Free and Bad Company’s Simon Kirke at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp

By: Saiichi Sugiyama

Simon Kirke - Photo credit: Saiichi Sugiyama

It’s London, May 28, 2007 and I’m with a rock icon, drummer Simon Kirke, the backseat driver of two legendary hard rock bands, Free and Bad Company. People know Simon as “the drummer”, but hand the softly spoken Englishman a guitar and he’ll pull out the stops. He is also an accomplished singer and songwriter equally adept at piano and on guitar. Before he helped found the group Free, he could be heard pounding his U.K made Hayman drum kit with an actor’s son and child prodigy blues guitarist, Paul Kossoff in a group named Black Cat Bones.

Kirke and Kossoff would move on with a vocalist from the North of England, Paul Rodgers, and an even younger bassist from John Mayall’s Blues Breakers called Andy Fraser to form Free. The group would hit the air waves with “All Right Now”, a #1 hit that in time would nail down over 2,000,000 airplays in the U.K. By 1973, Free had run its course and Simon left the group with Rodgers to kick start a new group called Bad Company, with Mick Ralphs (guitarist) and Boz Burrell (bass). Kossoff began a respectable solo career, but passed away in 1975.

We sat down at one of the rehearsal rooms at John Henry’s in North London where the US’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp was based for a week. Simon was serving as a camp counselor there leading a motley crew of “campers” that boasted an English Army Colonel on the rhythm guitar, a retired merchant banker on the drums, an Irish builder on the lead guitar as well as a professional bassist from Hartford, who worked with members of Allman Brothers Band.

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Saiichi Sugiyama: You just had a tour of England playing the guitar. I knew you played the guitar from the old days.

Simon Kirke: When I was with Free I played guitar very sparsely only – background stuff, but I have been playing guitar as long as I have been playing drums, which is over 40 years now and I love it and I take the guitar with me everywhere I go and you know, I love guitar.  I have a selection at home – I have a couple of Martins, a Washburn, a nice Taylor, a bunch of electrics and Fender Strats and a Les Paul.

Saiichi: Can you tell me about your last tour, when you went around places like Robin 2 (a medium-sized music venue in Bilston, near Wolverhampton, England) ?

Simon: I love Robin 2.  It’s one of the best gigs I have ever done.  Basically, what it is that I played an acoustic show, playing guitar and piano. I also had a guitarist with me called Larry Oakes who used to play in Foreigner and Bad Company for a few years – Very nice guy, a good player.  I played acoustic versions of the Free songs, Bad Company songs and my own and I tell stories and sometimes take questions.  It is an evening with Simon Kirke.  The UK tour has now finished and I do selected shows in America.  I live in Manhattan.

I am planning to do some more shows later on in the year, in the autumn.  That will be probably November/December.  I will do a bunch more of acoustic shows then.  But I still like playing drums.  For me, having a guitar is like having a companion – music is a good companion.  There are a lot of hotels when you are touring and it is great to have a guitar by the bedside and just play on it whatever comes to mind.

Saiichi: Please tell me about Rock’n’roll Fantasy Camp.  I believe you have done this a few times.

Simon: This is my fifth camp.

Saiichi: How did you first get involved?

Simon: It’s run by David Fishof who promoted Ringo Starr.  He did several All Star Band tours and I was recruited in 1996.  Eventually, I did four tours with Ringo and David was involved with all of them. When he split from Ringo several years ago, he called me up and said he had started doing this Rock’n’roll Camp, but he was not a musician and he needed some advice on how to handle musicians, what musicians would want. So, I am an advisor and I am on the Board and I like teaching. I like seeing these guys come in and at the end of five days, the way they have improved. The look on their faces is almost reward enough – real teaching.

Saiichi: I noticed on your website that you have done an instructional video.

Simon: I started a line of DVDs called Rockstarz*. Basically it is me playing, demonstrating what I played on the drums on five Bad Company songs and “All Right Now”, which obviously I did with Free, and I just show the various fills.  It’s aimed at people who are not total beginners. There is no rudiments or exercises.  It just shows you what I played on the actual song.  We are hoping to get various other musicians to demonstrate what they did on their hits.

Simon Kirke behind his Slingerland Kit - Photo credit: Saiichi Sugiyama

Saiichi: Can we talk about your drumming for a little while?  So you didn’t put rudiments on these videos.  When you started, did you go through the rudiments or in a marching band?

Simon: I started when I was about 13 and I lived in a very rural area in England, on the border of Wales and oddly enough – funny you should mention a marching band – because every year in our village we had a carnival and I was recruited to play a snare drum in a marching band.  I used to listen to the radio, we didn’t have cassettes or records in those days and I used to listen to the radio and I was enthralled by the drums that kept coming through, particularly the Beatles – they were one of the first bands I heard. So, I cut a pair of sticks from a hedge.  I had no idea how long they should be and they were about 7 or 8 inches – little did I know they were 16 ½” but I banged around on books and pots and pans and stuff.

