’s the flow they wanted with my feel and my drum sound. So they were doing that, and then taking that to go and write with, and put that in the computer, and then make tunes happen and stuff… So, that was the kind of vibe that they were into… And that’s still to this day, and there’s always been this interesting marriage between loop or machine drumming and me as a human drummer and for many, many years, I’ve had a capability to play with the click, so I’ve never had a problem playing in amongst the machines or the loops and trying to give it some waft, some swing. I think that was like going back to the couple of records we’ve just heard, we’ve got a Big Band drummer. Mix that with the produced studio drummers we’ve just heard… That’s going a little bit in towards where I am with Kasabian. This kind of brute force is kind of having it on top, but underneath there is that restraint that I’m still sticking with the click and some of the sounds that I’m playing with on stage, which are from the album, which blend with my drums… And between me and the machine, we create a feel, a separate feel.

BH: Yeah.

IM: Do you see what I mean? I’ve always found that fascinating, and it’s great when we play live, because, of course, live you have to dramify for effect. You have to bridge it all. And I don’t overstep the mark. I don’t want to overstep the mark. I don’t want to get too silly with it. So I do try and figure it out… And obviously, if I do something in rehearsals, and it’s a little bit too whiffy, then I might get an eye.

BH: No, dude.

IM: ‘OK, OK. Yeah, all right, that doesn’t work.’ But I can have quite a lot of enjoyment with dynamic lifts and bits and pieces when we play live. So–

BH: Going back to jazz, but in a different form. So it’s Morello. And the artist is Dave Brubeck. The album’s Time Out. Drummer is, of course, Joe Morello. The key track is– well, a few of them. Take Five, Rondo à La Turk. And– yeah.

IM: Yeah, absolutely.

BH: Yeah, yeah. So take it away.

IM: Rondo à La Turk actually is one of those tunes that just pops into my head every now and again. This album came into my life a little later on. I was probably like 12, kind of 13, something like that. And it wasn’t given to me. It was my dad’s, and he would play it in the car, and I sort of got obsessed with it… And actually, I think probably my favorite drum sound ever committed to tape in my opinion, for me, my favorite, is the drum sound that Morello gets in Take Five. It’s just like– it’s beautiful, and it’s powerful, yet it’s cool. And it’s jazz. And it’s like piano, upright bass jazz. But the power that Joe Morello’s got is up there with John Bonham for me. Probably people will be yelling at the screen with me saying that, but that sound, especially if you turn it up, it’s incredible. I wasn’t bitten by the Neil Peart Rush thing, so really, this was my little entry into time signatures. If you want to play either tune, Rondo à La Turk is blooming fantastic. Take Five, I would just say we could bask in the sound of Joe Morello’s bass drum.

BH: Let’s do Rondo à La Turk just because it’s probably, maybe, less people know about it.

IM: Yeah.

[Rondo à La Turk by Dave Brubeck plays]

IM: We’ve got to hear that drop in a minute… Here it comes. Yeah.

BH: Hell yeah.

[Both laugh]

IM: That’s just worth it for that.

BH: Yeah, yeah. It’s like a punchline. Did you study out of Joe Morello’s books? Like was it master studies? Is that what his book is?

IM: I had a teacher who’s ex army, and I’d sort of turned pro. I was about 19/20 years old, and I went on to what we used to call the DOLE. I sort of was like asked to be made redundant from a job that I had. I got on really well with the management. I was clear that I wasn’t going to make this my career, and they were really kind to me. They said, ‘Yeah, OK. Actually, yeah, your job is no longer required’ and so I was able to sign on from £35 a week and live with my mum’s, and I had a drum kit… And with that money, I hired this teacher every two weeks who was ex-army. He’s an old guy, probably in his 70s… And he was old school. He wasn’t here to make friends. He didn’t want to entertain me or make me feel good. He was like– he would have me playing rudiments. He taught me to play traditional. He wasn’t having it any other way, and I would play a double, sort of, parallel, and he would be like, ‘Back in my day, we used to meet up with the US Air Force Band.’ He goes, ‘That wouldn’t even get you through the door for an audition, let alone anything else, and I want that better next time

BH: Jesus.

IM: OK… [MAKING DRUMMING SOUND] You know, and we did use some pages from the Morello book. Master Studies, I think it is, and it’s just for the hands. He had me doing some insane stuff with it. But it really taught me– again, I had the patience for it. You know, I had the patience to sit down and nerd out and go around these exercises on a pad or on a kit, on my snare, and just do it and do it and do it until I could get it. I don’t know if everyone’s necessarily cut out for that kind of tedium… But again, it was all part of learning to play to a click track and having somebody like– not yell at me. He wasn’t like that, but he was very old school and just very much like, ‘Nah, you can do better than that. Nah. What’s that?’ And he kind of knew that I wanted to become a pro… And just in Bristol at that time, there was some– and it still is– marvelously, incredibly talented musicians, and just to get the bar gigs, you have to be astonishing. You have to be 100 miles away from where I was when I was 19
or 20, even though I was playing with bands and done big band stuff and theater stuff and been in my first rock bands just to make the cut on the local scene showing up, I realised I had a lot of work to do.

