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Peter
Lockett
By
Phil
Meadley
Interview
appeared in WAX magazine, uk in 1998
Behind any great
album or any great artist there are always a multitude
of truly talented individuals who largely go unnoticed,
aside from the obligatory sleeve credit. But it is the
session musicians, engineers and producers who pad out
the original concepts, that help create the essential
atmospherics that go to create a classic album. Many
session musicians are highly talented in their
respective fields, but outside the 'scene' they are not
names that trip off the tongue. They could go through
life not really getting the wider recognition that they
so aptly deserve.
For
many years Pete Lockett was one such
musician, but now he is looking to set the record
straight. Think Björk, Kula Shaker, Nitin Sawhney, Pet
Shop Boys, Trans-Global Underground, The Aloof, Joji
Hirota, David Arnold, Craig Armstrong and Natasha Atlas.
Then put their names alongside Pete Lockett. He's worked
with all of them, plus a great many others, and his CV
tends to read like a Who's Who of today's movers and
shakers. Not only that, but he has also contributed to
the last two Bond films (Tomorrow Never Dies
and the latest The World Is Not Enough); the
Meg Ryan film City of Angels and the superb
highwayman romp Plunkett and Maclean. He's in
demand because he's a master in his field - something
you will quickly discover if you listen to his excellent
new album 'One'.
Pete
Lockett is a master percussionist in every sense of the
word. He spent his formative years in Portsmouth and, at
nineteen, passing by a drum shop ended up with him
taking up a career in drumming and percussion. The drum
lessons had ignited a spark and before long he found
himself moving to London to play in various bands.
However, his gigging experiences led him to reevaluate
his career. He didn't feel he wanted to be a one-band
musician and instead turned to learning about different
forms of percussion. The wealth of talented musicians
from all four corners of the globe, centred in our
beloved capital, meant that Pete didn't have to go far
to find teachers. Tabla was studied under the expert
tutelage of Yousef Ali-Khan, and South Indian drums were
studied intensively under Karaikudi Krishnamurthy. This
is how it continued to present day, and nowadays his
list of percussive capabilities is impressive, to say
the least. Amongst the instruments mastered by Lockett
are the Tabla, Mridangam, Kanjira, Ghatam, vocal
percussion, Dholak, Nall and Dhol from Northern and
Southern India; Egyptian Tabla, Frame Drums and Req from
the Middle East and, from elsewhere, Bongo's, Conga's,
Timbales, Berimbu, Bodhran, Udu, West African Djembe,
Japanese Taiko and Brazilian Surdu.
The
new album 'One' is an amalgamation of five highly
individual expert percussive talents assembled by
Lockett. They go under the name Pete Lockett's Network
Of Sparks, featuring Bill Bruford. For any fan of
prog-rock or jazz Bill Bruford is perhaps the best known
of the five. Having worked with Yes, King Crimson and
Genesis his rock credentials are well known. More
recently, his jazz project Earthworks, with
Django Bates and Iain Ballamy, has received many
plaudits from the jazz fraternity. Nowadays, he is also
heavily involved with many world artists including
Kazumi Watanabee, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and Akira Inoue.
The other members of the group are Simon Limbrick on
marimba and midi mallets, Nana Tsiboe on African drums
and the inimitable Johnny Kalsi on North Indian folk
drums. All three come from quite different backgrounds,
both physically and culturally. Limbrick is known as one
of the foremost contemporary classical percussionists in
the country and was also a founder member of cult
systems orchestra The Lost Jocky. Nana Tsiboe is a
Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist who has worked with the
likes of Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure and the great
Fela Kuti. And the hugely charismatic Johnny Kalsi has
his own group, the Dhol Foundation, and has worked with
the likes of the Afro-Celt Soundsystem, Trans-Global
Underground, Fun'Da'Mental, Asian Dub Foundation and
Kula Shaker. It's a line up that most drumming fans
could only dream of and, although the prog-rock
credentials may tend to attract an audience of thirty or
forty somethings, the true depth and exuberance of the
album should be a welcome addition to anybody with a
true passion for music.
