How did you get started, did you have any tuition and what’s your background at the beginning?

I started playing trumpet when I was 6 years old, my Dad was a professional trumpet player, but he also played a bit of drums. In the old days on the ‘revolving’ bandstands there would quite often be a big band and a small band. They would play back-to-back music all night. Sometimes the drummer would have to substitute with another drummer, and my dad always played a bit of drums and would sub for one of the guys if they were late or ill, he could play a good swinging beat but not much else because he never practised. So he got me interested in drums, the trumpet was way too hard for me, I found drums easy because I was very coordinated, I had dance lessons and played football and was pretty good, I was just naturally coordinated and drums just felt easy.  So instead of hanging around with my friends, mostly I stayed at home and practised along to my dad’s record collection. When I was about 10 my dad got me lessons with an old show drummer called Joe Hodson who sadly died a few years ago.  Joe was real old school, but he had some hip ideas, he was really into match grip, and precision, like playing on a coin, he showed me all these things about playing on carbon paper and trying to hit the same spot every time.

Joe played both grips but he wanted me to do match grip right from the start.  He thought that was the ‘modern’ way, this was early 1970’s, with cutting edge drummers like Billy Cobham, who were opening up ideas about playing matched grip and open handed.  Joe would probably have loved me to play open handed as well, but it felt unnatural to me. I like to occasionally play a bit of traditional grip, but most the stuff I do now is rock and pop based and I just can’t play that hard with an orthodox grip.  When I’m playing jazz I quite often just switch grips because it makes me feel and think differently. It’s like playing with your heel up or down, there are times when both are good, you haven’t got to choose one, choose them both.  So, Joe was really into precision, he taught me to read, he taught me to hold the sticks. To be honest I dreaded the lessons because I wanted to play along with records and have fun. It took me a long time before I realised what Joe was teaching me had any relevance to what I was doing in my other half of practice sessions.  I would sit there playing along to records and then my mum would come in the room and say: “Have you done Joe’s practice”?  I would be there in tears sometimes because I couldn’t do it or I felt totally frustrated doing it, but my dad was paying for the lessons so I had to do it.  Of course years later it all paid off when it finally dawned on me the relevance of what he had been teaching me all that time, but I really didn’t enjoy it as a kid.

To be honest I dreaded the lessons because I wanted to play along with records and have fun. It took me a long time before I realised what Joe was teaching me had any relevance to what I was doing in my other half of practice sessions. 

How long did you stay with Joe for?

Probably 3 or 4 years until I was about 14 and he got me reading.  My dad was sometimes playing with the BBC radio big band and it was a lot of fun going to Maida Vale studios and watch them play. There was a great drummer in the band called Paul Brodie (who I’m still in touch with now) - he was, and still is, a very inspirational person to me.  He was about 50 when I met him but he was really into what was happening at the time, Steve Gadd, Billy Cobham, Harvey Mason John Guerin etc. and he would have all these grooves and fills to show me.  He played incredibly passionately, really gave it his all, and instead of going for a cup of tea in his break he’d get me on his drums and give me a little lesson.  I was just totally in love with the whole idea of playing and totally in love with Paul, he was my childhood hero. Just the idea that all these guys would sit in the room with no audience, just playing into microphones, I thought that was so fantastic that I really wanted to do that, in fact one of my very early ambitions was to do a session at the BBC Maida Vale. Luckily - as it worked out - when I was 16 I had my first session there with my dad’s quartet.

What would you say were your early breaks?

The first one was playing for Sunblest Bread, a 26 week promotional tour, playing round the country from 8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. playing in supermarkets and hypermarkets. In 1979 we would arrive in a town playing on an open top double-decker yellow bus. We’d then go in to a store, (I’d strap on a marching drum) and stand next to the bread counter and play Dixieland Jazz, which I really didn’t like. I really wanted to play some American style funk like Steve Gadd when I was 16 – or anything except trad jazz.  At 8.30 in the morning in a supermarket in Glasgow the last thing these tough housewives wanted to hear were guys dressed up in silly suits playing Dixieland Jazz, they’d throw tins of beans to try to stop us playing.  But it meant I left school and was a professional musician (which is exactly what I wanted to be) with a job paying £100 per week - which in 1979 wasn’t bad money at the time.

