Out here on the Eastern fringes of the Kingdom of East Anglia,
intimidated musos, guitarists, singer-songwriters, folk-musicians and
jazz aficionados wander in angry bands seeking drummers. When the ugly
mobs come upon a percussionist it is snared in rusty guitar strings,
bundled into a leaking kick drum and banished out of town, set down
river on an ebbing spring tide. This heinous treatment of
percussionists is endorsed and surreptitiously financed by the local
publican inner order, who fear a drummer may incite the clientele into
tapping the feet, moving the bum-bum, transcending the hoke-coke,
flinging open the rudely shut piano lid of indifference and moving off
the bar stool of apathy.
Local musicians have internalized this hostility to the beat, and can
be heard muttering, "Not 'round 'ere, we don't want them
percursioners, they's too loud". Publicans can be heard exclaiming in
self-serving exaggeration, "Singy-songy & Strummy the Bigot were
amazing last night", and, "Flora the Flower Pot Lady with her backing
band, Harm My Knee if I don't Dance, were fabulous last Thursday",
etc. in a perpetual effort to obscure the fact of no rhythm, no beat,
no drums, no percussion in any of it.
Far, far inland, there is a city, known as Peters Burrow, where bands
have drummers and the notions of rhythm and the down beat are held in
high esteem and regarded as essential to animating the places they do
rhythm with the essential life forces of paradiddles, flams, double
kick-drum hits and syncopated triplets, attracting large amounts of
money into the pockets of musicians and publicans alike.