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digitalDrummer: I was and remain a huge INXS fan and must admit that I was unaware of your e-drum adoption. yes, there were pads visible in the music videos, but if you weren’t looking for it, it kind of got lost.
Jon Farriss: In days gone by, there would have been no point in having any of those electronic devices in video clips when it did nothing to serve either the storyboard of the video content or even the “miming” of playing along to drum parts that had clearly been created using electronics because the audience were likely to not have understood it. In fact, because I was in a band recognised for being great live, I would probably have been reprimanded by a viewing audience for doing something which was not “live” in their mind. This was a deep frustration of that period because it was something that was almost swept under the rug. I recently came across a concert review from an early US tour around ‘86, where we had sold out three nights at Radio City (Music Hall in New york), we had done lots of college towns on the preliminary ‘KICK’ tour and the review talks about “the driving engine room”, “the funky this and that”, but they ended by saying it sounded like it was being driven by a drum machine. Although it was a criticism, I took that as a compliment! I look back at that and think, ‘isn’t that incredible?’. It was viewed as being some kind of breach of the public’s expectations of live music. This was at a time when you had Human League who had clearly just unboxed a Linndrum and read the manual on how to programme it. Then at the same time, you had Prince using electronic percussion, too. But it was somehow taboo to use a drum machine live and acts would always tour with a live drummer.
dD: But we’re not talking Milli Vanilli here (the R&B duo exposed for lip-syncing to someone else’s vocals). They’d love it on the recording, but couldn’t accept it when performed live …
JF: yes, there was a lot of clandestine technology in use which wasn’t brought out into the light because it was deemed ‘cheating’. In my experience of touring with INXS alongside the masters like Queen, for example, I remember gigs like Wembley Stadium and while Queen were on stage, there’d be a guy under the stage playing guitar with a pair of headphones, augmenting the onstage performance. And there’s a couple of people singing harmonies backstage, too. That is what you had to do because tape was so unreliable live and hard to sync. So what better way than to have live musicians in the wings? Of course, in those days, for some artists, there were tapes being played, and it was linear and analogue. But what was eventually to make the difference, was the advent of MIDI … dD: We’ll get into that in a bit, but let’s start by exploring your electronic journey. How did you realise this was a direction you needed to follow and how did you find out what was out there, because the technology was really thin on the ground when you set out? JF: I don’t know why, but I think I just had an innate attraction to the notion of an internal clock guiding electronic percussion. Until then, everything was running to a mechanical metronome, which clearly wasn’t loud enough for rock music. Then you started digitalDRUMMER, AUGUST 2014
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