DolFan54
Camco Enthusiast
I love Brian's tone on this album especially his snare drum. I thought he may have used a Ludwig Supra on this one but it could also be a metal Rogers Powertone.
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Brian Downey
- Thread starter DolFan54
- Start date
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Sonorlite
Forgive him for he knows not what he does.
I used to have a poster of that kit on my wall - boy that was some time ago... I love Downey's playing/sound. (Him and Simon Kirke).
That track has such a slinky feel.
He also used a Dynasonic. (IIRC I think the 70's Rainbow Theatre tour had him using a 400)
That track has such a slinky feel.
He also used a Dynasonic. (IIRC I think the 70's Rainbow Theatre tour had him using a 400)
vintagemore2000
DFO Star
One of my all time favorite bands Thin Lizzy, and I'm a big Brian Downey Fan. 
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mike-ellis
Well-Known Member
I interviewed Brian a few years ago at SARM Studios, it was the day after storms raged across the UK and as a consequence, there was no power to the studio. I was booked in for 30 minutes and ended up chatting to him for 5 hours, having lunch with him and Gary Moore (whose album was being recorded at the time)! We had plenty of time to chat about all his old kits going right back to his first kit as a kid, buying a Premier floor tom from a 2nd hand shop right up to his new Yamaha (which he let me have a rattle round!).
The edited interview is here: http://www.mikedolbear.com/story.asp?StoryID=1268
I must see if I can find the original transcript, pages and pages of stuff!
The edited interview is here: http://www.mikedolbear.com/story.asp?StoryID=1268
I must see if I can find the original transcript, pages and pages of stuff!
One of the most underrated bands and drummers of all time! I still listen to Thin Lizzy often, and I never get tired of them. Black Rose is one of my favorite albums. Thanks for posting this!
vintagemore2000
DFO Star
Mike you lucky soul, please see if you can find those, invaluable stuff!!! Thin Lizzy has always been a musicians band, one of the greats!!
4164SB
DFO Master
I thought his portrayal of John Wayne Gacy in 'To Catch A Killer' was excellent...
High on Stress
DFO Veteran
Nice interview! Please do post the whole thing if you can. If the current "Thin Lizzy" act comes here, I'm actually interested in seeing them this time just to see Brian Downey in action.
shilohjim
DFO Veteran
My absolute favorite hard rock drummer. I could never understand the hero worship of a Bonham when Downey was clearly a better player (and Lizzy a better band than LZ). Brian brought a very funky approach to hard rock.
stevesmithfan
DFO Veteran
Great video, thanks for posting.
BrianOwens
Drumsforever
That is a good sounding snare FO SHO!
Sonorlite
Forgive him for he knows not what he does.
Harris K.
DFO Veteran
IMO, one of the best rock drummers of the 70's, in the same league with Bonham, Paice and Powell.
mike-ellis
Well-Known Member
Here it is (6000 words!). Enjoy!
There’s little doubt that Thin Lizzy had an enormous impact on the world during the 1970’s and 1980’s and few rock aficionados could have failed to have been impressed with the drumming therein courtesy of Dublin drum legend, Brian Downey.
The day after storms tore across England in January, I picked my way through debris and fallen trees to SARM Studios to meet Brian who was on the last day of recording Gary Moore’s new album. Due to the destructive weather 24 hours earlier, the studio complex was without power so Brian and I settled down to talk through his career whilst the emergency generator was delivered and hooked up.
ME: When I was young, I had a bandmate who took it upon himself to educate me on what I should be listening to. One of the bands albums he foisted upon me were the Thin Lizzy albums. The thing that struck at the time, is that whilst you are considered by many to be rock drummer, there is a very much a ‘swing’, curved element in your playing. Who were listening to when you growing up?
BD: The person who got me playing initially was my Dad, but he didn’t really have much of knowledge of swing music or jazz even though he was very interested in jazz. But there was one or two albums hanging around the house that no one listedned to that made me very curious. So I decided to put them on one day when I was about 11 and I thought it was so weird and I wasn’t really surprised that no one wanted to listen to them! In our house people listened to Vera Lynn, Michael Holliday, Joe Lynch singing these Irish ballads, it was a very ordinary Irish household. My Dad was a postman and he happened to bring these albums home as they had never been picked up, they were from America, but because they weren’t picked someone said, take them home and have a listen.
One of them was an album called ‘Back Door Blues’ by a guy called Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vincent, so I played that and this stuff was totally alien to me! This had Louis Hayes on drums and he playing stuff that sounded really intricate, but very fresh as well. I persevered and tried to play along to these records, another one was an Oscar Brown Jnr record and there was a song on it called ‘When I was Cool’, a real sort of blues shuffle thing which was very influential. So I was listening to this stuff around 11 or 12 years of age, not really taking it too seriously
ME: Were you playing at this time?
BD: Yes, I started playing when I was about 9 because I was in a pipe band in Dublin and when I went to lessons, there was a long table with 10 or 11 of us just playing rudiments so I was aware of what to do. There was always drums in the house because my Dad was a drummer in the pipe band and he used to bring the drums home as he was designated every once a month to clean the drums. So there were always a couple of big drums around, perfect for me to bash away on, even though the neighbours were not too pleased! So I was playing away to these records on the pipe drums and had a practise pad as well, but my cousin who lived with us brought these ‘Shadows’ records home and they really grabbed my attention. I thought the drummer, Tony Meehan was quite good and when he played a solo on ‘The Shadows’ record; ‘See You In My Drums’ that became an influence as well.
So I was playing along to these tracks and then The Beatles exploded and everything changed then, I mean everything! That’s when I started to think about buying a set of drums and pestered my Dad to go down to the local furniture shop to get a kit. In those days Cavendish’s in Grafton Street, a big department store selling furniture also sold drums, guitars and all the rest of it. It was ideal because my Dad used to buy all our furniture in that shop! So I just pestered him one Christmas time and when he asked “What do you want for Christmas?” I said I wanted a kit of drums! He said I couldn’t have a drum kit as it was too expensive so I made a list of what I wanted; snare drum, tom-tom, floor tom, a couple of cymbals, but I ended up only getting the bass drum, snare and the hi hat. It was a little kit of Olympic Drums, no spurs on the bass drum, I don’t know how I played it without the spurs, I used jam something under the drum to stop it wobbling!
I would practise every day religiously just to get some semblance of beats, I didn’t really know how to coordinate between my foot and my left hand and my right hand, it took me a while to get used to that. I glad in the end that I didn’t have a ride cymbal, which is what I really wanted, because it gave me a sort of independence between my right foot and my left hand.
ME: So it was like an enforced focus?
BD: It was. Very much so.
ME: Rather than having too many ‘toys’?