Then we got a TV when we moved to a larger house which had electricity and one of the first programmes I saw was a thing called All That Jazz. It featured swing bands and I was knocked out.  I had been hearing stuff on the radio but to see these guys with all the drums and the flashing cymbals – it was very seductive. So, I was hooked.

Saiichi: Did you get into Jazz in those days?

Simon: Jazz is such a broad spectrum. I am not particularly into modern Jazz. I find it is on another plane.  I love big band Jazz. I love the swing – Buddy Rich and Sam Woodyard and Louis Bellson – the guys that swing.  I like some be-bop – but particularly big bands.

A big breakthrough for me – I was raised on Ringo and Charlie Watts and bands of that era – the mid-’60s – but a big breakthrough for me was getting into soul music and Otis Redding. In particular, Al Jackson Jr, who was Booker T’s drummer.  Booker T was the house band at Stax.  Al Jackson was just… He is my guru. I think most musicians have someone they sort of lean towards, you know, and Al Jackson is the man.  Then, side by side to Stax was Motown, which was less muscular. It was a bit more sophisticated. The drumming was a lot lighter. And the other one of the trio was James Brown.  So, Stax, Motown and James Brown around the late ’60s really got me thinking how I wanted to play drums; which was simple, but solid.

Saiichi: I think that’s what made Free and Bad Company special, particularly Free. People tend to equate you with hard rock but what I hear is something that’s much more, like you say, soul.

Simon: What I learned from Ringo and Charlie, particularly Ringo, was how to play drums to support the song and to complement it.  What I learned from the black drummers was to be simple and solid.  I think there was the mixture of the styles. It also helps to play another instrument.  I found out, oddly enough, that Al Jackson played piano and guitar, and his dad was a band leader. So, he was a very complementary drummer to the artist.  He played with lots of artists – not just Otis Redding, but Al Green and Wilson Pickett, Staple Singers. So, yeah..

Saiichi: What strikes me listening to you is that you are a musical drummer.  Like you say, and you just proved that I was on the right track, you listen to the track and you do what is the most appropriate.  And yet you give the fire and the groove that is so solid , while leaving the space..

Simon: Years ago, I heard Reebop, who was a conga player with Traffic,  say that music was what you didn’t play. It is an intriguing phrase.  It is about the gaps that you leave out ; particularly for a drummer.  I am listening to the younger drummers here and they are so busy. In a way, it’s a rite of passage, you know. They are in their late teens early 20s and they want to prove – they kind of want to show off and they are over-playing. Hopefully they will prune it down to being a little bit less self-indulgent. They are very good but just a bit busy.  That’s our job.  If you want to play in a band, play Rock, Blues, Pop, Soul, you must support the other guys.

Saiichi: And there is so much reward to be had in nailing the groove and getting it just right.

Simon: Yeah.

Saiichi: Having played with various drummers, what I find is that drumming is the most personal instrument where your personality really comes through. It’s like no two guys have the same groove and often I see it is the personality that comes through. In your case, I met you and had conversations with you and it just shows me that it is your personality coming through.

Simon Kirke - Photo credit: Saiichi Sugiyama

Simon: It’s a good point. I think so.  Our instrument is a projection and a mirror of our soul. That’s why I love playing with older people. I’m in my 50s now, but it’s great to play with them.  For me, so far the biggest reward was playing with Jack Bruce, who is a few years older than me, but he has got a wealth of experience. Probably more than anyone who will walk through these doors this week and what he has been through.  I was very moved.  In fact, I was close to tears when we did “White Room”, because he was playing in such wonderful emotional way.

Saiichi: You mean here a couple of days ago?

Simon: Yeah, when we did on the first day (of the camp).

Saiichi: It was very special.

Simon: I was getting chills. It was monstrous. There were 30 people there;  a cold little room and he was transported. I never forget a thing that was told to me. I went to see the Stones at a private party years ago in Las Vegas. There was maybe 200 people, It was a corporate event.   They were getting paid millions for this little bash. They went out on stage with the full compliment. They were unbelievable. I turned to their tour manager, Alan Dunn, and said it was great.  He said “they can only play one way. It doesn’t matter if they are in a club or a stadium, that’s how they play” and Jack is like that. He will play that way to two people or 200,000. I think that is a gift and that is something that I aspire to, not to be daunted by the number of people out there but to be inspired by the people

Saiichi: Is it okay for me to go back in the history to talk about your past bands?  I understand Free was a very special band for you.

