Rat a Tat Tat

Let’s bang a drum for the baby Jesus. (But quietly).

The French Third Republic was a lot like the nativity.  I’ll explain. Eventually.

In France, in the 1870s, they had an unemployment problem. To fix it, they sent gangs of men in the morning to dig holes in the ground. In the afternoon, different groups filled them in. Time was never spent so unproductively, until the launch of daytime TV.

I feel sorry for those Gallic workers. I bet they suffered the usual fate of people who dig for a living, explained to me by a student friend who did vacation work for a phone company. All day, every day, he explained, passersby would peer in the trench he was labouring over and say, giggling at their brilliance, ‘have you struck oil yet?’ Utterly hilarious, I’m sure you’ll agree. So witty. Although in a perfect world, people standing in a hole, digging, should really be assailed by strangers shouting ‘STOP!’

I’m personally familiar with this problem of universal popular wit, or lack of it, from my own life as a drummer. At the end of a gig, as I am laboriously packing gear away, someone in the audience will come up, simpering superciliously, and say ‘I bet you wish you played the piccolo’. I’ve heard that line at almost every gig for fifty years. My, how I laugh.

But the most original comment ever levelled at my percussive practice came a few years ago in Hexham Abbey. It’s just down the road from where I am writing this, a grand and ancient place, like a cathedral which was on the wrong spin cycle and shrank a bit. One of the earliest Christian churches in Britain, it was established in 673 by Queen Etheldreda - who, come to think of it, sounds like a hiphop artist. Its first bishop was Trumbrith. Or was that the evil Headmistress in Matilda? Not sure.

Anyway: Hexham Abbey survived Viking raiders and other ravages of history, and these days is just as cold and draughty as you might expect of a place whose crypt looks exactly like the set for The da Vinci Code, that bit in Rosslyn Chapel where Audrey Tautou discovers her interesting ancestry. Today, it’s a thriving centre of the community, and the place which educated all three of my kids in the English Choral tradition. This means, they all sang in the choir, an experience so cute it would reliably make my mother cry at Christmastime. Me too, actually. So, wanting to give back, I agreed to play in a children’s Christmas crib service, complete with live animals. Awww. For me, this meant timpani, cymbals, glockenspiels, snare drums, and the inevitable sleigh bells. The whole kitchen sink.

Before the gig/service, I was wheeling one of my timpani past the Rector, a nice man who embodied the word ‘pious’. He looked worried.

‘Those kettledrums are very impressive, Paul’, he said, ‘but, erm - how loud will they be?’

‘Well, that all rather depends on how hard I hit them, Graham’.

For some reason this did not entirely put his mind at rest. A furrow passed across his saintly brow.

‘Oh I see. It’s just that – well, I’m worried they might frighten the donkey’.

All those years of musical training, and it comes to this; accused of incipient aural animal abuse. I could imagine a note in the Order of Service: no animals were harmed in the making of this racket.

Fortunately I exercised heroic self-restraint, the donkey lived to poo another day, and the children looked delighted, their little eyes lighting up like cherubs as I played the finger cymbals in Mary’s Boy Child. And at the end, as I was packing everything away, one of the Dads asked if I wished I played the piccolo. Hallelujah.

Inevitably, the experience set me thinking about the Nativity. Imagine how different the Christmas story would have been if, instead of oxen lowing and Wise Men quietly delivering their gifts like the world’s first Amazon drivers, it had more cowbell. What a festive soundtrack that would be. Oh Drum, All Ye Faithful. Not very Silent Night. Ding Dong Noisily on High. A hundred bars’ Rest, ye Merry Gentlemen (for classical percussionists). Hark, the Herald Angels play, paradiddles every day.

And who could forget that timeless classic….

Once in Royal David’s City
Stood a lowly practice shed,
Where a drummer played a solo
Scaring shepherds, who all said,
What a noise, he’ll wake the child.
But Jesus Christ? The babe went wild.

Yes, inspired, barely ex utero, his tiny fingers tapping along religiously, the baby Jesus would inevitably have been captivated, and grown up a drummer. We are always despisèd and rejectèd; he would fit right in. The entire musical history of western civilisation would have changed for the better. How divine. It brings fresh new meaning to ‘the rhythm method’.

But the Rector’s animal anxiety raises a fundamental question which has troubled me ever since. Sort of a crisis of faith. I’m not questioning the Virgin Birth, or anything like that; it’s about that timeless Christmas classic, ‘Little Drummer Boy’. I mean, honestly. It’s so lacking in verisimilitude. Does anyone seriously think a little kid with a snare drum could do pianissimo? I don’t think so.

Doubtless many august theological treatises will be written on this important topic, but not perhaps by Graham. Today he has no time for donkey welfare; he’s the Bishop of Norwich. You could see him this year in a somewhat grander service, for an old-born King. Standing next to Camilla during the coronation, he ministered to her every regal need, passing her implausibly-shaped things to hold, still looking professionally pious. He was incredibly busy. Fully employed, in fact.

And the correlation between France and Bethlehem? The nativity was wholly holy. The Third Republic was wholly holey. Ahem.

Happy Christmas - or Holidays, if you prefer. I hope your crackers will have better jokes. I’ll be back next week, this time with audio too (but no drums). My gift to you, this Christmastide. Hee-haw.

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