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I can’t offer a sensible, dispassionate critique of this because I don’t know whether I love it or hate it. It’s clean, accurate in it’s articulation, highly repetitive, but tethered to the electronic pads, so indicative of its age. It’s melodically cute, but I think it might have benefitted from a less obvious group of pitches from the pads.

In the early 80s I was trying to get by without a hi-hat, and without continual riding on the hats or ride cymbal. That approach certainly cleared the air from all the metalwork, but I miss the ride and that cushion of sustain under the cymbal pattern. Here most instrument are short, their sounds decaying in milliseconds. It makes you move more quickly onto the next thing - to nervously fill space when space would have been better unfilled.

But this rig was for King Crimson of course, and no one said it’d be much use outside of that band. I chose these instruments to further the band’s programme; to do the grubby work, to find and challenge borders and genres, and to leave the place most definitely not as we found it.

My pre-click-track generation usually pedalled the hi-hat on two and four. It was our click-track. Art Blakey’s thunderous patterns around the kit wouldn’t have been half as cool if he hadn’t used his hat in that way. The other limbs were heard in relief from the constant ‘chick’ of the hat.

The hi-hat these days is a beautiful fourth voice, offering the highest frequencies in the kit through splashing or closed, with or without striking with a stick. Don’t tell anyone, because I often use it, but a great sound is kick and hat (pedalled) in unison; highest and lowest frequencies together.

In the King Crimson of the 1980s, this tinkering with the kit was all an artificial constraint that makes you dig deeper to find something else that’ll work. So ride patterns on the boo-bams, for example, worked well. Like the log-drum, they have a lovely sense of pitch without actually being in pitch; or better, indefinitely pitched. Constraints like these are like telling the lighting person she can only use blues and greens tonight. She’s going to have to find a work-around, and may find something she wouldn’t have found otherwise. It’s a creativity driver.

Anyway, that’s roughly how I went about doing things back in the Dark Ages. Hope you enjoy the solo. Good to hear the Neo-Crims – Belew, Levin, Vai, Carey – are going out on the road to give the 80s music a second go round, 40 years later! I wish them all the best with it. As someone pointed out, the original five Brits in 1969 have turned into four Americans in 2024.

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