I knew that Bobby Gillespie had been a drummer for Jesus and Mary Chain:
Naturally, the Mary Chain would have a standing drummer (a position that rotated so much – including a stint by Bobby Gillespie – this joint memoir should come with an “other guys” spreadsheet).
And it’s a nice little trick that the drummer here is standing:
And I like the song, the album etc. But the confusion. Drummers are supposed to have a sense of beat, of timing. But by the way he dances Gillespie doesn’t have that. Which is just so terribly confusing to me….
Good spot. It suggests that a person can have a sense of rhythm and timing which is adequate for some tasks, but inadequate for others.
Our cathedral Organist and Director of Music is some sort of minor genius, and can make Bach gigues and fugues really come alive on the organ. But when the cathedral team did that “Jerusalema” dance for their lockdown tik tok , he proved to have two left feet.
And that gets me thinking about the great man himself: could Bach dance?
Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground was the ‘primes inter pares’ of standing drummers.
TBF he’s not playing a drum kit, just some Latin-style percussion. The biggest difference is the bass drum which you pretty much have to sit down to play with your foot/ feet.
It makes you wonder if one reason people become musicians is that they love music but can’t dance. So they make the music instead of dancing to it.
I’m not serious. Becoming a musician that others will listen to involves far too much work.
Ah… playback/lipsync shenanigans…. 😉
One of the most iconic versions of that ,
The Mamas and the Papas on the Ed Sullivan show way back when:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNlwimUxUME
Yethro Tull even made an artform out of it when they were forced to do it…
What do you call someone who spends all their time hanging out with musicians?
A drummer.
What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?
You only need to punch the rhythm into the drum machine once.
Boom boom.
“Becoming a musician that others will listen to involves far too much work.”
I had a student who played the bass. He’d earn useful pocket money by making up string quartets for amateurs who, apparently, always had problems finding a bassist.
One day he told me that work was drying up. I suggested that jazz bands had notorious difficulties finding bassists; why not try that?
“Oh no”, said he, “I’m not good enough to play jazz.” Could that have been because he lacked an adequate sense of rhythm?
He’s using congas and a snare: no high-hat and no bass drum hence no stool.
Or Echo and the Bunnymen – the machine smoked less dope. Yes, I was at school with Pete de F…..
Having watched the clip a couple of times, it’s fairly obvious that the vocals aren’t well synced with the track. The rhythm he’s dancing to may not be the same rhythm you’re hearing. It’s quite common with music videos.
Having watched the clip a couple of times, it’s fairly obvious that the vocals aren’t well synced with the track. The rhythm he’s dancing to may not be the same rhythm you’re hearing.
The first thing that struck me was that the video and the audio weren’t properly synced. The second thing that struck me was nobody bothered to put more than about $100 into its production, which probably explains the first thing that struck me.
@dearieme
A standard classical string quartet is two violins, a viola and a cello – a bass would tend to overpower the other instruments. There are a few pieces that demand it (Schubert’s ‘Trout’ piano quintet being a well-known example – one of Schubert’s friends played bass) for which they need to ‘borrow’ a bass.
‘What was the last thing the drummer said before being kicked out of the band?’
‘Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea for a song!’
Re: primal scream, aren’t they all ex members of other bands? Isn’t the bassist from the stone roses originally?
Jand the MC never rocked my boat. Apparently terrible live.
Poor old Pete de Freitas came from Trinidad didn’t he ? Ganja was probably in the baby milk.
P de F, somewhere in the Portuguese diaspora but I don’t know where. I wouild imagine Porto orig if he ended up at Downside.
The very fact that it’s black & white & therefore “arty” means whoever made it will have done well out of it, Dennis. Count on it. It also looks as if it’s been shot with film stock, not digital. And I think we’re looking at the same thing. At around the 40 sec mark he manages to sing the word “blind” with his mouth wide open
I was desperately trying to think where I was musically in 1990. I was trying to appreciate bands like Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets. I had been through a phase of going to concerts with big name bands such as Simple Minds and REM and ended up hating them, because they seemed to turn into massive twats on stage ( guys like Jim Kerr were usually massive twats anyway). So these Indie bands seemed to be more about having a laugh.
Although like Jesus and Mary Chain, I really didn’t think much of Primal Scream.
Anyway Purcell, Haendel and Monteverdi soon took over…
Can Stewart “The Rhythmatist” Copeland dance? Or “Mark Unpronounceablename of Big Country”?
I wouldn’t want to watch such a display, just in order to find out.
