I know that drummers tend to be the butt of a thousand jokes, usually from the uninformed and untalented, but I always felt I had an important role.
You can't supervise your own history.
The idea of having proper qualifications had been very much ingrained in me. My father had a steady job for the Potato Marketing Board, and the family emphasis was on getting to university.
The sound levels on stage were so loud with all that constant banging and smash, smash, smash; it did untold damage to the fine nerve endings in the inner ear, though it is worse in the left, which is the side of my snare drum and the monitor.
Rock bands were never newsworthy. In the '60s and '70s, rock bands weren't in the newspapers because they weren't considered mainstream; they wouldn't sell papers.
I reckoned I could meet more girls being in a band than playing soccer.