BD: I didn’t have too much to hit so I used to concentrate on getting some sort of a beat going and it gave me some sort of independence. Even though I wasn’t playing any sort of independent pattern on the hi hat by any means, at that stage I was just going through the motions just to get the sounds. But there again, I was listening to the Shadows and then the Beatles came out and then I was listening the Stones, the Kinks and all these ‘British Invasion’ bands and just before that there was a skiffle craze too, that was a big influence, so that was all happening around that time too. Plus there was a couple of guys on our street who decided to buy a few guitars and form a band and one guy who was only five minutes away said to me “You play drums, I’ve heard you playing in your bedroom, it sounds quite good why don’t you join our band?” I said “OK, what kind of music is it?” It was a ll the regular hits which was OK I suppose, so he convinced me to join his band. Now I was about 13 at this stage and everybody else was a little bit older, around 15,16,17 so I was kind of young. So I joined his band and we used to practise in his front room and they had cheap guitars and tiny little amps but at least they had something to play with. Then they got a bass player in, that was really good because then I got another dimension of how to play, it was a real eye opener listening to bass and drums.
ME: So you’d actually started playing with the pipe band drumming before the ‘Beat Boom’ and everything that was influential at the time, coupled with these records that your Dad had ‘acquired’ from the Post Office, makes an interesting mixture of styles?
BD: I didn’t really know what ‘Blues’ was, I couldn’t put a label on it even though it was called ‘Back Door Blues’, it didn’t really make much sense to me as I didn’t know what ‘Blues’ was! There were no magazines that you go out buy in Ireland in those days that could tell you what ‘Blues’ was because it was just not popular.
ME: When you listen to the early Rock and Roll songs from the 50’s, you can hear the drummer playing a swing beat whereas say, the piano is playing straight 8’s on top of it because the ‘back beat’ hadn’t happened until people like Ringo came along.
BD: Oh yeah, Ringo really had that backbeat, very few people were playing the straight two and four on the snare until Ringo came along. Obviously there American drummers playing this but I was never aware of them, I thought Ringo invented the backbeat, because everyone else was playing; (plays ‘knee’ snare on 2-e & 4) so that was a bit of an eye opener and all this sort of thing was influencing me, I was taking it all in. So I got into this band, we got gigs in the local school hall, we’d get a couple of Mars Bars at the end! And that’s how it all really started.
ME: So it was the ‘Blues’ rather than jazz or swing that gave your playing the ‘shuffle’ feel?
BD: It was the ‘Blues’, I wasn’t even aware of jazz. Because of the ‘accident’ of my dad bringing those records home, I’m not really sure of what would have happened, even though I just discarded it when the Beatles came out, I wasn’t really too taken in with it until much later, I couldn’t understand it for a start, the lyrics this guy was singing was completely foreign for a start. To me, from Dublin, I had no reference points for it, although we had the BBC coming through and through the snowy reception we’d see ‘6-5 Special’ and once I heard something and looked up and saw these four black guys singing a blues tune. I thought; “I recognise that!” Everybody else is saying; “Sure you do!” and then as years went on I started delving into it, searching out bands, drummers and the rest of it.
ME: Your playing was something that grabbed my attention, a friend had given me Thin Lizzy records and I was thinking this guy’s playing ‘swing’ in rock music – and it works!
BD: It took me a while to get into these blues bands, but when the blues boom happened in England, just before it happened, I was listening to stuff like the Yardbirds and the Kinks and there was an album called ‘Five Live Yardbirds’ and a friend of mine had it. It was a very obscure album in Ireland, very few people had it, but this guy lent it to me saying; “Listen to this, there’s a guy called Eric Clapton on it and the drummer’s quite good, Jim McCarty.” So I put that on and it was a completely new dimension, there was blues in there, good shuffles, straight four to a bar blues, kind of simple but very effective. And this led on to the John Mayall blues stuff which was a big influence on everyone I think.
ME: Do you think that ‘self taught’ creativity can be drowned by strict teaching methods or is it a good way to avoid bad habits?
BD: Billy Cobham said that you need to be diligent in your practise and rehearsals to make sure you don’t develop bad habits. I was taught to use a mirror to watch yourself and make sure your cadence is exactly the same in each hand. I think we all develop bad habits, but once it sounds OK…. most people can’t see a bad habit; it’s just other drummers who can tell. I think you can get too carried away with the precision of things. All the guys I went to were sticklers for technique, but nobody seems to be into technique any more.
ME: Have you ever given lessons?
BD: I did a bit of teaching when I was in Dublin; after the band (Lizzy) broke up I had nothing to do. There were no gigs and a guy said to me “Why don’t you teach me?” So I said OK, come down Saturday; bring your sticks and a practise pad.
ME: When I started playing, there wasn’t the pressure on a drummer to be a certain type of player, you just had to be a drummer. Today it seems to be; ‘Drummer wanted, must be into … list of bands and styles’. In your case, it was “I heard you playing drums, do you want to join our band?” When I was young, it was ‘must live in Manchester’!
BD: Yeah, you had to versatile, you were expected to play everything! It wasn’t a case of we’ll just play Beatles tunes, you’d be expected play Hank Williams and all the others, that was the way it was.
ME: Was that also a consequence of the breadth of music at the time and the fact a lot of it was ‘new’ at the time?
BD: Yes, it was brand new. Even though it’s great for drummers now coming up, the influences, the fantastic equipment, but because in those days it was so new and novel, there was a ‘rush’ of ‘newness’. Your whole focus was on music, music was the be and end all of your life.
ME: You mentioned earlier your first kit, the Olympic, can you remember the set up?
BD: Red sparkle, 18” bass drum, 14x4” snare and 12” hi hats.
ME: How long did you keep that kit for?
BD: I had for about 4 or 5 years before I got rid of it. I wasn’t too pleased, but I had to sell it to get a proper Premier kit with a tom tom.
ME: So what happened when you got the tom tom?
BD: It threw me completely! Oh, there’s another thing to hit! When I got the Premier kit, it was a blue pearl, everyone was commenting on it, I was really proud of it but I just had the hanging tom and no floor tom. I was walking past this shop in Dublin that sold second hand instruments and I saw this blue pearl floor tom tom, a little bit different to the Premier blue pearl, but near enough so I went in and asked them how much it was. It was £2 7s 6d and I said; “That’s a bit dear, can I get you down to two quid?” I happened to have £2 saved up from my pocket money so I had it and hauled it back home on the bus. So I had this drum with me on the bus with everyone looking at me!
ME: Did you have to buy a ticket for it?
BD: No, they let me take it free but the conductor wouldn’t let me get it in the bit where he rang his bell! So I carted it home and that was like a totally new thing as well, a floor tom, unbelievable! So I had a proper kit then, two cymbals, snare, bass drum, rack tom, floor tom and that was the making of my full kit. I kept it for a good few years and eventually ended up getting a decent price on a set of Haymans from Leon Quigley who owned a sound and lighting store. In those days he used to get decent deals from Arbiter in England and bring them over to Ireland, but he did me a good deal on them. So when Lizzy formed, I had a Hayman kit.
ME: This must have been around 1970?
