I was procrastinating. I didn’t want to go out. All I wanted to do was to have a cup of tea, loll around on the sofa and watch nonsense on the telly. Instead, I decided to do my washing, my hoovering, and sort out all my recycling.
It got to the point where the hoovering was done, the washing was complete and the recycling was all sorted and I realised I didn’t want to watch the telly anymore. I had a shower, got changed, and sat on my sofa. I then looked at the Meetup app to see what I was going to do.
I was going to do African drumming at the North London Buddhist centre.
I think it’s fair to say that my musical abilities are somewhat limited. My first memory of musical performance is one of failure. When I was at primary school I volunteered to play the glockenspiel in the school play, not really knowing what a glockenspiel was. The teachers quickly realised that I was profoundly incompetent, so they gave me a much simpler instrument: the cymbals.
My task was to crash the cymbals together in a loud grand finale when everyone in the school orchestra had finished hitting, blowing and scraping. My performance oscillated from day dreaming, where the entire ‘orchestra’ ended up shouting at me, through to crashing the cymbals too early, ruining the performance of the new glockenspiel performer, who was regularly very angry.
My performance at secondary school wasn’t much better. I quite enjoyed playing the recorder as a part of a huge carol concert, which meant all my bum notes were covered up by fellow performers (who were all playing slightly different bum notes). For some reason I managed to get into the top group of music just because I could tell the difference between two different time bases and knew what a trumpet was. I ended my musical education knowing that it was possible to read music, but not having any idea about how to.
At the grand age of thirty two, I decided that I really ought to finish what I started: I decided that I needed to know how to read music properly. This process involved buying a bunch of kids’ books, a new plastic recorder, then eventually buying a second hand clarinet from the internet.
Four years later, my wife filed for a divorce.
I didn’t want to go to an African drumming class. I wasn’t interested; I had too much musical baggage, but I knew I had some musical demons that I needed to exorcise.
One train ride and one bus ride later, I had found the North London Buddhist centre. It was in what appeared to be a Victorian town house a short walk away from Highbury and Islington station. I caught a glimpse of a note on the door, which said that we should go to the basement. I was ten minutes late.
I found nineteen people sitting on chairs in a big circle. Everyone had a big drum called a Djembe in front of them. The only seat that was available was next to our teacher, Stephen. Stephen wasn’t African. He was in his mid-fifties and spoke with a midlands accent.
After a few minutes of theatrical arm stretching exercises, we were off: Stephen went through patterns of getting a ‘bass’ sound, followed by a ‘tone’, which was a higher pitched sound you got from hitting the end of the membrane. Everyone copied what Stephen was doing. Percussive bass mixed with higher less thunderous notes echoed and resonated through the uncarpeted basement. It was a surprisingly powerful noise; it was noise that was on the cusp of sounding musical. The drum felt uncomfortable between my legs, and I became aware that my drum looked different to the others. I soon figured out that I was holding it in the wrong way.
We stopped, and we were introduced to a new way of hitting the drum; the ‘open handed slap’. Stephen began again, and we all copied him. He went faster and faster and faster until everyone had no idea what was going on. It was pretty good fun, although I was generally confusing my bass hits with my tone beats and hand slaps. Plus, I was totally muddling my left and right hands.
Things were, however, getting far too complicated; it wasn’t too long before I wanted to give Stephen an ‘open handed slap’.
‘Okay, what we’re going to do is some triples. Left-right-left. Left-right-left. None of this one-two. It’s one-two-three. One-two-three. Okay?’
Although it sounded idiot proof, I was soon lost and getting incensed at my own incompetence. I looked to my left; a young woman in her late twenties. She had absolutely no problem doing the triples. I was floundering.
‘What we’re going to do now is six-eight time. We’re going to combine the bass, with the tone, and we’re going to do some slaps. We’re going to learn two bars of a piece. Here’s the first bar…’
After a few goes, I managed to get it! Then, the inevitable happened. I started to listen to what other people were doing which meant I confused my left and right hand, muddled my tone and bass and had no idea where to do my slap.
We then moved to the second bar. This was simpler. I could do it.
‘We’re going to put it all together!’ shouted Stephen.
I had forgotten what the first bar was. I forgot about the tones and the slaps, so I just did the bass quietly so I didn’t mess up too badly. Even on a drum, I was doing bum notes, and hoping that my more skilled neighbours could cover for me.
‘Okay, half of you are going to do this…’ Stephen pounded on his drum. The half of the room that was sitting on Stephen’s right followed.
I had reached that point where I wanted to leave. I wasn’t having fun anymore. It was difficult, but everyone else seemed to be making it look easy. In the middle of our drum loops, Stephen would do amazing improvisations, showing off, demonstrating his skill, which made me feel even more inadequate. I wanted to do it well, but I was getting mad that I couldn’t. Plus, my hands were starting to hurt.
Stephen noticed that we were collectively finding certain patterns difficult, so he simplified it back, before building it up again. There was another period where I just ‘got’ it, when my hands were doing the right thing in the right order. It felt good; it was a moment when I stopped overanalysing everything, and stopped consciously trying to co-ordinate my body to do stuff that it was thoroughly unaccustomed to doing. I began to see why you would choose to do this.
‘Thanks everyone! There’s tea, bread and hummus upstairs. Let me know if you’re staying for the second session’.
I went over to pay Stephen for the class. There was a charge for the lesson, and a fee for the hire of the drum. His Meetup happened every week, and he had been running the group for around five years. I couldn’t chat for him for long, since he was busy prepping for the next session.
I found the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea and chatted to the fellow drummers. Most were regulars, but there were a couple of bewildered newcomers like myself. I spoke with Sue, Gloria and Rafal. Apparently there were a number of groups like this in different parts of London. Sue had been to Stephen’s group around three times; she had become inspired by a street performer who had spontaneously encouraged her to have a go. Gloria had travelled all the way from Slough, which was over twenty five miles away. Rafal had been to the group a few times and lived close by.
‘How about you? Have you done this before?’ asked Sue. I told her about my quest and this was Meetup number thirty three out of one hundred. She appeared incredulous.
‘Do you work for the government?’ she asked, studying me with curious intensity.
I left just as Stephen was rounding people up for the ‘advanced’ session. As I waited for the bus, I noticed two things; there was a chill in the London air: autumn was approaching, and my hearing was slightly dulled; twenty people drumming in close proximity to one another in a North London basement had clearly taken its toll. I did, however, feel that I had exorcised some of my musical demons. I hadn’t made a complete idiot out of myself. I only felt mildly incompetent.
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