My second professional job was playing in Quaglinos (the Terrence Conran) restaurant in the middle of London. We would play dinner music and then back cabaret acts. To finish we’d play dance music until 2pm. Around that time I used to chase up adverts in the back of Melody Maker magazine and go along to loads of auditions. One of them landed me the gig with a progressive rock band called Renaissance, and I think it was mainly because I could read that.

I got the job.  They were doing quite complicated music, with lots of odd time signatures. So they sent me a tape of a 20-minute song they wanted me to play at the audition. I realised that if I really want to give it my best shot, I’d have to sit down and write it all out.  It took me a good week to score out this 20-minute chart. They said they had 200 drummers apply for the job and I was the only one that actually made it through the whole piece.  I guess that’s when the lessons with Joe made a lot of sense - being able to read and write notation. Renaissance toured the States when I was only 19, so it was a fantastic experience for me, really eye opening, and a really great time to get away, leave the family home and see some of the world. I found myself wandering around the music stores in New York one day when I came across Steve Vai’s transcription book of Frank Zappa’s guitar solos. I saw things in that book I’d never even thought existed – mad polyrhythmic notation. I also bought the Gary Chaffee “Patterns” books and worked really hard to try and digest both of them.

Gavin Harrison on stage with Porcupine Tree

1994 you joined Level 42, how did that come about?

I think purely because my friend Jakko Jakszyk was the guitarist. He’s a local guy who used to live in Watford and I met him through the local music shop, we used to work together and I started doing recording sessions for Jakko. We formed a band called Dizrhythmia in the late 80’s, and got a record deal with Island Records. Jakko got the job with Level 42, because Mark King was watching the James Whale show late one night and saw Jakko on TV with Tom Robinson. Jakko can play in a particular way, it’s a kind of Alan Holdsworth legato technique, so Mark just phoned him up out of the blue and hired him.  After that there was a time when Gary Husband had left and Mark asked the other band members if they knew any suitable drummers. Jakko suggested me – I did a kind of audition - and then I was in. Sometimes it’s just about who you know.

I’ve heard stories as well that Mark’s not the easiest person to play with as a drummer, how was that relationship?

He’s very rhythmical.  When he plays it’s like a great big train steaming along.  It would be really hard not to play with him, he is a drummer basically, I guess you have to adapt a little bit because Mark plays bass like it’s a clavinet - very rhythmical and funky. He should be in the Guinness Book of Records for his independence.  The guy can sing and play like you wouldn’t believe and play fills while he’s singing too, just unbelievable independence from his hands and his voice.  So I actually found it quite easy to play with him.  Maybe you can’t fit in as many double bass drum fills or ghost notes because Mark’s already there, he’s playing 16ths, and all you’ve got to do is groove along.  In fact the first time I met Mark, I went down to his house and he talked about playing some of the songs really simply, like 4’s on the hi-hat instead of 8’s, he said “you don’t need to play 8’s just play 4’s”.  We were playing a tune called “Running in the Family” and he was saying it’s like a tango, just sharp, ¼ notes coming off the hi-hats and it made a lot of sense.  On its own it didn’t sound that great but when Mark started playing it all fitted into place. I really enjoyed the experience - it was good fun.

How did you come up with the concept behind your very popular books and your DVDs?

I’m fascinated by rhythm, as I’m sure all us drummers are, and I’m fascinated by rhythmic design and patterns that you can create. I was much more interested in ‘rhythmic designs’ than I was in technique or speed because I’ve never been a particularly fast drummer and it never really appealed to me. Hearing things like “Cissy Strut” by The Meters knocked me out so much more than hearing someone play 16ths on a double bass drum at 250bpm. I’m impressed by the physical achievement of that kind of speed – but it doesn’t move me.

So I started collecting rhythmic patterns and ideas. I’ve always been quite ‘rhythmically curious’ so one day I wrote a beat one 16th note displaced because I wondered what it would sound like. I remember it was on the back of an envelope and I had it pinned on the wall of my practise room, I wrote down about 4 typical funk rhythms, followed by a few 16th note displacements of those rhythms. I got fascinated with the idea of displacement and the strange effect it produced.

Hearing things like “Cissy Strut” by The Meters knocked me out so much more than hearing someone play 16ths on a double bass drum at 250bpm. I’m impressed by the physical achievement of that kind of speed – but it doesn’t move me.