BD: Yeah. I started of with Lizzy using the Premier kit for the first couple of rehearsals and gigs. By the third or fourth gig I had a kit of Haymans so I sold the Premier kit and that ended up with Eamon Carr of Horslips. So I had the yellow Hayman kit which was really nice and I now had two hanging toms and two floor toms! I was looking for two bass drums but it was a little bit expensive to buy a kit with two bass drums. That was a really nice sounding kit now that I think of it, I still have some of it at home, I haven’t got rid of it, it’s still hanging around in the attic!
ME: I know a few people who would be a bit excited about that! They seem to be very popular again.
BD: They’re great sounding drums there’s no doubt. Great kits.
ME: What about the classic Rogers kit?
BD: Well, that came much later.
ME: What was between the Haymans and the Rogers?
BD: There was a kit of Gretsch with a pair of big 26” bass drums (pictures of this kit can be seen in the Thin Lizzy feature in the January 2007 edition of ‘Classic Rock’).
ME: 26”??
BD: Don’t forget at this time John Bonham was big at this time with his huge bass drum sound.
ME: Did you record anything with the Gretsch kit?
BD: Yeah, we did, we recorded ‘Fighting’, it was the first album when Robbo and Gorham came in. I think I had the kit just before they came into the band, we had a couple of guys just before them who were supposed to be permanent members, John DuCann who used to play with Atomic Rooster and Andy Gee. I think I had the kit around then because we did a German tour, which was fairly disastrous now I think of it! Playing in really dodgy places and these guys were so under rehearsed, we just had to sort of wing it. The Gretsch kit was used on ‘Nightlife’ as well, so there’s two albums with the Gretsch on it. Around the third album, that’s when I was considering to get another kit and getting rid of the Gretsch, it was a second hand kit and I found the bass drums a little too boomy for studio work. It was OK, you could put all the damping in them, but I just wasn’t happy with them and I got rid of them and got a 24” Rogers kit, the sound was a bit more controllable.
ME: Was that the chrome Rogers kit?
BD: When I got that kit, it was a mixture of white, black and different colours because I couldn’t get a kit of proper chrome drums in London for love nor money. So I went to Chas. Footes and asked him to do a job on it, he said: “Look, it might take a couple of weeks,” so I hired a kit off him while he was doing the Rogers. When I went to pick them up with one of the road crew, everything was lovely until I got to the bass drums and it looked like they were bubbled, the wrap didn’t stick to the shell properly and I wasn’t too pleased with that. But the tour was starting in a couple of days I just had to take them and use them, but I eventually took them back and he sorted them out. I think he was rushing to get them ready and put them too close to a radiator.
ME: That must have been around 1975, ’76, when Rogers brought out the ‘memriloc’ hardware?
BD: That’s right, that’s what I had. The big hollow tubes which I was told, I don’t know if it’s true, that you could ‘hear’ the hollow sound of the tubes which takes away the sound of the drum. But in those days, you didn’t question it. The inside of the shells was coated inside with a grey, speckly paint, the only way I could describe it is like somebody painted them and threw budgie seed at it!
ME: But as a hardware design, they were quite fantastic for the time, the first stands to have memory locks.
BD: They were, they were really solid. I’ve still got some of the older Swivomatics, I use them on gigs because they all go down into one tube and you can just pack them away into one case. I’ve still got a good few of those at home. The only thing I didn’t like about the memrilocs was the spurs didn’t have a spike, there was just these two big rubber feet. When you took the rubber cap off, it was a weird shape cut at an angle so there were four ‘corners’ in the tube – but no spike! That was the only thing I didn’t like about it. Rogers were lovely drums, there’s no doubt, beautiful sound, much easier to get a sound in the studio as well.
ME: You used a combination of regular toms and concert toms on that kit?
BD: That’s right.
ME: You had an unusual set up, but ergonomically, it was quite interesting at the time.
BD: What I remember is; I had two 24” bass drums and it should have been easier after the two 26” drums, but I found it very fatiguing to get from the left bass drum to the hi hat. It was really killing me to get over from a break back to the hi hat, I was struggling to get comfortable. I found if I put all the toms close together, the bass as close together as possible to make it more comfortable, that’s where that set up came from, just to make it compact and bring the hi hat in closer.
ME: There was a concert tom up on the left of the rack toms and there was another tucked in almost under the hi hat.
BD: So long as I could hit ‘it’ comfortably, that was my set up. I used to have my concert toms set up over the hi hats, but once I could hit it comfortably, that was my set up. I used to another concert tom over the ride, but I discarded it because it taking up too much room where a cymbal should have been.
ME: On the subject of set ups, did you find then you were dictated to by what was available in terms of hardware, rather than being able to sit down and say this is where that foot goes and that foot’s going here and so on?
BD: I had to compromise there’s no doubt. I made the best of, but I didn’t think about it too much until much later when all the new stuff came on the market, there was no alternative, you just had to get on with it and play! There was a couple of shops in London where they’d make suggestions and remember one roadie saying he could design something for my hi hat, but we were so busy at the time we never actually got around to doing it, so we just left it and carried on the way we were.
ME: After Rogers, you went to Tama.
BD: They came to me and at the time everyone seemed to be getting endorsements, Phil had an endorsement with Ibanez and Scott had Yamaha and Tama turned up and said ‘How about trying our kits?’
ME: Did you find that Tama solved any of the set up problems you had previously experienced?
BD: They did and didn’t. Again, I still had a problem with the hi hat pedal being too far away, but they had these little brackets that would lock onto the stand so instead having a couple of large stands, you’d have these adaptors and cymbals arms. But still I had the hi hat problem, I still had the large legs getting in the way. But I kept hankering back to the Rogers kit and even after 6 months of playing Tama, I thought maybe I should get the old Rogers back out, but there again, in the back of my mind I knew that this (Tama) was a decent endorsement. The drums weren’t great, they were called Fiberstar and they were very loud, but the quality wasn’t as good as the Rogers. Then they phoned me up one day and said; “Look, Billy Cobham has designed these new drums called Superstar drums, do you want to try a kit?” So I said ‘Yeah, send them down and I’ll have a go’. We were rehearsing in a country club in west Hampstead so the kit was in the boxes, brand new and we cut the boxes open, beautiful kit, we set them up and the sound was just phenomenal. A little bit harder than the Rogers but the sustain was lovely.
ME: So, you’ve still got the Rogers then?
BD: I still have the Rogers, well my son has it, I said ‘Take care of it’, whether he has or not, I don’t know. I’ve still got some of the concert toms in the attic, I never used them with Lizzy, but I still have them so he has the double bass drums, the 12”, 13”, 14”, 16”, so they’re still knocking around, I still have the Tama kits, two of them are still in existence and I still have the Hayman kit.
ME: Big attic?
BD: Some of it’s in my attic in Dublin and some is with my son, so there ‘everywhere’! They’re all around somewhere, I know where they are if I need to put my hand on them!
ME: There’s none of that wishing you’d never sold ‘that’ kit then?
BD: The only regret I have is selling the Gretsch, I had to get rid of it to buy the Rogers.
ME: It’s unusual by today’s standards because with a band of Lizzy’s standing, you’d have an endorsement, or the studio would provide the kit but you used your own stuff, that you went out found and paid for.
