Biography: About Working With Bic
Wayne Bell was drummer on Bic's "Drive" album, and has performed live with her at various gig's, including the Finn-Runga-Dobbyn tour.
Tom Atkinson interviewed Wayne for NZ Musician magazine. Tom Atkinson maintains the website www.funk.co.nz and can be contacted via tom@funk.co.nz
Article appeared in February / March, 2003 issue.
Original content remains copyright 2003 to NZ Musician magazine.
Kit Off
Not long back from a three week tour with Dave Dobbyn, I
caught up with Wayne Bell before he flew off to London for a one-off Waitangi
Day gig at the Brixton Academy – a repeat for Wayne who did the same gig last
year with the Finn/Runga/Dobbyn collective. Despite Wayne's extensive pop/rock
session career my knowledge of his history was minimal; so I chose one of his
albums I was already familiar with; Bic Runga's 'Drive' to break the ice.
How much preparation did you have for that album?
Absolutely none! I got a call late on a Tuesday night from her manager Campbell,
and I said 'Yeah that'd be great, when? Can you send me a tape of the songs?'.
And he said 'Yeah well, I can't send you a tape actually, and it's tomorrow
morning'. I replied 'Oh okay yeah, tomorrow morning's fine. I'll come out to the
studio. Just a couple of tracks?' 'Yeah um, about 11 or 12!'
I ended up just going out there and we did all the drums tracks in two days.
When you work with Bic you realise that actually she's a real talented drummer
herself, she knows exactly what she wants. Apart from one track maybe I felt
like I basically just did what I was told on that record. My first production
work was recording some of those demos for Bic and then the single Drive.
I refer to my favourite tracks Swim and Suddenly Strange.
It's funny, we did Swim in the first 10 minutes that I arrived in the studio. I
walked into an iso booth at Revolver, and there was a drum kit set up and I sat
down, moved a few things, and the producer said 'Okay we'll just play you this
first song down'. So I put on the headphones, didn't even get a chance to do a
rough mix and just started playing along to this song – something on the toms.
We just whacked it down. I remember thinking 'It doesn't sound too bad, I'll get
a couple of things changed in my headphones and I might tune this and retune
this and move this over here,' and they said 'Yeah okay got that one, so the
next track...', and I was like 'What?' It was freaky!
Some of the stuff reminds me of Ringo Starr.
[Wayne laughs.] Funny you should say that, because that's what Bic was saying
when we did that album.
When did you start drumming?
I started playing when I was about 11. My older sister's boyfriend was a drummer
and one day he set up his drum kit in our garage and I just started playing from
that point on. He gave me a pair of drumsticks and a little practice pad and I
just played on that for years, then it was a kit from school.
Your first drum kit?
I would have been about 12 or 13. It was a little 18" Premier bass drum,
12" and 14" Premier toms. My dad was really supportive of me playing
music, I started playing in pubs and stuff when I was like 13. He would load all
my drums into the car and take me to the pubs and pick me up afterwards. It was
good because I ended up playing with people who were much, much older than me
and had huge amounts of experience in playing in pubs and just playing covers
and stuff like that. Being 13 you just shut up and play along and watch those
guys and learn heaps.
Where was this?
Up in Warkworth (an hour north of Auckland). A lot of the work we did was in
Auckland. All through school I started playing jazz with guys much much older
than me and a lot of our gigs were in Auckland, so I spent a lot of time down
here. I started playing with really experienced guys like Jim Langabeer who
could have his pick of great players to play with.
He's like Obi-Wan Kenobi of the sax.
Yeah, yeah [Wayne laughs] he is. I learnt so much off him and similar guys. I
became sort of like a jazz snob for quite some time where I thought that if you
didn't know everything about Coltrane and didn't know every Blue Note record
ever recorded, that you didn't know anything about music. And then I discovered
bands like The Clash and The Jam and stuff like that, and started listening to
that and thinking 'There's really something going on here', and it really
changed my life.
What was your first record release?
It was two singles for Dianne Swann's band called Everything That Flies. We made
a few singles, no album, then I started playing in the original line-up of When
The Cats Away and did that for about five years from the mid '80s to 1991. It
was a good workout and a good contact for a lot of people and after that gig,
which was kinda the biggest gig in the country at the time, I started getting
work with other people. I did so much live work after that. I was working with
everybody up through the '90s. And then all the live work kinda dries up and you
end up doing a lot of albums for people... it never seems to balance out! It's
never two albums a year and two big tours, it's always like six albums - no
tours, and then no albums - four tours, that sort of thing.