BH: All right, next up is a fun one. Not that anything else wasn’t fun, but Iron Maiden, Live After Death, releases 1985. And the drummer is Nico McBrain. So, yeah.

IM: Yes.

BH: Take it away.

IM: This was the first metal album I ever bought, and it happened on a French exchange trip because my exchangee’s cousin– he was an older guy. I don’t know how old he was. Probably looking back, he’s probably in his early 20s. He shared a flat upstairs with his girlfriend, upstairs in the house that this guy lived in, my exchangee lived in, and went up there and had a stubby of lager – I remember that. It was only about 13 again. 13, 14, maybe? And I think I was whiffing this heavy rock thing, actually. It was around me. But he played Ian Paice, Made in Japan, I think it was. It was Highway Star. That literally just took me out. That tune on its own is a major influence… And I guess I think Ian Pace might well be very inspired by Buddy Rich. It’s the same kind of intensity, fast, and really excited me. Anyway, during that week, we went out for a walk somewhere, and we happened on a shop. I was browsing in the shop, and I went to the cassette tapes… And there was Iron Maiden, and I just put my hand in my pocket, I thought, ‘I can buy this. I got enough money’ and I bought it because I was inspired to buy some kind of heavy metal album. I didn’t really have any idea what I was buying. I just knew it was heavy metal, and it had Eddie on the front going, ‘Raahh’ , you know, coming out of a grave. I think I picked a good one. I mean, it’s live from LA, I think, in the main. I think it’s different nights compiled together, and I was off. I was in the ride, and I used to listen to that on my walkman night after night, and be so inspired by it. Then I got into Iron Maiden generally. The first seven albums of Iron Maiden for me were like– was like my little– my time with them, and Clive Burr’s drumming on the first three albums, I think it is, is sublime. He’s such a soulful, warm drummer, but Live After Death was a big one for me… And you know, Nicko, I’ve got to know Nicko over the years. I’ve met him and been part of a drum company with him, the British Drum Company, and he’s a lovely, lovely bloke… and yeah, I don’t know if I’ve necessarily attempted to play like Nicko, but I think the sound of the crowd, the playing those big stages, when I get up on that drum kit with Kasabian as a part of me is trying to stand up to that record…

BH: And so yeah, you said the whole album. Which– is there a song you want to play that represents it ideally?

IM: I don’t know. Oh my god, any of them. Just right at the beginning with the Churchill speech.

BH: Yeah, exactly.

IM: And it’s like, ugh, you’re in, you know?

[Chruchill’s Speech by Iron Maiden plays]

IM: I’ve felt these moments when I’ve been on stage with Kasabian, nd then maybe there’s a kind of backdrop in front of us. Like a kabuki, as they call it.

BH: Sure, yeah.

IM: Serge might be doing something or something’s going on in the front, and you can hear the crowd. They’re all excited. The house lights have gone down. They go, ‘Aaah!’ You know, you’ve got that– what that crowd sounds like now. I’ve heard that, and I’ve been sat on my drum kit behind the kabuki, ready to go.

[Aces High by Iron Maiden plays]

BH: And he is ahead of that beat for sure. He is pushing that whole time.

IM: You know, Nicko is, or was, anyway, and when he was younger particularly, a beat pusher. Definitely a bit of a beat pusher, but that was always excitement. He was always on the side of the beat that was excitement. Especially in a band like that. Very different to what we heard Porcaro do, which was like play the sumptuous back beat. We got, Nicko was like on the edge of his seat. So again, I guess, especially as being a teenager listening to that over and over again, that kind of ‘Ahhh, come on!’ is in there.

BH: Alright, well speaking of studio stuff, this is probably one of the records that people would talk about… So Steely Dan’s Aja came out in 1977. Similar with Leo Sayer. You’ve got Gadd on there, you’ve got all the greats on there. But yeah, Home at Last, which I believe is Bernard Purdie maybe?

IM: Yeah, again, you could go with any of these tracks. They’re all just genius… And also it was like Aja, the reason I picked Aja was because the actual record was given to me by a friend of mine, and I’m not really discovering this in a kind of under the layers of, you know, under the skin, until– this is in my twenties now. I’ve got a friend who’s a guitarist, Lewis Osborne. He’s a session guitarist in the UK, and he’s had an amazing career all the way through the 80s, 90s. He’s still in the West End now doing shows, and a very, very successful guy on all the television shows, particularly back in the days when you used to get house bands on television… And he’s played with people like Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones and people like that. So, he’s that kind of a musician. He does enjoy and love jazz, but he has no interest in playing it or playing rock. He’s just a brilliant pop sort of musician, and he gave me this album one day. We were doing panto together in Bath, which is, I’m from Bristol, and so is he… And for seven years I’d had the drum chair at the Theatre Royal in Bath doing the panto. That would be two shows a day for six weeks. And so Lewis, I’ve known Lewis for years. I used to play with his dad many, many– when I was a teenager. And Lewis would come back from, say, doing the Sydney Opera House for a weekend and come back and be playing a little work in men’s club with me and his dad, you know? And one day he just showed up and he said, oh, I’ve done, I’ve burnt this off for you. I think you need to listen to this. I think of course, you know, he completely dropped a bomb on me there.

