9. John Lennon - Imagine

John - my mate John as opposed to John Lennon - set up the drum kit in his bedroom, draped towels over the snare, toms and high-hat and stuffed a duvet into the bass drum.  He explained to me that I had to cross one hand over the other, hit the high-hat in rhythm with the music and in every series of 4 taps I had to thump the peddle on 1 and hit the snare on 3.  He then proceeded to play Imagine on his electric keyboard, helpfully making a point of accentuating the chords on that 1st and 3rd beat within a bar and then he sent me off with a pair of drumsticks and told me to drum along on my thighs to the songs we were intending to play in our band.

Imagine wasn't going to be on the set-list.  It was just a simple, mid-tempo plodder that served a purpose in teaching someone with no musical ability to play the drums.  A Hard Day's Night was a more challenging prospect, only because of the speed, which made it impossible for me at that stage to maintain a consistent tempo.  You Really Got Me by The Kinks required me to add a few extra thumps of the bass drum and hits of the snare at that moment when the rest of the band pause for about 2 bars before the riff kicks back in.  And Sunday Bloody Sunday had that iconic military tattoo, which I thought I'd mastered, until John made me listen to the record and pointed out that Larry Mullen, Jr was coming off an even faster tattoo on the high hat to hit the snare and that was WAY beyond my capabilities.

So, all in all, John kindly tolerated my complete, raw, near-incompetence and we booked out a series of Sunday morning sessions in a rehearsal studio in Blackstock Rd, Finsbury Park and set about recruiting two others.

Steeped in a deep knowledge and appreciation of The Beatles, to which he held true since I'd first met him at school at the age of six, John wanted the traditional rhythm-lead-bass-drums line up.  He played lead and sang, but he wanted the rhythm guitarist to also add vocals and with this aim in mind, he recruited Jason Hollis, who had sung in the choir and still retained something of the Aled Jones in his voice.  Not something that worked so well with the riff-driven rock that we were covering.  But at least he knew one string from another, unlike Stephen Gallagher, who had picked up a bass guitar for the first time and had to be told exactly where to put his fingers at every moment in each song.  This didn't prevent him from showing some aspiration for song-writing, but his anti-immigration protest song was just a tad too hateful to warrant inclusion in our set.

I plateaued fairly quickly in my drumming skills, and though I have continued to play irregularly over the years since (and even performing in front of easy-to-please students in end-of-term assemblies with several ropey staff bands), I don't believe that I have got much better than I was in Blackstock Road.  Or round John's house, truth be told.  But that hardly matters, because I wasn't (I'm not) so shit as to make a complete dog's dinner of a song and thus the UNSURPASSABLE feeling of enjoyment that you get playing music with other people is at least something I can experience (assuming those people are as kind and as tolerant of occasional, unconscious tempo accelerating as John was.)

What else I learned from John, that increased my appreciation of music ten-fold from that time onwards, was how to listen to the separate instruments in a song and break down in my mind what each one is doing.  Before joining John's band, I wasn't even aware of the concept of a bass guitar never mind what it was doing in a song (though you'd wonder what I thought McCartney was doing in Paperback Writer if it wasn't farting in the bath.)

Sadly - for John really, as I feel we let him down - the band split before we had a name or played any gigs.  But there's a drum kit in my bedroom now.