When I was a kid I used to try playing to a metronome – but it was one of those damn wind up metronomes that would swing from side to side. The problem was that I couldn’t hear it when I started to play the drums. I found it easier to play to records because I could crank up the volume – but I realised that some of the records weren’t that steady in tempo themselves. In the early 80’s loads of records came out with the Linn Drum Machine on them - which meant I could play along to them and I knew it was perfectly steady. Purely as an exercise I’d try and play a 16th note out (displaced) and I found it really hard to do - but gradually it became easier and I thought it helped my sense of time and placement. It is a hard thing to do (and not particularly a musical to do) but it really helps your sense of time and placement. The fact is that when I practised playing a 16th note out for 10 minutes – and then went back to playing it on the beat – it just felt a lot better – I had a better perception of the spaces in between the notes.

I started writing more and more things down and had this idea of experimenting with the subdivisions and spacing between the main bass drum notes (usually on beats 1 & 3) and backbeats of the snare drum (usually 2 & 4) and this how I stumbled across metric modulation.

I realised that displacement and metric modulation had something in common; they were both ways of rhythmic manipulation and it’s what I thought of as a “rhythmic illusion” because displacement gives you the illusion of a new downbeat (a new ‘one’) and modulation gives you the illusion of a new tempo. You can even combine the two - which feels like you’ve got a new downbeat and a new tempo - but it is still an illusion because you know exactly where you are all the time relative to the original tempo and downbeat.

My idea was always that I would only do it for a very short burst to create an effect, a sort of ‘on the edge of your seat’ Alfred Hitchcock moment, just for maybe half a bar, I could suddenly create a rhythmic illusion. In 1988 I did an interview for Rhythm Magazine (as part of the promotion for Dizrhythmia) and I told the interviewer (Simon Braund) that I had these ideas for a book.  I hadn’t seen a book about displacement and modulation before. He said he was looking for columnists and invited me to write it out every month as a column, so I did it for 3 ½ years (1989 – 1992). The first few months were the ideas I had been collecting and then after that I had at least a month to think of where was going to go next. That actually proved to be very useful because it gave me time to consider the logical path of where it was all leading to. So at the end of it I decided I had enough columns to stick together as a book. Probably 60% of the Rhythmic Illusion books were the columns grouped together plus 40% of new stuff I had thought of during the compilation.
      
Next I started finding categories like differing levels of a metric modulation. For instance a modulation based on easy subdivisions and spacings like 3, 4, 6 or 8 - I’d call that metric modulation type 1. Then I thought about using quintuplets or septuplets as subdivisions, which are much harder, or groupings of 5 or 7 and that lead me to modulation types 2 & 3. So I found I could categorise them as I put them together. Then there are different categories of displacement that you could apply. It’s really just about exploring the manipulation of rhythm, it’s up to you whether you think they’re musical or not, and how useful they are on your gig, but either way they’re good practise because they use your mind more than your muscles.
You think – ‘hang on, my arms are doing exactly the same thing they were before and now I’m struggling to play it’ - and that’s great exercise because that means you’re working on your brain, your ‘rhythmic control centre’, not your limbs, because your limbs can already play this rhythm – in fact they’ve played it for years, all you’re asking your brain to do is shift it along whatever amount you want displacing – or think of it in a different subdivision - and when you start to play them – they’ll feel like a totally different groove. It’s all to do with perception. 

The second book ‘Rhythmic Perspectives’ is about altering your of rhythm and viewing things from a different angle, which again was a slightly highbrow way to go about it but I much prefer books with a concept than just endless mathematical permutations. There’s a lot of ‘extended theories’ based on the first book.

 guess if anyone’s seen me play they’ll know that I don’t do many obvious rhythmic illusions, they might even be quite disappointed, but what I do use all the time is the ‘concept’ of displacement and modulation.

I felt the examples in both books were just demonstrations of the concepts. How much usefulness is in those books is entirely up to the person who wants to apply them to their own playing.

I guess if anyone’s seen me play they’ll know that I don’t do many obvious rhythmic illusions, they might even be quite disappointed, but what I do use all the time is the ‘concept’ of displacement and modulation. I find I can create quite simple rhythms or fills, that aren’t mega chops, by applying a certain concept.  If you’ve got an easy fill, next time you play it try displacing it by a 16th, it’s still an easy fill but it sounds different and it may inspire you to think in a different way. I’ve had this idea of playing fills where I think of a concept rather than a fill, because I’m sure - like me - you’ve sat on your gig night after night - playing the same old songs - and it comes to that point in the song where you make a fill and all you can think of is the same fill you did every other night. You sit there feeling totally uninspired. Or  you take a different approach which is having loads of stock fills that you’ve previously worked out and you just wheel them out one after another. I got so bored listening to my own old stock fills on gigs or recordings that I thought ‘this is embarrassing’ – I’m going to have to take a different approach to this. So I realised that I’ve got to think more conceptually about a fill, the colours I’m going to use for the type of effect I want to convey.

