HW: Father and son

[Jon Jarrett]

On Tue, 29 May 2001, iain ferguson wrote:

> Got to disagree, I thought Danny wa always the lamest hamfisted drummer hawkwind
> ever had,  the night of the hawks track is unlistenable to me because of the
> aweful drums.
> But Martin Griffin to me was a very good drummer, better than a lot of the
> drummers hawkwind have had over the past 20 years.
> Sonic attack is a great album, made all the better from Martin's great drumming.

        Actually, I have to concede you that point, that on _Sonic Attack_
I've never noticed the drumming particularly, which tends to suggest that
it's at least OK and possibly quite good. Furthermore, I have noticed the
drumming on _25 Years On_ and it's really quite good. I remember that my
theory at the time was that Martin was all right when told what to play
but lousy when left to improvise. But perhaps he actually has talent. In
which case, why...

> But then Choose your masks is an abomination of an album, the drums are gated ,
> metronomically perfect and without any movemnet to allow for fills etc, and may as
> well have been a drum machine.

        Well, this is it, it sounds like Pressurehed doesn't
it. Worse. There was a Mark & Lard series of sketches on Radio 1 a few
years back where they were taking the piss out of these albums which put
backing beats to classical pieces, where they just played such a piece
with Lard walloping a bass drum out of time; same drum sample every tune,
never in time, I thought it was hilarious. And then I got _Choose Your
Masques_ and there was Martin doing it for real. So what the hell
happened?

> I really wished martin had played the drums instead of Danny at the hawkestra,
> Danny's drums we just to much boom boom boom for me, and no finesse

        There was I think too much percussion going on there. You couldn't
have picked out finesse if it had been present (and wasn't Martin actually
playing one of the kits at the back for some of the songs?) Yours,
                                                                   Jon

--
       Jon Jarrett (01223 514989)     jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
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