BD: There’s a strange story about our first album with the Hayman kit, we came over on the boat, got to the studio and we had one roadie who so busy with everything, I said to him; “The drums, they don’t all seem to be there!” There was a tom missing! So on the first day of the session, I had to get a taxi to shaftsbury Avenue to hire a hanging tom, because he’d left it in Dublin! The session started at 10am, I’m up at 8am, to get the taxi to get this drum to set it up ready for the 10am session. I was shattered by the time we started, it was an alien atmosphere and I was a bit stressed to say the least. And you can still hear the difference between the toms in the breaks!
ME: What’s the weapon of choice these days?
BD: Yamaha Absolutes with a maple snare. I got a good deal on them.
ME: What were you playing with ‘Talk To Strangers’?
BD: As one stage I was playing part of the Rogers, half of it and after about a year I decided not to use it because everyone was coming up and whacking it. “This is the kit you used in ‘Live & Dangerous’ Give us a go!” So it became a bit dangerous to take it to a gig! So I used some of the Tama kit, funnily enough people didn’t recognise it so I didn’t have the same problem.
ME: It’s interesting that sometimes kits can become as iconic as the player! John Bonham’s amber vistalites, Keith Moon’s red sparkle Premiers….
BD: When Keith Moon had his red sparkle Premiers, I thought; “Jesus! He’s copying me!” It was very close to my Olympics! Keith was the most exciting drummer in that era, I loved him on Top of the Pops, you knew he was miming by the way he held his sticks, digging in! He hated miming, but he was great to watch.
ME: I think for many drummers at the time, Top of the Pops was something of a drum lesson, those long shots of each band member meant you could see what he was up to.
BD: That’s it, once a week, every Thursday, I watched it religiously! That’s where I picked stuff up, this how you do it!
ME: Can you recall what cymbals you used?
BD: I remember staring off using Zyns, then I went on to Super Zyn, then Paiste at one stage and I eventually ended up using Zildjian cymbals, everybody was using Zildjian at the time.
ME: Did you ever have a cymbal endorsement?
BD: No, I wasn’t, a guy came to a few of the gigs to see if I wanted a Paiste endorsement, but I was using Zildjian at the time and I didn’t want to change.
ME: What about preferred snares?
BD: I never had a big thing in my head about; “Let’s use this snare because so-and-so used it,” I always ended up using an ordinary, metal snare, just a standard 5½“ metal Ludwig and I always got a good crack out that. I’m using this Yamaha maple at the moment and it’s a really nice snare. I’m using this Yamaha maple at the moment and it’s a really nice snare. I was using the Ludwig Black Beauties in the past, I had four or five at one stage but I always ended up using an ordinary, metal snare, just a standard 5½“ metal Ludwig and I always got a good crack out that. At one stage, I think it was the third album, we had this engineer who was a real stickler for sound and we ended up taking all the bottom heads off the toms, tuning the snare right down to get that real fat sound. But you listen back to it now and it sounds kind of dated compared to some of the other albums.
ME: In the drum solo on ‘Live & Dangerous’, you play a very distinctive and very effective twin bass and tom part; it’s almost like a signature for you….like Bonham, Paice and Powell have their own.
BD: You know people like Paice, you know Bonham from just listening to the first few bars of a song and there were a lot of drummers from those days that had a signature sound. A name that comes to mind is a guy called Pete Gavin from ‘Head, Hands and Feet’, I’ve no idea why he wasn’t more famous, he was a great drummer.
ME: Aynsley Dunbar is another?
BD: Oh why did I forget about Aynsley? I played a gig in Belfast with the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation and because I was a huge fan of his from his days with John Mayall and I was acquainted with his sound and playing. I got chatting to him and he was really, really nice and helpful. We did our set and he went on and he did this solo which was just spectacular, he was a huge influence on me, I loved his playing, lovely swing.
ME: Many rock and metal bands and drummers have mentioned Thin Lizzy and you as influences, even Rush and Neil Peart.
BD: Yeah, well we toured with them and got on great. There were some great parties, but we won’t talk about that! But playing wise, Neil Peart is great, a brilliant drummer.
ME: Lizzy had a very fresh. Clean sound that I think is still relevant today, it’s interesting that in the early 80’s, you didn’t fall into the trap of following fashion of the New Wave of Heavy Metal.
BD: No we didn’t, Lizzy was always that kind of a band where we never said “Let’s become a metal band,” we were influenced by Deep Purple and Hendrix but Phil had this real quiet side to him. Sometimes he’d say; “Let’s do something totally different, you play with brushes,” and it was like “Yeah, brilliant, let’s do that!” Something just to totally change the atmosphere, Phil was great at that, it was an interesting bond we had to say the least.
ME: Were you happy to embrace the rock and metal fraternities?
BD: Yeah, no problem at all. Even though the hard rock and metal fraternity like Lizzy, it got comments like; “Some of your albums are little too soft for my taste, but I like ‘that’ album and I like ‘this’ album because they’re heavy!” Some albums were little too soft for real metalheads.
ME: Many rock and metal bands and drummers have mentioned Thin Lizzy and you as influences, even Rush and Neil Peart.
BD: Yeah, well we toured with them and got on great. There were some great parties, but we won’t talk about that! But playing wise, Neil Peart is great, a brilliant drummers.
ME: Are there any modern drummers you take influence from?
BD: Loads. Brian Blade is a great drummer, I went to see him recently and he’s just fantastic. But there’s so many young drummers coming up nowadays it’s hard to keep track of them.
ME: On a couple of Lizzy tracks, there’s a lot of Irish influence, was that deliberate from the band’s background and growing up?
BD: Whisky in the Jar was a track we always messed about with, because it’s an old song, but don’t forget in Ireland in late 60’s there a ballad boom which meant you get gets with a couple of guitars and a fiddle playing ballads. Whisky was one of the songs that was played at this time and Phil suggested we try it one day at a rehearsal. Our manager came into a rehearsal and said it sounded brilliant, so he arranged for the next time we were in Decca’s studios to put it down to see how it sounds. Phil wanted it to be a ‘B’ side and we use ‘Black Boys in the Corner’ as the ‘A’ side, so we did that and when Decca heard both tracks they said Whisky should be the ‘A’ side. Phil wasn’t pleased, but he was persuaded as it was a commercial proposition and when it was released it took ages to get into the charts. Even in Ireland, it took a while to chart but it did eventually get to number 1.
Whisky in the Jar was a song that started our fans asking for more folk based vibe and it got to the stage where we’d turn up at gigs where people were expecting a whole set of traditional songs. We were playing Phil’s own material and the audiences were walking out! But it started us on the road, if we didn’t get a hit at that time, I think we would have struggled on but financially we were really staring to feel the pinch. We spent more time in Ireland doing tours to make money to see us over in England for six months, any money we made in Ireland, we’d live on here.
When we had the hit, then when the really good gigs started coming in, we were up and down the M1, every week, relentless travelling. There wasn’t much traffic on the roads then, but when you’re in Redcar one night and Penzance the next, it’s still a lot of miles and long way to go.