Sometimes just for a laugh, I’ll just throw my arms at the drums and take pot luck, it might be horrible but I’ve never not been able to pull it out of a nose dive by the end of the bar.  Occasionally great surprising things can happen, I’m sure most drummers feel that when you play a fill you’ve never played before in your life, it puts a big smile on your face and what triggered that fill is usually just a moment of madness or divine inspiration. I’m sure that’s a feeling all drummers want to have. To get to a point in their playing where they can just improvise a fill or solo and feel confident it’s going to work rather than keep regurgitating the same old pre-rehearsed stuff.

Gavin Harrison in the live room of his studio

Let’s talk about Porcupine Tree. How did that gig come about?

It was because I knew Richard Barbieri, the keyboard player.  I’d worked with Richard in the early 90’s with an Italian artist called Alice. In 2002 Richard called me up and said they we’re going to New York to record an album and would I come and do it as a session player because the previous drummer had just left the band. It all worked out well so they invited me to join the band as a permanent member. After 23 years of being a hired hand – I thought it was a good time for me to give it a go.

You were saying earlier about breaking America with Porcupine Tree; can you repeat the story?

We spent a hell of a lot of the American record company’s money in tour support just doing the first few tours.  For me, I’d been touring with quite named artists before and I was used to going to a nice hotel room and being limo’d about. When I first went to the States with Porcupine Tree we were travelling around in two vans and sharing rooms in really cheap motels, we weren’t making any money at all, but just trying to be there, trying to play and build an audience.

We’d go to a club and the fee would be almost nothing like $50, sometimes it would be free, but it was costing us a lot of money per day to be there with our small crew.  With the second tour the only way we could be there and make back to back gigs was with a touring bus, which was the first time I’d ever done a tour where you had to sleep on the bus as its moving.  That’s quite frightening.  When I first got into the bunk it was a claustrophobic 2ft high x 6ft long space, and that was it for 2 months. We were bouncing about on roads outside New York’s’ notoriously pot-holed highways, we weren’t sleeping and it felt crazy, playing half empty places for almost nothing.  But it had to be done to even get a chance to ‘break’ into America. Luckily at that point the record company were picking up the massive costs.

It’s taken us 5 tours of America before we could actually not lose money.  Luckily the band had been touring Europe for much longer and was already doing reasonable OK in Europe but any money that was left over from Europe would go towards supporting the American tour.  The expenses are unbelievable and it’s an interesting insight for me because I’ve been a session musician most of my professional live where I’ve been paid a weekly fee, but now I was seeing it from the other side.

It’s much harder than I ever imagined being a member of a band, the point where you start making loads of money is so far down the road.

It had been a while since the previous DVD and I had a lot of new ideas I wanted to put across. I suppose I could have done a new book, but I find I personally learn more by watching someone play.

You’re now co-producing the albums and producing the DVDs for Porcupine Tree, how has that all come about?

I got involved with the video stuff because I was the only member of the band who really knew anything about it. I’d made my own DVD at home so I knew a tiny morsel more than anyone else. I get involved with the production for the tour which means finding ways of synching films and organising drum loops and clicks that we play to keep the whole thing in sync with the films that are projected, sometimes there are elements in the film that relate to lyrics so they really  have to be in time.  I’m quite technical, I know what we need to make it work, what computer software we need, what hardware we need, what MIDI connections we need to make all that work. 

So then someone needed to project manage the DVD - which was to find a filming company to talk about prices, talk about cameras, talk about formats, how many cameras, where you want them and go through the details. I spent ages on the phone to all sorts of companies in the States to try and get them down to film the two nights at Chicago that we did last October. Then there’s all the audio recording, getting a 48 track ProTools unit up there, then we need another desk because our desk can’t do what we need, enormous amounts of cost and planning and because it was something I was interested in and knew something about I sort of project managed that side of it, the live performance DVD and audio but also the production on stage I tend to deal with.

Tell us about your new DVD?

