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Montreal Gazette: What was your first reaction to the idea of three drummers at the front of the stage when it was presented to you?

Gavin Harrison: What was my first reaction? Well, it’s quite a bold idea. I don’t know of any other band that’s got three drummers, setting them up at the front of the stage. But King Crimson is a band that likes breaking the rules. (Laughs) And so to start with that as the idea for this lineup, which was Robert’s idea, is a pretty bold statement. I was very surprised by that, and it got me thinking: How can we make this work?

MG: And how did you make it work?

GH:(Laughs) A lot of contemplation to start with. Obviously I’d played in the band before with Pat Mastelotto, so not being the only drummer in the band is not a new feeling to me. But how can we incorporate three drummers? You know, we’re three very different drummers, and you have three very different drum/percussion setups, so there’s a lot of variety. I suppose it’s a sort of percussion section, if you like. If someone just needs to play the hi-hat, then that’s what they need to do while someone else is doing other parts of the drum kit. And sometimes one or more of us don’t play anything.

So it’s more orchestral in its approach. If you’re playing tuba in an orchestra, you don’t play through every song. You sit there and wait for the right moment that the arranger/composer has chosen for you to play. So that’s the approach we take. Sometimes it’s a drum rhythm split across three drummers, sometimes it’s written as if we’re one enormous drum machine, sometimes one guy might start an eighth note later than the other guy. And sometimes Pat plays electronics, and he has a lot of metallic percussion; sometimes Bill plays keyboards and I play drums. Sometimes there’s moments where Pat will play the start of a song, Bill will play the middle of the song and I’ll play the end of the song, because it suited our styles better and it suited the sounds that we have in our percussion arsenal better.

MG: Can you talk a bit about how your setups are different, aside from Pat using more electronics and Bill having a keyboard?

GH: Yeah, I have a much larger drum set than Bill; Bill has a much more traditional-size drum kit with fewer sound options. But he plays in a less “rock” kind of way than maybe me and Pat do. So if there’s simple, softer passages, they might suit Bill more. If there are some crazy bits that require fast double-bass-drum madness, it might suit me more. Pat has a kit, as I said, with a lot of metallic percussion, so he covers a lot of the Jamie Muir style of percussive playing, if you know who I’m talking about, from the early Crimson days. Which can sound great, with straight drumming and crazy metallic percussion. That can be a good sound.

Sometimes you need to think, more than the parts, how are we going to work this from a sound point of view? You know, start with the sound and work backwards. So we spend a very long time choreographing what we’re going to play — and quite often, more than not, what we’re not going to play. Because as you can imagine, with three drummers, there could be the chance to create a lot of chaos. And occasionally we do create a lot of chaos. That’s a sound as well.

MG: Actually, I spoke to Tony around an hour ago and he said he was kind of concerned when this lineup was activated that with three drummers, there would be no room for him to play. He was talking about how he was very grateful for the fact that you all, like you said, know when not to play.

GH: Yeah, you don’t really want a situation where there’s two guys both hitting the downbeat on the bass drum and both hitting the backbeat on the snare drum. That wouldn’t be much fun if you were the bass player. So the main bass drum and the main snare drum parts, we don’t normally double up on those. Unless that’s a sound we want. But usually there’s never two bass drums and snare drums playing the main rhythm at the same time.

Photo by Rubin Fogel Productions

MG: Tony said he has fun watching you three up front, as much as the audience probably does, and that it’s kind of like a circus act, like a lion-tamer routine. Does it feel that way to you too, or are you too deep into it to appreciate the effect it’s having?

GH: No, it’s quite a spectacle.(Laughs) I mean, normally the drummer in a band is doing the most movement, shall we say. And to have three guys who are moving a lot down the front, busy at their workstations, I think is visually quite interesting to watch. Rather than the normal setup of a singer who stands in the middle at the front and the band wrap around him. So in this particular lineup, although Jakko is singing, he’s on a platform behind me. So it doesn’t overemphasize the lead frontman singer thing, which most bands I can think of do. You have the person who sings and plays guitar or whatever standing in the front at the middle, and the band wrap around him. This is good, because it doesn’t emphasize that side of a rock band. This is much more like an orchestral look to the show, with the percussion section at the front.

MG: Yeah, I was trying to think of other so-called rock bands that have … well, not a similar setup to you, because I don’t think anyone does, but ones that de-emphasize the singer, and Tool is the only one that came to mind right away.

GH: That’s right, yeah. Tool don’t do the singer at the front. And plus, no one talks to the audience. There’s no interaction. We don’t say, “Hey folks, here’s one from our last album, thanks for coming, you’ve been a great audience” — there’s none of that. We just play.