By now, the power had been restored to the studio so we adjourned to the main room where Brian showed and allowed me to rattle round his current kit; Yamaha Absolutes, 22” bass drum, 12” and 13” rack toms and 14” and 16” floor toms with Sabian cymbals. The set up was very compact and ergonomically extremely easy to play. Since the recordings had been held up, we had to bid farewell as he had two tracks to record before heading back to Dublin the next day.
Brian will be touring with Gary Moore in the UK through May and June 2007; 24 May - Norwich UEA, 25 May - Folkestone Leas Cliff Hall, 27 May - Glasgow Academy, 28 May - Newcastle City Hall, 30 May - Wolverhampton Civic Hall, 31 May - Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 2 June - Manchester Apollo, 3 June - Bristol Colston Hall, 5 June - Portsmouth Guildhall, 6 June - Oxford New Theatre, 8 June - London Shepherds Bush Empire and 9 June - Brighton Dome,
Mike Ellis
February 2007
There’s little doubt that Thin Lizzy had an enormous impact on the world during the 1970’s and 1980’s and few rock aficionados could have failed to have been impressed with the drumming therein courtesy of Dublin drum legend, Brian Downey.
The day after storms tore across England in January, I picked my way through debris and fallen trees to SARM Studios to meet Brian who was on the last day of recording Gary Moore’s new album. Due to the destructive weather 24 hours earlier, the studio complex was without power so Brian and I settled down to talk through his career whilst the emergency generator was delivered and hooked up.
ME: When I was young, I had a bandmate who took it upon himself to educate me on what I should be listening to. One of the bands albums he foisted upon me were the Thin Lizzy albums. The thing that struck at the time, is that whilst you are considered by many to be rock drummer, there is a very much a ‘swing’, curved element in your playing. Who were listening to when you growing up?
BD: The person who got me playing initially was my Dad, but he didn’t really have much of knowledge of swing music or jazz even though he was very interested in jazz. But there was one or two albums hanging around the house that no one listedned to that made me very curious. So I decided to put them on one day when I was about 11 and I thought it was so weird and I wasn’t really surprised that no one wanted to listen to them! In our house people listened to Vera Lynn, Michael Holliday, Joe Lynch singing these Irish ballads, it was a very ordinary Irish household. My Dad was a postman and he happened to bring these albums home as they had never been picked up, they were from America, but because they weren’t picked someone said, take them home and have a listen.
One of them was an album called ‘Back Door Blues’ by a guy called Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vincent, so I played that and this stuff was totally alien to me! This had Louis Hayes on drums and he playing stuff that sounded really intricate, but very fresh as well. I persevered and tried to play along to these records, another one was an Oscar Brown Jnr record and there was a song on it called ‘When I was Cool’, a real sort of blues shuffle thing which was very influential. So I was listening to this stuff around 11 or 12 years of age, not really taking it too seriously
ME: Were you playing at this time?
BD: Yes, I started playing when I was about 9 because I was in a pipe band in Dublin and when I went to lessons, there was a long table with 10 or 11 of us just playing rudiments so I was aware of what to do. There was always drums in the house because my Dad was a drummer in the pipe band and he used to bring the drums home as he was designated every once a month to clean the drums. So there were always a couple of big drums around, perfect for me to bash away on, even though the neighbours were not too pleased! So I was playing away to these records on the pipe drums and had a practise pad as well, but my cousin who lived with us brought these ‘Shadows’ records home and they really grabbed my attention. I thought the drummer, Tony Meehan was quite good and when he played a solo on ‘The Shadows’ record; ‘See You In My Drums’ that became an influence as well.
So I was playing along to these tracks and then The Beatles exploded and everything changed then, I mean everything! That’s when I started to think about buying a set of drums and pestered my Dad to go down to the local furniture shop to get a kit. In those days Cavendish’s in Grafton Street, a big department store selling furniture also sold drums, guitars and all the rest of it. It was ideal because my Dad used to buy all our furniture in that shop! So I just pestered him one Christmas time and when he asked “What do you want for Christmas?” I said I wanted a kit of drums! He said I couldn’t have a drum kit as it was too expensive so I made a list of what I wanted; snare drum, tom-tom, floor tom, a couple of cymbals, but I ended up only getting the bass drum, snare and the hi hat. It was a little kit of Olympic Drums, no spurs on the bass drum, I don’t know how I played it without the spurs, I used jam something under the drum to stop it wobbling!
I would practise every day religiously just to get some semblance of beats, I didn’t really know how to coordinate between my foot and my left hand and my right hand, it took me a while to get used to that. I glad in the end that I didn’t have a ride cymbal, which is what I really wanted, because it gave me a sort of independence between my right foot and my left hand.
ME: So it was like an enforced focus?
BD: It was. Very much so.
ME: Rather than having too many ‘toys’?
BD: I didn’t have too much to hit so I used to concentrate on getting some sort of a beat going and it gave me some sort of independence. Even though I wasn’t playing any sort of independent pattern on the hi hat by any means, at that stage I was just going through the motions just to get the sounds. But there again, I was listening to the Shadows and then the Beatles came out and then I was listening the Stones, the Kinks and all these ‘British Invasion’ bands and just before that there was a skiffle craze too, that was a big influence, so that was all happening around that time too. Plus there was a couple of guys on our street who decided to buy a few guitars and form a band and one guy who was only five minutes away said to me “You play drums, I’ve heard you playing in your bedroom, it sounds quite good why don’t you join our band?” I said “OK, what kind of music is it?” It was a ll the regular hits which was OK I suppose, so he convinced me to join his band. Now I was about 13 at this stage and everybody else was a little bit older, around 15,16,17 so I was kind of young. So I joined his band and we used to practise in his front room and they had cheap guitars and tiny little amps but at least they had something to play with. Then they got a bass player in, that was really good because then I got another dimension of how to play, it was a real eye opener listening to bass and drums.
ME: So you’d actually started playing with the pipe band drumming before the ‘Beat Boom’ and everything that was influential at the time, coupled with these records that your Dad had ‘acquired’ from the Post Office, makes an interesting mixture of styles?
BD: I didn’t really know what ‘Blues’ was, I couldn’t put a label on it even though it was called ‘Back Door Blues’, it didn’t really make much sense to me as I didn’t know what ‘Blues’ was! There were no magazines that you go out buy in Ireland in those days that could tell you what ‘Blues’ was because it was just not popular.
ME: When you listen to the early Rock and Roll songs from the 50’s, you can hear the drummer playing a swing beat whereas say, the piano is playing straight 8’s on top of it because the ‘back beat’ hadn’t happened until people like Ringo came along.
BD: Oh yeah, Ringo really had that backbeat, very few people were playing the straight two and four on the snare until Ringo came along. Obviously there American drummers playing this but I was never aware of them, I thought Ringo invented the backbeat, because everyone else was playing; (plays ‘knee’ snare on 2-e & 4) so that was a bit of an eye opener and all this sort of thing was influencing me, I was taking it all in. So I got into this band, we got gigs in the local school hall, we’d get a couple of Mars Bars at the end! And that’s how it all really started.