When
I meet up with Pete Lockett on a cold Saturday evening
in St George's, Brandon Hill in Bristol, he is preparing
for the penultimate gig of his latest UK tour. St
George's is an imposing building just off the ever
fashionable Park Street. It's a de-consecrated church
that now provides an impressive venue for all manner of
music and arts. The acoustics are excellent and although
the seating is rather formal, once the Network of
Spark's vast percussion and drumming equipment appears
on stage, the whole place takes on a different
character. Maybe, unlike some of the less formal and
distinctly more club-orientated venues, St George's
won't provide the kind of rapturous reaction that the
band have been generating to date, but Pete reckons it
should be a great venue for getting totally immersed in
the percussive sounds that they will be generating.
I
start by asking how the idea of Network of Sparks
came about.
"Really
it's an eclectic mix of percussion from all over the
world." explains Pete. "We've got an African
drummer Nana Tsiboe, we've got Johnny Kalsi from the
Dhol Foundation, we've got a contemporary classical
player Simon Limbrick and Bill Bruford on the rock/jazz
drumset. Myself, I do everything from the Arabic, Indian
and Japanese... loads of different stuff. It's not
really that we've just got someone doing a bit of
African drums, or Indian etc., it's really more about
everybody compromising and finding the area in-between
us all. That's where the music's made, I think."
With
Pete being able to play virtually any form of drumming
and percussion, it does beg the question, 'why bring in
more drummers, when you could do it all yourself?'
However, as he explains, it's all about interaction:
"I could've done the album on my own, and no doubt
there will be totally solo albums in the future. But I
think when you're bringing in lots of different people,
people from different backgrounds, they've all got their
own thing to say and I think that makes it a really
diverse thing. I think it's really important, in the
same way that you get the diversity in dance music. It's
the one area of music where people are completely
unpretentious about what they put in a track. I mean,
you could get a Ghanaian percussionist with an Outer
Mongolian nose flute player, and there's no pretention
about it. It's what sounds right together."
Interaction also plays a major part in a live setting,
as Pete describes: "I think the thing that people
really want to see at a live concert is the interaction
between people, y'know, changing the direction of what
could happen. It's a network of sparks you see?
Igniting the potential."
Making
a purely percussive album would seem a bit of a risk
taker in terms of commercial accessibility. However with
'One' it works because there is so much depth there. The
question of how the album manages to get away from the
muso tag is something that Pete ponders on: "I like
an album being somewhat akin to an idea of a journey.
People often equate percussion with a loud drum solo or
some kind of circus trick. But I'd like to think of this
album as being a journey through lots of different
textures and flavours, where sometimes it's virtuoso and
sometimes it's free. The fact that it's a journey, and
you're not exactly sure what's going to happen next, is
exciting. It's not predictable, and that's really the
essence of it."
Perhaps
it takes some time to really appreciate how integral
percussion is to many forms of music, but the beat or
break is such an important part of today's dance scene
that most DJs and punters should be all too aware of
it's vital significance. However, it will probably take
a little while to really truly appreciate the
craftsmanship that is on offer in 'One'. It's an album
that should be listened to quite a few times before it
starts to creep into your psyche - and creep it most
assuredly will. For Pete, percussion is his passion, so
I try to delve a little deeper into why it's such an
integral part of his life now: "I think it's
capable of so much," he enthuses. "It can move
people in an immediate way, like the thud of a really
powerful drum. There's a Japanese guy I work with called
Joji Hirota and there's a piece I play with him that
just starts off with these really slow beats, but on
these huge drums. He's basically hitting it as hard as
he can, and you think that it's just one note, but after
that one note, however much noise there is in the
audience before, this silences everyone.
But
I'd put my fascination with playing so many instruments
down to curiosity, as much as anything. You hear
something being played and you think 'wow'.
First of all you're touched or moved by it, then you
begin to inquire, thinking 'how do they do that? How do
they get that sound? I really wanna do that', and it
goes from there."