BH: Yes, he did.

IM: But then the entry, the gateway point for me was Steve Gadd on Aja. You know, that was the tune that opened me up to my fascination with this record. But after a while, that song became, not tired, but I suddenly realized everything else caught up. All the other drumming caught up, and this is an album that, we were talking about playing to music earlier, I will put this album on and play to it, to get vibed, zhuzhed up, get the drumming going or something. Just to get inspiration. This album and Gaucho, which is the album that followed, which is also extraordinary. These two albums are definitely my favorites. We could listen to any of them. This was the first time I had experienced the Bernard Perdie shuffle getting under my fingernails, you know, and sitting there and trying to emulate it with him and try to make him disappear into my playing, you know, as I played along with my headphones.

BH: Did you learn it yourself or did someone, because I had, someone had to tell me, oh, it’s the middle triplet, or did you just figure that out by listening to it because you’re better than me?

IM: I figured it out by listening to it, not because I’m better than you, but I think because, because I was able to do it because when I was younger, I was playing my ride cymbal, my jazz ride cymbal, and playing my triplet subdivisions against it, or my 16th note subdivisions against it, so it was already there. The facility for that was done.
And this is the thing, like, I mean, I did a lot of drum teaching. I taught at a lot of schools and stuff. On the occasion that I tried to teach people the way I was taught, it just didn’t go down very well, but back in those days, I needed to learn my bossa nova, my basic samba, my quick steps and foxtrot, some kind of cod rhumba, you know, or which kind of was like a beguine as well, a tango, an Argentinian tango. And as I say, the basic beat of the foxtrot and the quick step and the Mayfair quick step and to know their tempos, you know, and then it was rudiments, reading snare text, and, you know, doing the basic independence… And it’s just set me up because you can kind of do anything. If you’ve got that. I think that’s where that came from. But emulating Bernard Purdie is really quite difficult, you know. It breathes. It’s not perfected. It’s organic. It sounds human.

[Home at Last by Steely Dan plays]

IM: This is something that I’ve noticed, like, so when I do the blues thing every month, and we have different tunes to learn. You’ll be, like, especially old blues records, you’ll be surprised how much drummers did not use a crash cymbal.

BH: Exactly.

IM: Going back to, you know, the old Freddie King and all that stuff, you know, and it’s like, ‘wow’, you know, when you really, really sit down with it, it’s like, ‘Oh, yes, all easy stuff, isn’t it?’ I actually go round and round it, just to make my feel authentic for when I show up with these guys at Ronnie Scott’s. I’m not going to try, I’m not going to play pub blues at Ronnie Scott’s. I want it to be immaculate, you know? And the players I’m playing with, Tom Jones’ keyboard player, brass section from Jools Holland, you know? You’ve got Annie Lennox’s guitarist and bass player, you know, all that kind of thing. You know, these guys are like another level, you know? And it’s like, I don’t even have to create time. I just articulate it around them. I put the corners in over the top of what they do. It’s like someone’s just put the record on, you know.

BH: Yeah, exactly.

IM: And so I, you know, I’ve really gone out my way to enjoy the music form and to really study it, and it’s like, I must note to myself, this guy just does that all the way through for four minutes… And the smiles you get back from the other guys, do you know what I mean? It’s like, by doing nothing, I’ve done everything at the same time.
The song’s been allowed to breathe. I don’t want to be down on anyone… But you always learn every time you watch a band, watch a drummer, it could be in the smallest bar or in the biggest stadium and getting your ear worn out by somebody’s frequencies, being an audience and hearing the… ‘Psh, psh, psh’ always there from that 16 or that 18 or the, like, the bite of the snare getting into your jaw because he’s just squacking it all night. You know, and it wears your ears out and you’re like, I’m knackered.

BH: Yeah.

IM: You know, I’m tired of listening to you, you know? And so trying to temper everything you do, getting inside the music and trying to caress and snake charm your audience, you know, not to shock them or every now and again, of course, if you earn enough throughout a night of just like playing inside it, then you can drop a bomb and everyone goes ‘Ugh! It’s great!’ And it’s an amazing moment… But I love to see an audience just… I love that like ‘Jungle Book’ you know, in the eyes when Mowgli’s getting snake charming… And it’s like I love to see an audience in that state, you know, just people just doing that… And it’s like, right, I’m going to stay right here. I’m not going to go anywhere. I’m just staying here and let these guys do the work, and build behind them and maybe do a fill, just back to the hats. Anyway, I’m just chatting, but yeah.

BH: And that’s the show. If you’re listening on a platform that allows ratings and reviews, do that. It helps more people find the show, so it’ll get bigger and better and hopefully all have a chance to sell out one day, but you’ll be an OG listener that can brag to all your friends. Anyways, why don’t you go and check us out at bigfatsnaredrum.com and follow us on all the socials. Just search for Big Fat Snare Drum and you will find us. The show is edited in part using iZotope RX Audio Editor. It’s amazing, so go check that out at iZotope.com. And thanks again to Gunnar Olsson for the theme music. Bye!