ME: So it was the ‘Blues’ rather than jazz or swing that gave your playing the ‘shuffle’ feel?
BD: It was the ‘Blues’, I wasn’t even aware of jazz. Because of the ‘accident’ of my dad bringing those records home, I’m not really sure of what would have happened, even though I just discarded it when the Beatles came out, I wasn’t really too taken in with it until much later, I couldn’t understand it for a start, the lyrics this guy was singing was completely foreign for a start. To me, from Dublin, I had no reference points for it, although we had the BBC coming through and through the snowy reception we’d see ‘6-5 Special’ and once I heard something and looked up and saw these four black guys singing a blues tune. I thought; “I recognise that!” Everybody else is saying; “Sure you do!” and then as years went on I started delving into it, searching out bands, drummers and the rest of it.
ME: Your playing was something that grabbed my attention, a friend had given me Thin Lizzy records and I was thinking this guy’s playing ‘swing’ in rock music – and it works!
BD: It took me a while to get into these blues bands, but when the blues boom happened in England, just before it happened, I was listening to stuff like the Yardbirds and the Kinks and there was an album called ‘Five Live Yardbirds’ and a friend of mine had it. It was a very obscure album in Ireland, very few people had it, but this guy lent it to me saying; “Listen to this, there’s a guy called Eric Clapton on it and the drummer’s quite good, Jim McCarty.” So I put that on and it was a completely new dimension, there was blues in there, good shuffles, straight four to a bar blues, kind of simple but very effective. And this led on to the John Mayall blues stuff which was a big influence on everyone I think.
ME: Do you think that ‘self taught’ creativity can be drowned by strict teaching methods or is it a good way to avoid bad habits?
BD: Billy Cobham said that you need to be diligent in your practise and rehearsals to make sure you don’t develop bad habits. I was taught to use a mirror to watch yourself and make sure your cadence is exactly the same in each hand. I think we all develop bad habits, but once it sounds OK…. most people can’t see a bad habit; it’s just other drummers who can tell. I think you can get too carried away with the precision of things. All the guys I went to were sticklers for technique, but nobody seems to be into technique any more.
ME: Have you ever given lessons?
BD: I did a bit of teaching when I was in Dublin; after the band (Lizzy) broke up I had nothing to do. There were no gigs and a guy said to me “Why don’t you teach me?” So I said OK, come down Saturday; bring your sticks and a practise pad.
ME: When I started playing, there wasn’t the pressure on a drummer to be a certain type of player, you just had to be a drummer. Today it seems to be; ‘Drummer wanted, must be into … list of bands and styles’. In your case, it was “I heard you playing drums, do you want to join our band?” When I was young, it was ‘must live in Manchester’!
BD: Yeah, you had to versatile, you were expected to play everything! It wasn’t a case of we’ll just play Beatles tunes, you’d be expected play Hank Williams and all the others, that was the way it was.
ME: Was that also a consequence of the breadth of music at the time and the fact a lot of it was ‘new’ at the time?
BD: Yes, it was brand new. Even though it’s great for drummers now coming up, the influences, the fantastic equipment, but because in those days it was so new and novel, there was a ‘rush’ of ‘newness’. Your whole focus was on music, music was the be and end all of your life.
ME: You mentioned earlier your first kit, the Olympic, can you remember the set up?
BD: Red sparkle, 18” bass drum, 14x4” snare and 12” hi hats.
ME: How long did you keep that kit for?
BD: I had for about 4 or 5 years before I got rid of it. I wasn’t too pleased, but I had to sell it to get a proper Premier kit with a tom tom.
ME: So what happened when you got the tom tom?
BD: It threw me completely! Oh, there’s another thing to hit! When I got the Premier kit, it was a blue pearl, everyone was commenting on it, I was really proud of it but I just had the hanging tom and no floor tom. I was walking past this shop in Dublin that sold second hand instruments and I saw this blue pearl floor tom tom, a little bit different to the Premier blue pearl, but near enough so I went in and asked them how much it was. It was £2 7s 6d and I said; “That’s a bit dear, can I get you down to two quid?” I happened to have £2 saved up from my pocket money so I had it and hauled it back home on the bus. So I had this drum with me on the bus with everyone looking at me!
ME: Did you have to buy a ticket for it?
BD: No, they let me take it free but the conductor wouldn’t let me get it in the bit where he rang his bell! So I carted it home and that was like a totally new thing as well, a floor tom, unbelievable! So I had a proper kit then, two cymbals, snare, bass drum, rack tom, floor tom and that was the making of my full kit. I kept it for a good few years and eventually ended up getting a decent price on a set of Haymans from Leon Quigley who owned a sound and lighting store. In those days he used to get decent deals from Arbiter in England and bring them over to Ireland, but he did me a good deal on them. So when Lizzy formed, I had a Hayman kit.
ME: This must have been around 1970?
BD: Yeah. I started of with Lizzy using the Premier kit for the first couple of rehearsals and gigs. By the third or fourth gig I had a kit of Haymans so I sold the Premier kit and that ended up with Eamon Carr of Horslips. So I had the yellow Hayman kit which was really nice and I now had two hanging toms and two floor toms! I was looking for two bass drums but it was a little bit expensive to buy a kit with two bass drums. That was a really nice sounding kit now that I think of it, I still have some of it at home, I haven’t got rid of it, it’s still hanging around in the attic!
ME: I know a few people who would be a bit excited about that! They seem to be very popular again.
BD: They’re great sounding drums there’s no doubt. Great kits.
ME: What about the classic Rogers kit?
BD: Well, that came much later.
ME: What was between the Haymans and the Rogers?
BD: There was a kit of Gretsch with a pair of big 26” bass drums (pictures of this kit can be seen in the Thin Lizzy feature in the January 2007 edition of ‘Classic Rock’).
ME: 26”??
BD: Don’t forget at this time John Bonham was big at this time with his huge bass drum sound.
ME: Did you record anything with the Gretsch kit?
BD: Yeah, we did, we recorded ‘Fighting’, it was the first album when Robbo and Gorham came in. I think I had the kit just before they came into the band, we had a couple of guys just before them who were supposed to be permanent members, John DuCann who used to play with Atomic Rooster and Andy Gee. I think I had the kit around then because we did a German tour, which was fairly disastrous now I think of it! Playing in really dodgy places and these guys were so under rehearsed, we just had to sort of wing it. The Gretsch kit was used on ‘Nightlife’ as well, so there’s two albums with the Gretsch on it. Around the third album, that’s when I was considering to get another kit and getting rid of the Gretsch, it was a second hand kit and I found the bass drums a little too boomy for studio work. It was OK, you could put all the damping in them, but I just wasn’t happy with them and I got rid of them and got a 24” Rogers kit, the sound was a bit more controllable.
ME: Was that the chrome Rogers kit?
