Our road manager would come in and say, ’20 minutes, guys.’
We would show up at gigs and we were so tired that we would be fast asleep in the dressing room. “One of the things I loved about Black Sabbath was when we were on the road there were times we had been on the road for so long and we were tired and we were exhausted. What is the key to longevity as a musician? We had accomplished something after a long time of trying.” It felt uncomfortable and strange and at the same time I was elated.
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I looked at Tony, he looked at me and I said, ‘Oh my god.’ I didn’t know how to feel. "We found out about it when we were at a pub in London and our publicist told us it had charted. But when our first record went into the charts, I think it was at number 27 and it was the song ‘Black Sabbath’. I thought if I did that all of my problems would be over. “As a child the dream was to be like Elvis and have a hit record. What has been your biggest career highlight? The song Black Sabbath actually has no specific time.If you go looking for the one on the song you’re gonna be f***ed! If you go looking for the one on the song you’re gonna be f***ed!” We would measure it all off the hats and Tony’s guitar. We would just go back where Tony was putting the main notes of the song and I would drop my hats in there. "The song Black Sabbath actually has no specific time. ‘Fairies Wear Boot’ is like a blues swing. The feels and jazz feels and rock feels were exactly, to me, what we needed in the song. “Without the jazz influence, the Black Sabbath drumming would be very different. That was definitely a challenge and it gave me muscles like you would not believe! I blessed the day that someone said, ‘Can we put a couple of mikes on your drum kit?’ I said, ‘Go for it pal, I’m dying here!’” "Keep in mind that we still didn’t use PAs for the drums back then, everything was live without microphones. I tuned to maintain the integrity of the sound but at the same time to give the kit some wallop. I needed that for my build-ups and for songs like ‘Fairies Wear Boots’. "My floor toms were particularly important in the way that I tuned them because we were already going to things like the song ‘Black Sabbath’ so I needed power in my toms. I knew the sound I was after and what would work for what we were playing. I spent a lot of time around drummers learning how to get sound. I knew how I wanted the drums to sound and we did the best we could with a beat up Ludwig kit. “I based my tuning on Gene Krupa, Buddy and Joe Morello. I would try my best to listen to the records and copycat what they were playing.”īonham would come in and lay something down in this nonchalant way and he would be doing his triplets on his bass drum. That was as extreme as we got at 14 years old. We would go as far as to play some Howlin’ Wolf. When I was in my first band at 14 we were doing pop songs and things like Chuck Berry. “I would listen to lots of songs and try to learn them. What was the first song that you learned to play? There was camaraderie between the drummers even though we were all always away working.” "Bonham would come in and lay something down in this nonchalant way and he would be doing his triplets on his bass drum. There would be maybe seven or eight drummers sat in there and we would all play a little bit and show each other what we had learned. We would all congregate around Micky Evans’s shop. “There was a community around the drummers of the West Midlands. Who did you look up to as a young drummer? When I think about my upbringing I feel like the most fortunate person.
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It was the kind of band they had when there was a talk show on TV and I watched him as well. "There was another guy called Lionel Rubin who would play for the BBC at lunchtime. He had a drum shop in Birmingham and I would watch him.
Micky Evans was one of the biggest influences on me. There were so many guys back then to watch and I watched everybody. "When Clive Bunker was playing with Jethro Tull I would snuggle in right there by the side of the stage and watch Clive. I’d see Jim Capaldi with Deep Feeling and I would sit on the stage right next to Jim and watch him. Even when I was still at school we would go to the pubs and clubs in Birmingham and I would watch all of the drummers. But I’ll tell you what, I was around a lot of drummers. Did you take lessons or were you self-taught?
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