MG: But it doesn’t feel to you like you’re disconnected from the audience in that way, does it?

GH: No, not at all. In fact, I feel more connected to the audience than normal, because I can actually see people quite close. Depending on the venue, sometimes people are very close to me. The normal position for a drummer is on a riser at the back of the stage. You can feel more disconnected like that.

MG: Do you find it easy to be connected to the rest of the band as well, not just Pat and Bill?

GH: My particular position, I’m on stage left and I’m turned in towards the centre. So I can see everyone in the band, and I prefer to look at the band as we’re playing, rather than look into the black void, which is normally what you can see of an audience apart from the first couple of rows. That just feels like a black curtain, normally. (Laughs) So it’s more fun to look at the people you’re performing with. And as I say, there’s quite a lot of times when I’m not playing and I just sit and watch King Crimson! I’ve got a really good seat.

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MG: Tony was saying that when the lineup first formed, the drummers got together before the entire band did?

GH: Yeah, and we’ve done that last year, we’ve done that this year. I think any year that we’re going to perform, if there’s new pieces to rehearse, we’ll do that. And we play a couple of drum pieces, maybe two or three drum pieces per night, which are written, composed pieces. Carefully choreographed. They might be three or four minutes long, but actually they take three or four weeks to work out. We don’t sit on stage with pieces of paper reading music, so you have to learn it all. So it does require a lot of rehearsals. So obviously it’s better that the three of us get together on our own and work on those things.

In the last couple of years, it started off in a studio with just the three of us and the chance to record what we’re doing. And if we’re rehearsing to songs, then we’ll have a multi-track version of the song on the hard drive, and we can record ourselves and listen to it and decide what we could improve. Maybe if I know someone’s going to play something in a particular place, I can remember to not play at that particular place.

MG: When you three first started playing together, how daunting was it? Did it take a while for form to come out of chaos?

GH: Well, of course I’d worked together with Pat before, and we’d done a lot of work in 2008 on the two drummers playing together, so we were very familiar with the idea that you might play part of a pattern — you might play the hi-hat and snare drum, but not the bass drum. Or you might play the snare drum and bass drum, but not the hi-hat. Parts of what would traditionally be a normal drum kit rhythm. And I don’t know if Bill had done double or triple drumming before, but he’s a very musical guy and it was obvious that it was going to work. The first couple of days, we talked a lot about things we liked, what we wanted to do and what we didn’t want to do, the kind of sounds we wanted to make and the kind of sounds we didn’t want to make. So we had an agreement about the approach to arranging for three drums.

MG: Was there anything you stylistically ruled out, in terms of what elements you could use?

GH: No, there’s no restrictions. I mean, the only restrictions are the ones that you put on yourself mentally. There’s no restrictions in terms of sound. No one has said, “Don’t play double bass drum, don’t play China cymbal” — there’s none of that going on. It’s really what you think is working or not. It would be very easy to overplay with three drummers and make it too much. We’re trying to be one drummer with six arms and six legs, but controlled by one idea, let’s say.

There are moments in the show where all of us have a chance to improvise, so it’s not all every single note written. Like, there’s drum fills in some songs where I’ll take a turn, Bill will take a turn, Pat will take a turn, and then in the fourth time there’s a drum fill we’ll play one that’s choreographed between the three of us. There might be something that I play and then the other two answer, or we all play notes in between each other or something like that. So some of the fills that we play together are choreographed, but there’s plenty of times where you have two bars on your own to play whatever fill you want. And there’s certain sections in certain songs where you can pretty much do what you want and we’ll just see what happens.

MG: In terms of the repertoire for this lineup, was it surprising to you when it was proposed that you play the much older songs?

GH: It wasn’t surprising to me. I expected we’d probably go right back to the beginning, the early albums. And in fact, we do pull quite a lot of material from 1969 to 1974, those first albums in those first five years. There’s quite a lot of that. But Robert always said to me, “Don’t learn the drum parts. Play the song as if it’s the first time you’ve ever heard it. Don’t worry about what they played 40-something years ago.” Which I found quite easy, because I wasn’t a King Crimson diehard fan, and I didn’t have those albums anyway. I didn’t grow up listening to progressive rock music.

In 2008 when Robert came to my house and said, “This is the material I want to play in the 2008 band,” I said, “Listen, I’ve got to confess something, Robert: I don’t have any of your albums, apart from one record” — which I think was maybe Beat, on vinyl — “and I haven’t listened to it in almost 30 years.” He said, “That’s great! I like that, because you’re going to come at it from a fresh angle. You don’t need to copy what any of the previous drummers came up with. I’d prefer that you just played the song as if it was a new song. So here’s the song, forget the drums and just imagine you were in a band and the guy said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a new song, this is how it goes.’ What are you going to do to that song?” And that’s how I personally approach it.