At a guess, the art of drumming is in training each limb/joint to hit a very specific element of the overall rhythm, throughout the entirety of the track, and consistently across many tracks.
Jokes aside, this not at all compatible with throwing some shapes on the dance floor. Of the “I got paid to be in the studio for what turned out to be a top ten hit in 1981, and then had to tour for three months for two hundred quid” types that I’ve run into over the years, somehow, the general rule seems to be that if you take the crutch, instrument, away, then they’re worse dancers than I am.
Which is pretty bloody damning, really.
Gillespie doesn’t appear to be a “good” drummer. Neither is Alan Wilder of Mode. Perfectly capable of sitting behind the kit to bang out Personal Jesus or I Feel You live, but otherwise not much kop, in terms of adding much innovation to the track during its creation, purely through sitting behind a kit.
And, given how the tech has developed, there’s probably a shitload more of them around now than there would have been thirty or forty years ago. There is the persistent rumour that Mode’s current drummer, Christian Eigner I think, is time-corrected both in the studio and live.
I didn’t realise that song was one of theirs (but that frequently happens to me with pop music).
I do rather like “Country Girl” by them though; even bought the CD because it’s a fun thing to blast out whilst driving too fast round Dorset roads.
On the video thing. If it’s anything like the ones I’ve been involved in, that was shot with a single camera & could have taken most of a day in a studio. So it’s lots of short takes stitched together. Probably not in any particular sequence. The editing will have been trying to match the shots with the audio track. With the success you see.
@Grikath
My favourite miming incident was when Family appeared on TOTP to “perform” Weaver’s Answer and the sound of the record’s sax solo was presented as emanating from a flute.
According to people who appeared on it, almost all of TOTP was mimed to the audio. There were numerous incidences of the vocalists losing track & not opening & closing their mouths whilst apparently singing. I know someone that was on it. Their problem was the record track was a studio creation. They’d never performed the number like that to an audience. The performance version was totally different.
There was a miming ban in place for performances on TV (and probably elsewhere for all I know) before ToTP was launched in ’64. The programme had essentially been given an exemption of sorts, on the grounds that the performance broadcast should reflect the version that fans could actually buy on vinyl. The Musicians Union started getting antsy about this sort of thing in ’66, with one demand being that a recording of the “performance” should be available. Strikes ensued, and Aunty Beeb had some large number of orchestras on it’s books.
ToTP largely ignored all this, but due to the format occasionally ran into a separate issue; some tracks had to be edited down to fit into the time allotted, and this had already cropped up in the radio, you had Radio Edits that would turn up as B-sides or on the 12″ single, or be released parallel to the 7″ vinyl. I think (could be wrong) that a Duran Duran release got the treatment on ToTP. Also, when Frankie Goes to Hollywood released Welcome to the Pleasure Dome as a single, that was severely hacked down from the album version.
On the miming front, one band took to the stage and didn’t bother to even make the pretence; just stood there. Want to say it was New Order, but could have been anyone. Pretty sure the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses took the piss as well. Stroppy Mancs.
Several things led to to introduction of actual performances, even if it was just the vocalist in the late ’80s I think; first was the whole Milli Vanilli thing, second was the existence of The Tube followed by The Word, and the show was obviously entirely focused on the Top 40 singles, and had become heavily reliant on the top Radio 1 DJs as presenters, so Simon Bates, Peter Powell, Mike Read and Dave Lee Travis, who were somewhat long in the tooth. Whitehouse and Enfield’s Smashie and Nicey with their charidee work stuck the knife in and properly twisted it.
So, they did a reset in ’93-ish, at exactly the moment satellite broadcasting was really getting critical traction courtesy of the footie, and it you could get MTV/VH1 thrown in for nothing. About six years after Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing was the opening video on the launch of MTV Europe.
Remember being more than slightly surprised when ToTP finally got cancelled. I’d assumed it had just died years before. There’s the possibility that the cancellation may have been something of a strategic error by the BBC.
Bobby Gillespie in JAMC
Martin Duffy in Felt
Iness, Throb and Beattie original members
Later Mani from Stone Roses
Kevin Shields and Debbie Goodge from My Bloody Valentine on separate occasions.
Barney Sumner from New Order
Plenty more came and went over the yeard
@BiS
One song that was definitely performed live was Army Of Me by Björk. She was backed by Skunk Anansie and the ensemble proceeded to turn the volume up to 11 and play in a style that I assume wasn’t what the producer expected. It certainly wasn’t an easy number for the teenies to dance to.