Drummers You Just Can’t Beat: # 25 – Roger Taylor (Queen)
Drummers You Just Can’t Beat is an occasional series here at Off The Tracks.
I have often written about how much I don’t like Queen. But it’s more about a) how overhyped/overplayed they became in the wake of Freddie’s death, and b) just a symbolic break, I moved on. I loved Queen when I was a kid. Right up until Freddie’s death really. And then, almost overnight, that switched. I moved on and away from them. The music isn’t as special as fans seem to think, I’ll stand by that. But also, I’m no longer a fan. So, there’s that.
But in recent years, I’ve been able to hear them — now and then. And perhaps the gig (Queen+Adam Lambert) from 2020 was the olive branch between me and the band. I went, really only because my son wanted to go. And I was reminded of my own childhood listening to so many anthems.
Gig Review: Queen + Adam Lambert (February 5, Wellington)
Twenty years ago, or so, I remember a poll of the best drummers, and I was somewhat agitated by seeing Roger Taylor figure so high in the list. Such lists are always random at any rate, but I really felt it a huge oversight to list Taylor so high and forget about so many other amazing players. One of my colleagues pointed out a bunch of stuff about Taylor — some of those things I’ll mention in the coming column inches now. But at the time I just wasn’t wanting to hear it.
My appreciation of Taylor was there when I was young. He was one of my favourite members of the group. The thing I have always loved about Queen is that all four of the players weren’t just songwriters, all four had huge hits. So my first favourite thing about Taylor is that he contributed hugely to the group’s recorded legacy as a composer.
Radio Ga Ga is one of my all-time favourite Queen songs, and Taylor’s pen also accounts for One Vision, Innuendo, Invisible Man, These Are The Days of Our Lives, Stone Cold Crazy, Sheer Heart Attack, A Kind of Magic, and other staples of FM radio, the band’s live sets and greatest hits compilations. So, as a young music fan it was cool knowing the drummer could have the full hand in creating songs that were more sophisticated than say Octopus’ Garden…
Taylor is also a great singer, handling tricky — and very high — harmony parts which he also managed to replicate live, while playing. But it’s his abilities as a singer that really start the discussion about his distinctive drum playing, and the innovations there, or his way of thinking.
Songs like Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Good Old Fashioned Loverboy, I’m In Love With My Car, Get Down Make Love, Hammer To Fall and Death on Two Legs showcase his ability to follow where the singer is going, to leave space for the main vocal, and to punctuate around it, his fills little signposts, or big punctuation stops.
He’s a thinking player, a very compositional player, and it makes sense that he was raised on Mitch Mitchell (Jimi Hendrix Experience) and The Buddy Rich Big Band, both examples of great drummers with huge personalities finding the spaces, making gaps, mowing through certain passages, sure, but also colouring in and around the lines.
And then we get to the thing that absolutely matters the most in this discussion, and for any drummer: Pocket.
Roger Taylor has an incredible pocket. A deep groove that is precise, warm, effortless. He has all these great fill ideas (starting on the deepest, biggest tom and working around backwords), he has intricate cymbal recording techniques (overdubbing, recording cymbal-chokes and specific crashes separately for maximum impact), but at the end of the day it’s about that pocket.
And I think his simplest — most ‘easy’, obvious — groove pattern is the best example.
I’ve been sitting with Another One Bites The Dust a lot lately. Practicing it most days. Playing along, and trying my very best to not play more than what is there, and to also get close to the feel on the record. It could take me many years to even get close…
Maybe that alone qualifies Roger Taylor as a drummer you just can’t beat.