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Any drummer who solos every night of a long tour has a lot of people to please. His colleagues want to hear something they haven’t heard a thousand times before; a non-specialist audience is often indifferent (oh, no - not a drum solo…); and most of all the drummer him or herself. That person wants to feel that it flows, that it has ideas that are related to something that preceded the moment at hand, something that gave him the reason to be playing the thing he’s playing right now and not just showing off his favourite lick. Is there some sense of form, of pacing, of dramatic intent?

That’s quite a list of boxes to tick, but this song Indiscipline was not a hard task. It came with built-in neurotic tension. The title of the piece itself conjures images of feral school-kids kicking over trash cans down at the schoolyard. In other words, it’s a perfect set-up to toy with the listener, to put him on edge, jumpy. Is there going to be a manic outburst? “Playing little games…” sneered singer Adrian Belew, who used to play a steady slow tick-tock beat on a second drum kit when we were just a quartet in the 80s. I was free to imitate or comment, slyly or explosively, as the ill-disciplined protagonist. Once I had that sort of scenario straight in my head, the ideas came fairly easily.

Another strange observation is that the drumming information your listener has to make sense of is coming much faster to him than it is to you. You know what you're giving; he doesn’t know what he’s getting. So a little goes a long way. To the layman at the back of two thousand seats, four on the floor and a simple rhythm on one other drum on top of it is already a ton of information and a lot of music. Too much blinding speed is irrelevant and unmusical. Happily I can’t do blinding speed so I don’t have that problem! I do blinding texture!

So I soloed on a lot of versions of this song. This here at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco is OK. But one of my favourites – or at least a night where it all almost went right - was during a five-night run at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway, New York City, in 1995. The sound of the drums is so crisp and beautifully recorded, thanks to Adrian Belew and his man Ken Latchney. The solo has surprises, development, fabulous audience reaction, shape, fiery interludes, some tricky metrical shit that Gavin Harrison ‘s books got me going on, and tons of chutzpah. If you told me to find 2’33” of serious drummage somewhere in all my recorded work that was definitive Bruford, stuff I just couldn’t do any better, stuff I could die happy with - I’d point to that night’s version of Indiscipline. It's available on the double CD Vrooom Vrooom by King Crimson. Anybody catch those Longacre shows?

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