I’ve worked on and off for two and a half years gathering the ideas and content and slowly composing, recording, filming and editing the new DVD Rhythmic Horizons. It had been a while since the previous DVD and I had a lot of new ideas I wanted to put across. I suppose I could have done a new book, but I find I personally learn more by watching someone play. You can see the attitude that some gives to a performance. Again the running theme through all my stuff is manipulation of rhythm. There are 5 whole tunes where you can hear me directly apply the concepts in a musical setting – and hopefully in a musically tasteful way. Because the lessons are concept based, anyone should be able to apply the ideas to their own playing and their own style of drumming. It’s a double sided DVD and I’ve included a lot of lessons and information on there as well as some rhythmical entertainment. There’s printable PDF’s of all the lessons, MP3 and MIDI file play-along, plus Italian and German subtitles for the whole disc.

Just tell us a little about the studio, for those that can’t see it, just tell us a little bit about what you’ve got going on here

Since moving here (to my new house) in 1997 it’s gradually mutated, but I knew from my experiences of working in professional studios the type of microphones I wanted. Whenever I did sessions, and I thought “that’s a great sounding bass drum" or "I love the way the toms sound”, I remembered what those microphones were and I went and brought them. In fact I’m still buying gear, it’s a never-ending story. I’m using 16 channels of Apogee converters – so I can just squeeze all the tracks into the Mac computer.

I listen back to the sessions I did when I first started here, and I’m happy that the sound has got better and better, which is more to do with gaining experience through trial and error. I’ve had studio engineers round here helping me, saying it would better if you did it like this or that, it’s a sort of slow evolution process of getting a good drum sound.  I play in the control room and I’ve got a big live room (which is about 40 x 50 with a 40ft ceiling) and I sometimes record two stereo pairs of microphones in the live room to capture the ambience. Then I move those tracks forward on the computer so there isn’t a big delay.

I have a lot of snare drums and huge amounts of cymbal choices. I’ve got different bass drums that I use so that I can try to design a sound that I think will fit the tune.  When someone sends me a session to play on I sit and listen to the song and one of the decisions I make very early on is what sort of sound I’d like to make with that song and how I’m going to achieve it. If I need to get out a 5” wood snare drum or if I need to change the tom heads to clear Ambassadors or get all my old cymbals out and do a real jazzy thing. The great thing about doing it at home on your own is that you can experiment, not have someone sitting there looking really unimpressed and checking their watch all day.

Yeah, thinking how much is this costing in our studio time.

Exactly, which is a drag when you’re at an expensive studio that could be costing £1,500 per day. You might decide to want to change all the tom heads and tell everyone to come back in an hour or so. Now there’s a few hundred quid gone already, and most people can’t afford that to do that. 

So usually I have the luxury of time and I might also play on a song all day and then get up the next morning and think, no it’s the wrong approach and I’ll start working on it again. The downside is you have to play on your own all the time with no other musicians here. Even though some of the backing tracks are real full with an entire band on there - sometimes you miss the input from other musicians or a producer.

Sometimes it’s as simple as someone sending me an MP3/MP4 over the internet and telling me the tempo, I put it on the computer, line it up, make sure the clicks and bars line up; I do my thing, and send them back an MP3.

What have you been up to recently?

I’m involved in a new project at the moment with a really talented singer/writer called 05 RIC who I met on MySpace. We’ve been writing songs together and I’m really excited about it. The tunes involve some of the most demanding and advanced rhythmic composition I’ve ever played.

I go through periods of being quite busy as a session drummer doing albums, jingles, TV themes, big projects, small projects, all sorts of stuff and I’ve got the studio here so I can do a lot of the stuff at home.  Sometimes it’s as simple as someone sending me an MP3/MP4 over the internet and telling me the tempo, I put it on the computer, line it up, make sure the clicks and bars line up; I do my thing, and send them back an MP3. Sometimes they tell me if they’ve got any comments about it, then I post them a DVDR with all the drum files on or upload them across the internet.  Depending on the sound and size of the kit, sometimes I’m recording 16 tracks of 24 bit audio and if I do maybe 2 or 3 takes on a track that could be 3 or 4 Gb of stuff, so it can on occasion it can be a bit too big to send over the net.

My new DVD is out now - plus the Porcupine Tree Live DVD is out and I am heading off to Italy to do some clinic dates. We hope to have a record out later this year. The next thing with Porcupine Tree is the release of the new record (mid April) and then the British tour in the last couple of weeks of April (dates can always be checked at www.porcupinetree.com). We will probably tour the United States and Europe a couple of times this year to support the new CD.

Interview by Mike Dolbear
February 2007