BD: When I got that kit, it was a mixture of white, black and different colours because I couldn’t get a kit of proper chrome drums in London for love nor money. So I went to Chas. Footes and asked him to do a job on it, he said: “Look, it might take a couple of weeks,” so I hired a kit off him while he was doing the Rogers. When I went to pick them up with one of the road crew, everything was lovely until I got to the bass drums and it looked like they were bubbled, the wrap didn’t stick to the shell properly and I wasn’t too pleased with that. But the tour was starting in a couple of days I just had to take them and use them, but I eventually took them back and he sorted them out. I think he was rushing to get them ready and put them too close to a radiator.
ME: That must have been around 1975, ’76, when Rogers brought out the ‘memriloc’ hardware?
BD: That’s right, that’s what I had. The big hollow tubes which I was told, I don’t know if it’s true, that you could ‘hear’ the hollow sound of the tubes which takes away the sound of the drum. But in those days, you didn’t question it. The inside of the shells was coated inside with a grey, speckly paint, the only way I could describe it is like somebody painted them and threw budgie seed at it!
ME: But as a hardware design, they were quite fantastic for the time, the first stands to have memory locks.
BD: They were, they were really solid. I’ve still got some of the older Swivomatics, I use them on gigs because they all go down into one tube and you can just pack them away into one case. I’ve still got a good few of those at home. The only thing I didn’t like about the memrilocs was the spurs didn’t have a spike, there was just these two big rubber feet. When you took the rubber cap off, it was a weird shape cut at an angle so there were four ‘corners’ in the tube – but no spike! That was the only thing I didn’t like about it. Rogers were lovely drums, there’s no doubt, beautiful sound, much easier to get a sound in the studio as well.
ME: You used a combination of regular toms and concert toms on that kit?
BD: That’s right.
ME: You had an unusual set up, but ergonomically, it was quite interesting at the time.
BD: What I remember is; I had two 24” bass drums and it should have been easier after the two 26” drums, but I found it very fatiguing to get from the left bass drum to the hi hat. It was really killing me to get over from a break back to the hi hat, I was struggling to get comfortable. I found if I put all the toms close together, the bass as close together as possible to make it more comfortable, that’s where that set up came from, just to make it compact and bring the hi hat in closer.
ME: There was a concert tom up on the left of the rack toms and there was another tucked in almost under the hi hat.
BD: So long as I could hit ‘it’ comfortably, that was my set up. I used to have my concert toms set up over the hi hats, but once I could hit it comfortably, that was my set up. I used to another concert tom over the ride, but I discarded it because it taking up too much room where a cymbal should have been.
ME: On the subject of set ups, did you find then you were dictated to by what was available in terms of hardware, rather than being able to sit down and say this is where that foot goes and that foot’s going here and so on?
BD: I had to compromise there’s no doubt. I made the best of, but I didn’t think about it too much until much later when all the new stuff came on the market, there was no alternative, you just had to get on with it and play! There was a couple of shops in London where they’d make suggestions and remember one roadie saying he could design something for my hi hat, but we were so busy at the time we never actually got around to doing it, so we just left it and carried on the way we were.
ME: After Rogers, you went to Tama.
BD: They came to me and at the time everyone seemed to be getting endorsements, Phil had an endorsement with Ibanez and Scott had Yamaha and Tama turned up and said ‘How about trying our kits?’
ME: Did you find that Tama solved any of the set up problems you had previously experienced?
BD: They did and didn’t. Again, I still had a problem with the hi hat pedal being too far away, but they had these little brackets that would lock onto the stand so instead having a couple of large stands, you’d have these adaptors and cymbals arms. But still I had the hi hat problem, I still had the large legs getting in the way. But I kept hankering back to the Rogers kit and even after 6 months of playing Tama, I thought maybe I should get the old Rogers back out, but there again, in the back of my mind I knew that this (Tama) was a decent endorsement. The drums weren’t great, they were called Fiberstar and they were very loud, but the quality wasn’t as good as the Rogers. Then they phoned me up one day and said; “Look, Billy Cobham has designed these new drums called Superstar drums, do you want to try a kit?” So I said ‘Yeah, send them down and I’ll have a go’. We were rehearsing in a country club in west Hampstead so the kit was in the boxes, brand new and we cut the boxes open, beautiful kit, we set them up and the sound was just phenomenal. A little bit harder than the Rogers but the sustain was lovely.
ME: So, you’ve still got the Rogers then?
BD: I still have the Rogers, well my son has it, I said ‘Take care of it’, whether he has or not, I don’t know. I’ve still got some of the concert toms in the attic, I never used them with Lizzy, but I still have them so he has the double bass drums, the 12”, 13”, 14”, 16”, so they’re still knocking around, I still have the Tama kits, two of them are still in existence and I still have the Hayman kit.
ME: Big attic?
BD: Some of it’s in my attic in Dublin and some is with my son, so there ‘everywhere’! They’re all around somewhere, I know where they are if I need to put my hand on them!
ME: There’s none of that wishing you’d never sold ‘that’ kit then?
BD: The only regret I have is selling the Gretsch, I had to get rid of it to buy the Rogers.
ME: It’s unusual by today’s standards because with a band of Lizzy’s standing, you’d have an endorsement, or the studio would provide the kit but you used your own stuff, that you went out found and paid for.
BD: There’s a strange story about our first album with the Hayman kit, we came over on the boat, got to the studio and we had one roadie who so busy with everything, I said to him; “The drums, they don’t all seem to be there!” There was a tom missing! So on the first day of the session, I had to get a taxi to shaftsbury Avenue to hire a hanging tom, because he’d left it in Dublin! The session started at 10am, I’m up at 8am, to get the taxi to get this drum to set it up ready for the 10am session. I was shattered by the time we started, it was an alien atmosphere and I was a bit stressed to say the least. And you can still hear the difference between the toms in the breaks!
ME: What’s the weapon of choice these days?
BD: Yamaha Absolutes with a maple snare. I got a good deal on them.
ME: What were you playing with ‘Talk To Strangers’?
BD: As one stage I was playing part of the Rogers, half of it and after about a year I decided not to use it because everyone was coming up and whacking it. “This is the kit you used in ‘Live & Dangerous’ Give us a go!” So it became a bit dangerous to take it to a gig! So I used some of the Tama kit, funnily enough people didn’t recognise it so I didn’t have the same problem.
ME: It’s interesting that sometimes kits can become as iconic as the player! John Bonham’s amber vistalites, Keith Moon’s red sparkle Premiers….
BD: When Keith Moon had his red sparkle Premiers, I thought; “Jesus! He’s copying me!” It was very close to my Olympics! Keith was the most exciting drummer in that era, I loved him on Top of the Pops, you knew he was miming by the way he held his sticks, digging in! He hated miming, but he was great to watch.
ME: I think for many drummers at the time, Top of the Pops was something of a drum lesson, those long shots of each band member meant you could see what he was up to.
BD: That’s it, once a week, every Thursday, I watched it religiously! That’s where I picked stuff up, this how you do it!
ME: Can you recall what cymbals you used?
