Marcus Berkmann

The beat goes on

Where would Fleetwood Mac be without Mick, or Steely Dan without Keith Carlock - or The Beatles without Ringo?

It’s rare that I see a piece about music that makes me want to cheer from the rafters and shake the perpetrator by the hand, but one such appeared in these pages last week on the subject of Ringo Starr, 75 this week. James Woodall, who may or may not be a Beatles tragic of the first water, argued that Ringo was a genius and that the Beatles were lucky to have him. True Beatles fans know this to be true and are enraged when anyone suggests otherwise. For years an urban myth had it that John Lennon, when asked if Ringo was the best drummer around, said that he wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles. But as Woodall reported, Lennon never said this. Jasper Carrott did, in 1983. Carrott was never actually a member of the Beatles as I understand it, although his song ‘Funky Moped’ did reach number five in the UK charts 40 years ago next month.

Drummers are perennially underrated. Other musicians make drummer jokes. Some writers make rock critic jokes. How many rock critics does it take to change a light bulb? None: they like working in the dark. What do you say to a drummer in a three-piece suit? ‘Will the defendant please rise.’ For a while, in the 1980s and 1990s, it looked as though drummers would soon be out of a job. All but replaced in the studio by machines, they could only argue that machines sound like machines, and wait for everyone else to notice and start employing them again. Drum machines responded by becoming even more artful and complicated, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator films. My friend Phil, who has been drumming professionally for 30 years, would listen to the latest apparently unplayable drum figure someone had created on a computer, and become determined to master it.

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