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I’ve probably said enough about drum solos, one of which follows this Yes classic ‘Long Distance Runaround’. I’ll make an exception here though, because I feel I owe you an explanation about what’s going on in my head while i'm playing this.

It’s a big drum kit, largely electronic, with acoustic metals (cymbals and hi-hat) and snare drum. The heritage of the back-rack dates back to working with Jamie Muir in King Crimson in 1973. His was strung with small acoustic instruments, years before the idea of electronic percussion had made an appearance, but the idea stayed with me. When he left, I adopted back- and side-racks to cover some of his territory.

This was the flagship: the state-of-the-art, sample-based, electronic drumkit from Britain’s Dave Simmons. The back-rack was designed to make me reach for things, so these gestures could be seen from the back of large rooms. At these gigs, the visual is important. It was too expensive for anyone to be able to afford it, but, aside from that small blemish, it was a creative slice of electronic engineering. You could assign literally dozens of samples to each pad in invisible concentric zones. So, a triangle in an inner zone, a shotgun in a central zone and a tambourine in an outer zone. Play outer and central zones together and you get a tambourine-shotgun blend, all parameters infinitely adjustable.

The first tricky bit is remembering which pad has what sounds in what zones - not easy when you’ve got perhaps a dozen identical pads! You never quite knew what sound you were going to get when you played a pad anywhere on its surface. That was demonstrated in one of my better performances – a little Improvised ‘small -instrument’ solo on the Earthworks album ‘Dig?’, in a song called ‘Stromboli Kicks’ (3.58”-4.40”)    • Bill Bruford's EARTHWORKS - Stromboli...   .There I got lucky, and the drumming had all I wanted in one pass.

My only plan in this ‘large-scale’ solo was to start by working from the back-rack, and move to the seated drum kit as the action heated up. Things started well enough with some random drum sounds inserted between the repeated full-band ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ figures. My version of that lick on a pitched pad at 3.45” was perhaps unwise – the pitch is more variable than I thought! If programmed properly, the pads were very sensitive, so I thought I’d try some finger work across a pad at 4.16”, abandoned fairly quickly as it seemed too quiet. But what I’m playing, generally, is a function of whatever sounds came up under the sticks, with a large quantity of surprise dictating events.

This sort of heroic, high on the visuals, vaudeville-strength ‘stadium-rock’ drum solo is nothing I shall venture again, although it was fun bringing my particular way of doing things to that space on that tour at that time. The nine as-loud-as-possible hits at the end - on the biggest sounding drums to hand - had been my go-to signature exit phrase, signalling to band members and audience alike, I’m done. No more. “That’s plenty enough of Bruford, for now”, say the drums.

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