BD: I remember staring off using Zyns, then I went on to Super Zyn, then Paiste at one stage and I eventually ended up using Zildjian cymbals, everybody was using Zildjian at the time.
ME: Did you ever have a cymbal endorsement?
BD: No, I wasn’t, a guy came to a few of the gigs to see if I wanted a Paiste endorsement, but I was using Zildjian at the time and I didn’t want to change.
ME: What about preferred snares?
BD: I never had a big thing in my head about; “Let’s use this snare because so-and-so used it,” I always ended up using an ordinary, metal snare, just a standard 5½“ metal Ludwig and I always got a good crack out that. I’m using this Yamaha maple at the moment and it’s a really nice snare. I’m using this Yamaha maple at the moment and it’s a really nice snare. I was using the Ludwig Black Beauties in the past, I had four or five at one stage but I always ended up using an ordinary, metal snare, just a standard 5½“ metal Ludwig and I always got a good crack out that. At one stage, I think it was the third album, we had this engineer who was a real stickler for sound and we ended up taking all the bottom heads off the toms, tuning the snare right down to get that real fat sound. But you listen back to it now and it sounds kind of dated compared to some of the other albums.
ME: In the drum solo on ‘Live & Dangerous’, you play a very distinctive and very effective twin bass and tom part; it’s almost like a signature for you….like Bonham, Paice and Powell have their own.
BD: You know people like Paice, you know Bonham from just listening to the first few bars of a song and there were a lot of drummers from those days that had a signature sound. A name that comes to mind is a guy called Pete Gavin from ‘Head, Hands and Feet’, I’ve no idea why he wasn’t more famous, he was a great drummer.
ME: Aynsley Dunbar is another?
BD: Oh why did I forget about Aynsley? I played a gig in Belfast with the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation and because I was a huge fan of his from his days with John Mayall and I was acquainted with his sound and playing. I got chatting to him and he was really, really nice and helpful. We did our set and he went on and he did this solo which was just spectacular, he was a huge influence on me, I loved his playing, lovely swing.
ME: Many rock and metal bands and drummers have mentioned Thin Lizzy and you as influences, even Rush and Neil Peart.
BD: Yeah, well we toured with them and got on great. There were some great parties, but we won’t talk about that! But playing wise, Neil Peart is great, a brilliant drummer.
ME: Lizzy had a very fresh. Clean sound that I think is still relevant today, it’s interesting that in the early 80’s, you didn’t fall into the trap of following fashion of the New Wave of Heavy Metal.
BD: No we didn’t, Lizzy was always that kind of a band where we never said “Let’s become a metal band,” we were influenced by Deep Purple and Hendrix but Phil had this real quiet side to him. Sometimes he’d say; “Let’s do something totally different, you play with brushes,” and it was like “Yeah, brilliant, let’s do that!” Something just to totally change the atmosphere, Phil was great at that, it was an interesting bond we had to say the least.
ME: Were you happy to embrace the rock and metal fraternities?
BD: Yeah, no problem at all. Even though the hard rock and metal fraternity like Lizzy, it got comments like; “Some of your albums are little too soft for my taste, but I like ‘that’ album and I like ‘this’ album because they’re heavy!” Some albums were little too soft for real metalheads.
ME: Many rock and metal bands and drummers have mentioned Thin Lizzy and you as influences, even Rush and Neil Peart.
BD: Yeah, well we toured with them and got on great. There were some great parties, but we won’t talk about that! But playing wise, Neil Peart is great, a brilliant drummers.
ME: Are there any modern drummers you take influence from?
BD: Loads. Brian Blade is a great drummer, I went to see him recently and he’s just fantastic. But there’s so many young drummers coming up nowadays it’s hard to keep track of them.
ME: On a couple of Lizzy tracks, there’s a lot of Irish influence, was that deliberate from the band’s background and growing up?
BD: Whisky in the Jar was a track we always messed about with, because it’s an old song, but don’t forget in Ireland in late 60’s there a ballad boom which meant you get gets with a couple of guitars and a fiddle playing ballads. Whisky was one of the songs that was played at this time and Phil suggested we try it one day at a rehearsal. Our manager came into a rehearsal and said it sounded brilliant, so he arranged for the next time we were in Decca’s studios to put it down to see how it sounds. Phil wanted it to be a ‘B’ side and we use ‘Black Boys in the Corner’ as the ‘A’ side, so we did that and when Decca heard both tracks they said Whisky should be the ‘A’ side. Phil wasn’t pleased, but he was persuaded as it was a commercial proposition and when it was released it took ages to get into the charts. Even in Ireland, it took a while to chart but it did eventually get to number 1.
Whisky in the Jar was a song that started our fans asking for more folk based vibe and it got to the stage where we’d turn up at gigs where people were expecting a whole set of traditional songs. We were playing Phil’s own material and the audiences were walking out! But it started us on the road, if we didn’t get a hit at that time, I think we would have struggled on but financially we were really staring to feel the pinch. We spent more time in Ireland doing tours to make money to see us over in England for six months, any money we made in Ireland, we’d live on here.
When we had the hit, then when the really good gigs started coming in, we were up and down the M1, every week, relentless travelling. There wasn’t much traffic on the roads then, but when you’re in Redcar one night and Penzance the next, it’s still a lot of miles and long way to go.
By now, the power had been restored to the studio so we adjourned to the main room where Brian showed and allowed me to rattle round his current kit; Yamaha Absolutes, 22” bass drum, 12” and 13” rack toms and 14” and 16” floor toms with Sabian cymbals. The set up was very compact and ergonomically extremely easy to play. Since the recordings had been held up, we had to bid farewell as he had two tracks to record before heading back to Dublin the next day.
Brian will be touring with Gary Moore in the UK through May and June 2007; 24 May - Norwich UEA, 25 May - Folkestone Leas Cliff Hall, 27 May - Glasgow Academy, 28 May - Newcastle City Hall, 30 May - Wolverhampton Civic Hall, 31 May - Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 2 June - Manchester Apollo, 3 June - Bristol Colston Hall, 5 June - Portsmouth Guildhall, 6 June - Oxford New Theatre, 8 June - London Shepherds Bush Empire and 9 June - Brighton Dome,
Mike Ellis
February 2007
mike-ellis
Well-Known Member
Some pix from the day;
Harris K.
DFO Veteran
Thanks for the complete interview and the pics Mike. Very interesting.
Huge influence!
So sad that his name was never as known as other monster drummers from the 70's (Bonham, Moon)
Always loved his style, the drum breaks in Bad Reputation at about :50 into the song always floor me.
And he's got a great drum sound too.
So sad that his name was never as known as other monster drummers from the 70's (Bonham, Moon)
Always loved his style, the drum breaks in Bad Reputation at about :50 into the song always floor me.
And he's got a great drum sound too.
teenagebrain
Well-Known Member
The entire JailBreak L.P....WINS! Stellar Drumming! One of the best musical,in-the-pocket drummers Ever!!! Cheers Brian 
!!!
!!!
