SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Some of my earliest memories of music were works brass bands in Kettering, England, where I lived from the age of two to nine. Many of the Midlands factories had brass bands and we lived opposite a factory that had an award-winning band. We could hear them practise in their lunch hour: the music was very beautiful: rich, and warm-sounding with the horns in the mid and lower registers. Every summer, during the week of my birthday, there was a festival on the town common with marching bands. I distinctly remember the Marine band and the amazing power of the drum section as it went by. I knew at that moment that I needed to play the drums. My grandparents and my parents always listened to music on BBC radio, which at the time was a mix of whatever was popular. My parents would take me with them to the working men’s clubs and there was always a band playing. I would sit there all night and watch the drummer. I have no idea why drums called out to me like that but there is no question that they did. We had a friend who used to sing in clubs, so we would travel around to various towns in the region with her and that was when I started to become curious about how records were made and how songs were written.

One of the earliest artists who caught my ear in the 1950s was Lonnie Donegan performing songs such as ‘Midnight Special’. I later realised that he was getting this material from the songster Lead Belly. Many decades later the Lead Belly recordings were a deciding factor in my going to work at Smithsonian Folkways, the label that owns many of those recordings.

We emigrated to New Zealand when I was nine and I became obsessed with popular music. I loved The Shadows; ‘Apache’ was a big favourite, but I liked everything they did, and followed all the incarnations of the band and the breakaway groups as well. I was a huge fan of both drummers – Tony Meehan and Brian Bennett. When I heard ‘Love me Do’ by the Beatles in 1962 I had the sense that life would never be the same again – it sounded so different to everything else on the radio.

At this time, my best friend and I were glued to the BBC World Service Broadcasts, and we heard so much great music as the 1960s British music scene unfolded. An early influence was The Yardbirds – I bought the single ‘For Your Love’ and played it till the grooves wore out. The first two Rolling Stones albums were life changing. I knew they were tapping into an extremely vital wellspring, but I hadn’t yet fully explored the source: Black American blues music.

The Who was a dopamine explosion for me, the raw power they exhibited, the look, the attitude, Keith Moon’s wild undisciplined, revolutionary drumming. Aside from his unique, aggressive guitar technique and harmonic approach, Pete Townsend’s incredible statement songs spoke directly to me. My Generation was a clarion call and coming from my background, I particularly related to the first line of the second verse of ‘Substitute’: ‘I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.’ Powerful stuff.

I loved all the British Blues bands. Alexis Korner, Blues Incorporated, the Graham Bond Organization, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and Cream all blew my socks off. And then, suddenly, there was Jimi Hendrix. These were exciting times. Who knew that Led Zeppelin was about to redefine the meaning of heavy? Three incredible drummers in three amazing bands – Ginger Baker (Cream), Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience) and John Bonham (Led Zeppelin) – had completely different styles of playing that were equally exciting. It was Mitchell’s playing that caused me to pay careful attention to jazz drummer Elvin Jones.

Around this time Miles Davis released Bitches Brew. This was an album that challenged everything I thought I knew about music. I couldn’t figure out how their composition process had worked, and it was some years before I found out that the band had jammed in the studio, using short tunes and riffs by Miles, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, and that producer Teo Macero had edited the extensive recordings together, creating hooks and structures out of improvised sections.

I had previously had my understanding of the role of the drums in jazz completely revised by drummer Tony Williams’ playing on Miles’s second great quintet recordings and by his drumming on albums by Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill and Williams’ own band, Lifetime. Williams had been taught by Alan Dawson, the legendary Boston jazz drummer, and that led me to apply for Berklee College of Music in the States, with the express intent of studying with Alan. This was a life-changing experience.

While at Berklee, I spent every spare second in their library, a cornucopia of great music on reel-to-reel tapes. One album that intrigued me was Extrapolations by the British guitarist John McLaughlin, featuring the incredible Tony Oxley on drums. I needed to leave Berklee (and, sadly, lessons with Alan Dawson) to take up a record deal with a band in the UK, so I contacted Tony Oxley and I began taking lessons with him in the U.K., which proved to be transformative. [While preparing this article for publication, we received the sad news that Oxley died on 26 Dec 2023.] At the same time, I signed up to study classical percussion at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London with David Arnold (RPO) and for private lessons with percussionist James Blades (LSO). Heady times. I was playing on sessions, working with several live bands touring the country, and I began the most important chapter of my musical life, playing with the nascent Landscape.

The diversity of music that I was listening to, and studying was dizzying. On the classical side, Beethoven, Debussy, and Ravel stand out. Chris Heaton turned me on to the avant-garde ‘classical’ music scene, including composers Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Ligeti, Penderecki and much more. Then there were the British improvisational musicians around Oxley, including Derek Bailey and Paul Rutherford.

There were the country-influenced bands such as the Band, Little Feat, The Eagles, The Doobie Brothers, etc., and I can’t forget the great singer-songwriters, including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Paul Simon and the latter-day Beach Boys. However, Black American musicians never ceased to inspire me – artists such as Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, Gil Scott-Heron, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Bill Withers, and too many jazz greats to mention, plus R&B artists such as Etta James, Ray Charles and the Motown, Stax and Atlantic artists.

This then progressed to George Clinton and P-Funk and later The Valentine Brothers, Chaka Khan, Prince and of course hip-hop, a total game-changer that led to me moving (in the 1980s) to the wellspring: New York City.

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Landscape A Go-go: the story of Landscape 1977-83. is out now, available from the Landscape official store, landscape.lnk.to/landscapeagogo

See also INFLUENCES – ANDY PASK

INFLUENCES – PETER THOMS

INFLUENCES – JOHN L. WALTERS

INFLUENCES – CHRIS HEATON