MG: I’m fascinated to hear that you weren’t a King Crimson diehard. I don’t know why I would assume everyone is; even when I was talking to Tony, despite the length of time he’s been in the band, he said he wasn’t an expert.

GH: No, and I’m not. You could probably list some songs now and I couldn’t tell you what albums they’re on or where they come from. Or names of songs that I actually have never heard. So I didn’t personally grow up listening to King Crimson — or any, really, progressive-type music. It came to me much later in my life.

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MG: When these older songs came up as possible pieces to play, why is it that you weren’t surprised? I know fans were shocked to see some of these songs had been resurrected.

GH: Well, when Robert invited me into this band, which started in 2014, this seven-piece band with three drummers, right from the first phone call he said, “Look, there’s going to be three drummers, you’re going to be down the front of the stage, we’ll be set up on a riser behind you, we’re going to play lots of old stuff, we’re going to play some new stuff,” and that was that.

I didn’t know what I was expecting. I wasn’t expecting any of it, to be honest. So unless he’s written a new album or something, I assumed it would be calling on older material. In the 2008 band, we didn’t play much of the older material at all. I think we might have played Larks II and Red — maybe two, possibly three songs from the early catalogue. In the 2008 band, we played a lot of the ’80s/’90s material that Adrian was part of.

MG: Now that you’ve been in King Crimson for a while, have you become a fan of the band as well? Would you go back and investigate it on your own time if you had no involvement in it?

GH: Well, what I like about the band is that it’s got a very modern attitude, which is obviously led from Robert, in that anything’s possible. If I woke up in the middle of the night with a mad idea, the craziest idea I could ever come up with, I’m sure I could find a way to use it in King Crimson. You can’t really say that’s true of almost any other band on the planet. So there’s nothing you can’t play. I think the thing that would sound out of context is anything obvious or mundane. That’s the thing that would start to stick out like a sore thumb. But mad, crazy ideas are very welcome in King Crimson. I can’t say I’ve been in a band before where you could just turn up with the craziest of ideas and say, “Hey guys, can I fit this in somewhere?”(Laughs) There’s always opportunity somewhere in some place that you could use whatever your imagination can come up with.

MG: Were you surprised that the 2008 lineup didn’t end up doing more? Did it feel like unfinished business?

GH: Yeah, I think the plan was to play more concerts. We actually only ever did 11 concerts. We rehearsed for about six weeks and we played 11 concerts. I think there was a plan to play the following year, but it fell apart.

MG: Did you have faith back then that the band would come back and that you would be back in it?

GH: Yes. I mean, at that point I was playing in the gaps of Porcupine Tree. So about the first eight months or nine months of 2009, I think there was a large hole in the Porcupine Tree calendar where I could have worked again during that year. But as I said, it fell apart quite soon after we stopped playing in 2008, so it really didn’t become a problem.

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MG: Then when the (Jakszyk/Fripp/Collins) Scarcity of Miracles album surfaced, did you have a strong suspicion that King Crimson would follow from it?

GH: No, not at all. No, I thought that was just going to be a little project that came and went. Until Robert called me in I think September 2013, there was no talk of King Crimson coming back. I mean, I was surprised when I got the phone call, because as far as I knew he had virtually retired to deal with the business angle of King Crimson — certain problems he’d had with different companies. He was not working as a guitarist at that point, and therefore King Crimson didn’t exist. But as he resolved his issues I guess he thought, “Why don’t I restart King Crimson, but with a fresh start, with a new idea?”

MG: Yeah, I think it’s the only way King Crimson can come back, right? It never looks or sounds like what came before.

GH: Yeah. I mean, we play old material, but this is nothing like a tribute band. We don’t faithfully reproduce note for note those old songs. They’re our new take on those old pieces.

MG: I feel like I have to ask you about your take on the future of Porcupine Tree, if there is a future. I interviewed Steven Wilson a few months ago, and he made it sound as if the band may be over.

GH:(Laughs) Yeah, I mean, we haven’t split up, is what I can say. I think we’ll come back one day. I don’t know when that day will be. I see Steve … I saw Steve today. We live quite close, we’re good buddies, and it’s not off the menu. But there’s no plan right at this second that I could mention. We’ll be back at some point, I believe. But obviously he’s quite busy with his solo career, and I’m quite busy doing King Crimson. And I believe the other guys are pretty busy doing their thing too, so it couldn’t be something we could put on together very quickly anyway.

The Complete Conversation is an occasional series where the Montreal Gazette publishes full transcripts of interviews with musicians.

jzivitz@montrealgazette.com

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