What gigs were you doing around the late '90s for example?
In '96 I did an album for a band called Bike, and then the Bic Runga album in
'97, and then '97-'98 was all working with Bic. After that it's pretty much been
Greg Johnson for the last seven years and Dobbyn for the last six . Added to
that the Finn/Runga/Dobbyn 'Together in Concert', Splitter, and a few other
albums...
The last time I've spent days in studio doing a record was the second Splitter
album 'Devil In The Detail', which I co-produced with Andrew [Thorne]. The days
of going into studios for lockdown for six weeks or something and just doing
tracks – it's over eh? It just doesn't happen. Most recently I worked with
Godfrey de Grut and Justin Pilbrow the other day at Radio NZ doing some music
for TVNZ for Americas Cup.
Your opinion of drum clinics?
I don't really go to them to take anything away other than amazement that people
can play like that. One clinic where I actually agreed with what the guy was
saying was John Robinson (Michael Jackson etc). He kept talking about the 'money
beat' which is just basically [here Wayne starts playing rock beat number one on
his knees]. Just that. He'd go away and talk about other things, and then come
back to talk about the 'money beat'. He had two kits set up. It was amazing to
see how many people there hadn't listened to a thing he was saying and they got
up and played anything but the 'money beat'. I reckon it makes up 90% of the
sessions I do.
Do you have any endorsee deals?
In 1987 I signed a deal with Pearl and I've had quite a few kits from them. I
just changed to Zildjian cymbals – I was with Paiste before that. The main
difference is when you put Paistes on a stand, and you've got nothing else
around and you play the ride you think, 'It's the most beautiful sounding cymbal
I've ever heard in my life'. But then when you put it into the context of a
piece of music, they never quite kinda fit in there. With the Zildjians –
their cymbals really blend, they become a part of the track, you can really lay
into their ride cymbals and make them wobble.
I've got some vintage drums, an old Gretsch kit. It's been on Shihad records
etc. But the Pearls... it took me a while to get used to them, because they are
like grown-up drums, you know, they really sound like drums, they're fantastic.
What do you like in your foldback at gigs?
Usually kick and snare. And depending on where you are playing, I'll tend to get
just a little toms and hi-hat, but I never have any overheads, mainly kick and
snare, quite a lot of bass. When I play with Dobbyn I have an awful lot of his
guitar, vocal and piano in there because he has impeccable time. He has this
inner metronome that just doesn't fail. If you're not playing with him, you're
not playing the songs. He likes to have a lot of me in his fill, and I like to
get a lot of him in mine.
How many gigs will you play in England?
Oh only one, but it's Waitangi Day and it's huge. Mainly ex-pat Kiwis; 4000 –
5,500 people going nuts. I grew up looking at famous gigs around the world like
Brixton Academy, CBGBs, and you know, Royal Albert Hall and all these places
around the world. You think, 'Man if I could just play one gig there it would be
just fantastic'. Brixton Academy was always one of those gigs and now it's my
second gig there so that's rocking. You do feel kinda strange about going all
the way over there and playing to a bunch of New Zealanders! At the same time
it's a great thing to be able to go over to the other side of the world and play
in front of 5000 people.
How much production have you done?
Not a lot, but I would love to do more – it's just hard because no one has any
money! I also did three tracks on Splitter's first album, some short film work
with Stellar*, plus some tracks with Jan Hell-riegel and for the last
Strawpeople album.
Have you had much TV exposure?
I did some work for the TV3 show 'Ice As', a real late night TV show with a
house band. It was Dan Sperber and Joel Tobeck on guitar, Bob Kerrigan bass, and
(Rhythm) Slave was doing turntables. It was good to be on TV late night and we'd
always drink quite a bit before we went on! We had free reign really, whatever
music we wanted to do we could do.
We did some pretty weird stuff and it was good for me because you can't play
everything well – you have styles that you play better than others. I've spent
the last 20 years bluffing my way through funk and reggae and jazz 'cause I
don't really know how to play that stuff.
Tom Atkinson maintains the website www.funk.co.nz and can be contacted via tom@funk.co.nz
Original content remains copyright 2003 to NZ Musician magazine.