Beat it

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. This was a programme, for example, that compared Elvin Jones’s stick work for John Coltrane to Moses’s parting of the Red Sea; that attributed the Beatles’ success largely to Ringo; and that put forward Dee Dee Chandler as one of the key figures of 20th-century global history.

So who, you might be ignorant enough to be wondering, was Dee Dee Chandler? He was of course (it turns out) the man responsible for ‘one of the most important inventions in modern music’ — i.e. the bass-drum pedal.

By then, four-beats-to-the-bar drumming, with the bass drum providing the downbeat and the snare the alternating upbeat, had already been developed in New Orleans (rather pleasingly, by freed slaves who’d bought old Confederate Army drums from local pawnshops). But before Dee Dee’s breakthrough, this operated on a strict one-man, one-drum policy, so that two people were needed for a basic beat and more if you wanted something fancier. Now, the way was open for the ‘greatest invention’ of the lot: the drum kit, where the same person could do it all, thus providing ‘the musical paradigm shift of the century’ (that backbeat again) and making the whole world dance.

At which point, enter another neglected global hero: Earl Palmer. On such records as Fats Domino’s ‘The Fat Man’ and Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, Palmer established the bass-and-snare backbeat as it still exists today — although, as Copeland’s impressively close analysis of the work of Cream’s Ginger Baker and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham demonstrated, it was later accompanied by more complicated rhythms too.