Simon: Free was a little gang of four. We were a little bunch of guys. It was the first real band for all of us. We had semi-pro bands but this was kind of special and we knew it really within the first few weeks.  We weren’t an over-night success like a lot of people think, you know, “together a few weeks or months and off they went”.  No, we were together two years and we had two kind of flops in both albums. They didn’t do well at all – but we slogged around England month after month and we built up a fan base.  Then “All Right Now” hits and we were launched.  But, Free was a special group.

It’s funny, we didn’t realise it at the time.  We didn’t realise what a good band we were.  We knew we were good. We loved playing with each other and gave each other chills, but I didn’t realise until fairly recently when I started listening to, we had to approve certain re-mixes from Island and I thought “hell, we really were good”.

The interaction particularly between me and Andy -Andy was a busy bass player, influenced hugely by Jack and Paul McCartney, so he was almost like a lead bass and he would leave out gaps and then he would come in [Simon sings in triplets].  So, it complemented my very simple metronomic style.  The two Pauls were almost spiritually connected.  Rogers has said he has never played with anyone like Koss since and that‘s 40 years ago.  Koss absolutely loved Paul and he loved his singing, he loved him as a person, I mean obviously in a spiritual way.  They were inter-connected and when Paul Rogers and Andy decided to break-up the band, it dealt a terrible blow to Koss. He never recovered. The rest is a tragedy.  Nowadays if people demonstrate the first signs of addiction, they are whizzed off to the nearest rehab – but there was nothing like that in those days. We had a rest.  We thought we were touring too much, we’d have to take a few weeks off, let him cool out.  He never went to a rehab. It gets me angry.  Anyway, we’ll move on.

Saiichi: Bad Company?

Simon: I have got to say the first few years of Bad Company were the happiest of my life.  We were seasoned veterans, even though we were in our mid-20s.  We were young, healthy. We were a super-group and whether we liked it or not we came from three famous bands and we could deliver the goods. We were hooked up with Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin, it was a marriage made in heaven and as I said the first few years we produced platinum albums sold out shows. Everybody loved it.  It’s everything that you join a band for and also it was fun.  Free ceased to be fun.  Free became almost like a Greek tragedy.

Bad Company could have done anything that we wanted.  Mick Ralphs, although he wasn’t the legendary player like Koss was, he was a great player – a very good guitarist. He wrote great simple rock songs, but he was funny.  He had us in stitches and he still does. I love him to death. He is at the camp 30 years on!  He managed to keep it light-hearted whilst still being serious.  It is a strange dichotomy but he was wonderful.

Boz was a novice bass player but he was kind of into Jazz.  I don’t know if you ever saw The Commitments, that movie, where the sax player starts getting a little bit “flattened fifth” and “augmented ninth”? Boz was like that. Our common ground was R&B – Blues, R&B and Jazz. So, Boz brought a different approach to songs. There is a song we did called “Burnin’ Sky” which has a hiccup-y beat [Simon sings the groove] and that was his idea because I was going to do it like this [Simon sings a subtly different groove].  He said “why don’t you try that”.  He always had a different way of doing things.  You know, it lasted very well for a few years.  Then it started going a little bit crazy.  That’s another story.

Saiichi: Can you tell me about your drum kit – what you used and what you use now please?

Simon: I have a DW kit. I have a little Jazz kit at home, four piece. I have a couple of road kits.

Saiichi: What are the sizes?

Simon: 22”x14” bass, 14”x10” rack, 16”x 16” floor, regular 14” x 5 ½” snare. I use Paiste cymbals, 20” ride, 2 x16” crashes (2002)  I have had them for years and I love them.  I love Paiste and I used them for pretty well all my career – and Pro-Mark sticks. DW drums have 5 ply maple shells.

Saiichi: What did you use in Bad Company and Free?

Simon: I had a variety of kits with Bad Company. The majority of the time, it was Ludwig because Bonzo took me under his wing. I think I had a little Gretsch kit towards the end of Free and he said “oh, no, we’ve got to get rid of that…l’ll get you Ludwig.” He called up Ludwig up in Chicago and they freighted me this lovely Ludwig kit.  So, I used Ludwig for about four years. Then I just messed around a lot with Pearl (Export) kits. Pearl was very nice. Modern drums today are pretty damn good.

Saiichi: Even that kit over there?

Simon: Yeah, even that. They are from China. They are Tie-e or t-a-y-e whatever they are called.  They are great. I mean the bass drum is fabulous.  I can spend a few minutes tuning it properly but… they are probably about 400 quid.  Wonderful.

Saiichi: Then again, whatever the drums, it is always the player that comes through in the end.

Simon: Yeah, I’d like to think so.

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