The
project featuring Pete and Joji Hirota is called 'Taiko
to Tabla'. Last year alone the duo did around seventy
gigs, which culminated in a live album recorded at the
annual Bruges festival in Belgium. The album appeared in
conjunction with V.R.T., Radio
One and the world Zoku label.
It's well worth getting hold of if you want to truly
appreciate two percussive masters at some serious play.
Pete also worked in July of this year with David Arnold,
in a live setting at the Rhythm Sticks festival on the
South Bank. The hugely successful pairing saw Arnold on
stage with pro-tools, a forty channel mixer, and
"bucket loads of effects", whilst Lockett
played some improvised percussion, Arnold looped it all
through the computer. This friendship has seen Pete
working on the last two Bond films, as well as Arnold's
successful Bond inspired album, 'Shaken and Stirred'.
With
the new Bond film, 'The World Is Not Enough'
making some serious headlines at the moment, I asked
Pete to describe the process of recording music for a
film: "It usually works in short cues," he
confides, "The longest cue was on the last Bond
film, which was about seven minutes long. Obviously the
music's already written to a click, anyway. Usually it
happens before the orchestra put their bits down. Some
sketches have been put on already, and you basically do
it to the picture. It works differently to say recording
an album in as much as you don't record from the point
of view of verse chorus, verse chorus. Suddenly there
will be a change cos he's jumped over the balcony, or
whatever. In the last film there was quite a bit of
Japanese drumming, and some Indian stuff. This time
there are some scenes in Azerbaijan, so I had
to use Middle Eastern Frame drums, and stuff like
that."
With
David (Arnold) you see someone with a lot of clear
ideas. He comes up with the skeleton but lets you
improvise over it. He's just a very nice guy, very down
to earth, not a bullshitter."
Getting
back to the new album (incidentally recorded for
MELT2000), in terms of production and recording (and in
today's climate) the album was recorded with undue
haste. This could be partly down to the fact that the
album had to be booked two years in advance to fit in
with everybody's hectic scheduling demands. "I did
a lot of pre-production before." explains Pete.
"I've got a little studio where I prepared all the
tracks. A lot of it was overdubbed and some of the
tracks had to be done live."
You
could really portion it in days: I had about a week's
pre-production in the MELT2000 studio; then we had three
days in Livingstone Studio; then we had three days
mixing and I had three days pre-production myself. It
was without rehearsal as well!" The overall result
gives the album that live jam feel but with the added
bonus of well crafted compositions. "That's part of
the thing, to get the flavour across without it being so
loose that people think that you've just done it really
quickly and sloppily. To keep that flavour but arrange
it enough to have structure - that's the life in it, that's
the buoyancy."
That
night in St George's, Pete and his assembled crew put on
a spellbinding show of serious intensity and immense
skill. As we had thought, the venue perhaps didn't help
with the dynamism of the show, but as soon as the
effervescent Johnny Kalsi joined the team in the last
segment, the whole performance stepped up a gear.
Johnny,
with his huge Dhol drum slung around his neck, let forth
with some huge beats whilst he urged the rest of the
band to follow in his fervour. It reminded me of a
performance that I saw at the Realworld party in the
summer, when the Afro-Celt Soundsystem (with whom he is
a member), put on one of the best live shows I've ever
seen. This guy, with his front-man charm and charisma,
is a star in the making, believe me. Pete's performance,
especially on the Tabla, rammed firmly home why he is
such a respected percussionist. At times his virtuoso
performances were just a blur of incredible hand
dexterity and impossible timing. Genius
is the only word that comes to mind, as the whole
audience shot up at the end to give a standing ovation
and stamp their feet (more or less in time) for more.
My
advice, should you take heed, is to open your ears and
expand your mind to the possibility of percussion. I
can't think of a better guide than Pete Lockett who,
after many years of hard but enjoyable graft, deserves
the attention that this album should bring him. Give
him a little bit of your time, and hail one of the UK's
foremost unsung heroes.
Phil
Meadley
More
interviews and info @ www.petelockett.com
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