Drum Phil

Phil, “drum Phil”, “Scottish Phil”, or “Shiva, the Destroyer” was an original member of DeathBoy, our original and only drummer and a total, utter, excrutiating bastard who left us to rot in our tears of betrayal.

I met Phil when we worked at the same company, programming games for the Playstation (1) and PC, at which time, the poor bastard had the misfortune to be on my team.

During our professional time together, I became aware that Phil was quite the talented drummer, who, at the time, was playing in some kind of shoe-gazing band.

Obviously, this sickened and disgusted me and I refused to attend such things and despised him and his people.

Some years later, after moving to London and realising I needed a shit-hot drummer, I duly assumed the position and asked Phil to join us.

High on mescaline and the musk-glands of otters that he bred for the purpose of bleeding, Phil acquiesced and, within a short time, purchased some Roland V-Drums. As a band, we had decided that the live show should maintain the stark, electronic edge of the studio drum programming, and Phil was open-minded enough to embrace this.

For some years, Phil diligently battered the living shit out of synthetic drum heads for us, emulating 5 breakbeats at a time, without so much as a “hoots, mon, whares ma bawb” (he will hurt me for this), until, later in the life of the band, we realised that actually, he sounded fucking obscenely better on “real” drums and that we had probably picked the wrong direction rather early on.

In the last few years of his involvement, Phil shifted to a set of flat drums, which, when micced up, sounded as tough as fuck, but fit into a space the size of a normal kick drum. As a band, we had matured slightly and realised that the more conventional configuration of bass-drums-geetar-singer was probably successful for a reason, and that much of our work translated very nicely into that setup.

Phil was, from the electronic start, to the thundering end, one of the things that people would remark upon about our live show. Real Fucking Drums (or, indeed, Fake Fucking Drums played by a Real Fucking Drummer) were always the subject of compliments for our live sets, even by people who (quite rightly) thought we were a bunch of  otherwise useless cunts.

When, last year, Phil’s grotesque and villaneous ambitions led him to (of all places) France, we shook his hand, bid him farewell and put his name on the appropriate register.

Finding a replacement for Phil has, as yet, been impossible. His groove, ability to assimilate a complex pattern and reproduce it with only the standard number of limbs and exquisite attention to detail underpinned our live show and many facets of our studio albums.

DeathBoy remains committed to the idea of extracting Phil’s DNA and cloning an army of 8-limbed-monkey-drummers to be named Phil-zero, Phil-one, and upwards until we reach the polyphony provided by the original template-Phil.