From the age of 17, I started playing drums, learning by ear as well as I could and became a drummer in a band. There was really nothing else going on at the time in Smethwick; factories were closing, unemployment was high, racism was an issue everywhere, and the opportunity to get involved with crime was very available to me, so when I say Drumming saved my life, I do mean it. Once I started drumming, I thought of myself as a drummer before being male, British, Human, or any other label attached to us or that we put on ourselves, it was somewhere to hide and be a version of myself I liked.
I ended up playing in a lot of bands, both original and club bands, to the point I was playing every night of the week, either rehearsing with bands or doing gigs. It was my life, and between it and work, it kept me physically fit with very little stress.
Then, at about 35, I took a break from playing with bands after a fairly bad experience, and I almost stopped drumming completely and began my career in IT, Teaching and Education. It was nearly 10 years before I started playing properly again, and in that time, I got unfit and fat, and when I say fat, I mean morbidly obese. Health problems such as the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, etc, all came along with that.
During lockdown, I was working at a university which needed to move all of its courses online. I was happily working long hours, 10 to 12-hour days, filling the time, sitting at my desk, hiding from my family and getting used to being in a stressful state as my new normal and of course getting less and less fit by the day. Ok… I’m rambling now, so I’ll get to the point.
Then, in 2021, I lost my Dad just as lockdown was being relaxed and things were finding their new normal, flexible working etc.
At the time, I told myself my dad’s death wasn’t unexpected, as he was 93, but it was a shock. Dad had this invincible way about him; he was active, mentally and physically. In fact, the only thing he was noticeably suffering from was hearing loss; his brain was sharp and questioning as ever. His death triggered something in me, like a domino falling against dominos, and my mental health dropped rapidly, culminating in a breakdown and periods of long-term sickness.
My life, like many of us, has been filled with stress, worry, conflict, etc, and my way of dealing with much of it was to turn it into a positive, to be philosophical, or to box it up inside and bury it deep. I am talking about a life of repression and compartmentalisation. The problem is that if you go through a period of long-term stress, etc (COVID), the walls you’ve built become weak and eventually cracks because you can’t maintain that level of stress indefinitely, it affects everything around you and is affected by everything around you, your work, relationships, marriage etc, they all feed into this and are damaged by it.
Of course, being in an extended stressful state and not getting or giving yourself any time to go through the necessary stress reset, a necessary calm period, eventually puts you in a continuous stressful loop where stress becomes normal, which is where I was. I didn’t know any of this, of course, and it’s taken a lot of reading and self-reflection to work this out.
Prevention and well-being strategies are the most effective ways to deal with this, but the NHS isn’t geared/organised in a way to promote this; it needs to start in schools, along with many other things, giving children the tools they need to digest and understand the world. Mental health support in the UK is poor, underfunded ignored for the longest time, and I was offered drugs and placed on a long waiting list for therapy and counselling. That should be the other way around as drugs only offer a way to manage symptoms, they don’t fix a problem without either coping strategies, counselling or removing the problem, which isn’t always practical… I mean you can’t just leave a job, a family or a city, etc.
There’s a great expression I came across, which I think is true;
You won’t get well in the place that made you sick!
However, you can’t always leave the place that’s making you sick any more than you can be anything you want to be, which was a fire-breathing flying Badger, btw.
If your life has made you sick, then this quote takes on a much darker meaning. I have been close a few times, more a, “well, what if it all ends, how bad would it be, I bet it’d be quiet”. We have spent a lot of time making the world sick, and now it needs some TLC and some therapy.
While I was on long term sick, I tried a number of different medicines but I found they muddied my thinking and made me tired, which wasn’t going to help sort out my issues at all, I needed my mind fully functioning to help me. I just wanted to hide at first, and then I decided I was going to build something I’d wanted to do for a long time, a drum studio at the bottom of the garden. Physical work, like this, was not something I did anymore. At work, most of my job was done at a desk or in a meeting room or on webcam now. It turns out it was the best medicine, the construction of something tangible rather than virtual and something I would finish rather than unending digital projects. So I built the ultimate expression of a male sanctuary in the UK, a shed! (dramatic music?)
This was no ordinary shed, it was more like a summerhouse or a freestanding room, and it was going to house my acoustic drum kit, one I’d owned for about 35 years at the time. I’d had an electronic kit, a Roland TD30, which was amazing, but it’s just not like playing an acoustic kit. The problem with an acoustic kit is, of course, the volume, not great in a terraced house! So I sold all my electronics and used the money to build this Shed, using reclaimed materials where I could and soundproofed it as much as I could. My friend Paul, who is an expert at building anything and everything (and a great guitarist to boot!), designed it and built the frame and helped with all the construction.
I often felt I was achieving little in my work life as the digital realm isn’t something you can touch or feel in the same way as building something physical; however, digital stuff doesn’t give you splinters!
Once completed, wired up and painted, I had a place to set up my kit, but the actual process of building it was also a healing one; I just needed to do it. With the kit set up, I got back to playing nearly every day. I lost 42 lbs (about 22kg, still a long way to go) in 8months and was finally fit enough to play gigs again, which is something I’d missed a lot, though I hadn’t realised that, and I was genuinely happier. It gave me a place to go.
When you learn to play music, or any hobby, your brain is constantly working out and creating new neural pathways, and the more you play, the stronger they become, i.e. practising and, for me, performing with others.
Ok, I’m getting to the point about now, I think…
Drumming for me is both a physical and mental workout that goes ‘Beyond the Beat’, see I got there in the end. And it’s not just about hitting something at the end of a bad day; it assists in working out issues and relieving stress by liberating my mind from ongoing problems. Learning a pattern, breaking down a part or just improvising over a track and relaxing my mind in different ways. I didn’t know how good playing an instrument is for my mental health or how much I’d missed this connection to drumming, and playing with other musicians, it had been so much of my life in my 20s, playing had healed me then, and now it was doing it again and gave me enough of me back to start to think again and work myself out.
As I said at the start, music/drumming saved my life when I was a teenager, and I think it’s done it again.
