James Walton

Beat it

The bass-drum pedal of course. Plus: why Catastrophe continues to be as great as ever

issue 12 January 2019

Here’s a tricky quiz question for you. What word completes this sentence from a BBC4 documentary on Friday: ‘The world as we know it was created by the…’?

The answer, bizarrely enough, is ‘backbeat’ — because the documentary in question was On Drums… Stewart Copeland!, in which the former Police percussionist took a fiercely drum-centric view of well, more or less everything.

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