30/07/2024
PART 1
My name’s Craig Long.
I’m a drummer currently recovering from Focal Dystonia (aka Musicians Hand Dystonia) in my left arm/hand/fingers.
This is my story so far…
I was born and bred in East London and grew up in a little s**thole called Plaistow.
I started showing interest in drums around the age of 3 when my parents bought me a little plastic drum kit to play with and my mum noticed I was enjoying it quite a lot more than the usual toy.
I have memories of taking my mums pots n pans out of a kitchen cupboard and laying them all over the floor and playing them with wooden spoons when I was little. I even remember there was a small red pot which was supposed to be my snare drum haha!
Around the age of 6 I have another memory of having this strong urge to get that little plastic drum kit out of a cupboard and take it downstairs (in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping) and set it up so I could play it the next day as soon as I woke up. Doing this set off a safety alarm in my house (which scared the s**t out of me) and I remember my parents coming downstairs and running into the living room while I was standing there with all the drums and my dad getting really angry at me asking what the hell I was doing at that time getting the drum kit out lol!
It was around this time my mum started noticing that I had a genuine interest in the drums and she noticed that my Granddads rhythm may have been passed down to me. I’m gonna speak more in depth about my Granddad in a future post. He was also a drummer but unfortunately passed before I was born (RIP Eddie Jones).
After a lot of pleading and begging, my parents bought me a snare drum for my 7th birthday. I remember seeing this black snare drum covered in a blue plastic bag a couple nights before my birthday and I got so excited! It was hidden away and I went snooping round the house looking for presents and found it haha!
After a short while of playing the snare drum my mum convinced my old man to buy me a full drum kit as she saw that me playing may not just be a hobby or a 5 minute wonder.
We found a cheap 2nd hand drum kit in an area nearby where we lived and went to look at it, taking my dads work van incase we ended up buying it. I remember when we walked in and I saw it all in bits and barely set up properly in the corner of a room, and I remember falling in love with it on the spot and begging my dad to buy it. I think we ended up paying like £80 for the whole kit (with cymbals and stands!). It was a dark emerald green kit with a wood finish and Paiste cymbals…I fu***ng loved it!!!
It was on this kit where my love for playing drums and drums in general really started to grow. My Grandmother lived in the house next door to ours on the end of our street and had a spare room for the drums and that’s where my practice really began. I would spend a couple of hours in this room everyday playing and doing something that truly made me happy. I had a little boombox with a tape deck and CD player which I used to plug headphones into and play along to various bands which I liked and had heard my parents listening to. I feel like this is where the foundation for a lot of my musical influence started. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, AC/DC, Oasis, compilation tapes of various soul records etc…I would play along to these bands/artists tapes and CD’s everyday until I knew them backwards.
My mother told the priest at our local church about me playing and he suggested I come n try playing in church for a Sunday with the piano player to see how it went. Anxiously, I thought I’d give it a try and went to play! This was my first ‘gig’, playing in my local church, Saint Martins Church in Plaistow.
It was here I started to learn about playing with other musicians and playing live in front of an audience thanks to the piano player in the church, John.
Playing in St Martins became a regular thing and I’d play every Sunday, sometimes playing at different fares/community events and playing in different churches for special events all over east London.
I also started playing at my primary school, New City Primary School, playing in school plays and events.
I was self taught up to this point and then went on to have some lessons with a local drum tutor in The Royal Academy of Music in East London. It was with him that I started to learn to read music and after a while he recommended I join the Academy’s junior brass band. I was never fond of (or good at) reading music, but it was with the brass band that I started to learn to play with a conductor and a big band comprising of 15+ other musicians. I learned a lot of marching stuff, how to take solos, how to control the dynamics of the band etc. Great fun! We used to play events all over London and I learned what it was to play in a lot of outdoor situations.
When I started secondary school (Saint Bonaventure’s Secondary School) I was completely blown away with the schools music department and music teachers, Mr O’Connor and Mr Broadbent. It was here where I started to play with the school’s Gospel Choir and started to play in different school events and music events over London. I also learned the basics of music production on an Atari ST1040 using Cubase 1 and a midi keyboard. This was back in the days of floppy discs and waiting at least 5 minutes for the computer to start up (which was probably gonna crash again in another 30 minutes haha!).
I have some fond memories learning with Mr O’Connor and Mr Broadbent and can’t thank them enough for everything they taught me and all the great experiences I had with them in St Bons.
I used to be taken out of my classes by Mr O’Connor to help in his lessons with other students and I eventually started teaching drums in school. This only lasted a short while due to me ‘not getting my education’ and I wasn’t allowed to teach anymore (which really pi**ed me off cause all I wanted to do was be in the music department and play drums all day haha!).
It was also around this time I started taking private drum lessons with Bob Armstrong (RIP) outside of school. I learned a lot from Bob. He taught me to play Latin music, Jazz, The Moeller technique, Rudiments, Linear phrasing, helped me advance my music reading etc.
He also gave a lot of advice on playing situations, business situations, and helped me understand the importance of slow and soft playing. “Slow practice - Fast progress”.
Bob recommended me to a company who contacted him looking for a little drummer for a bit on a TV show (TFI Friday with Chris Evans). I went in for an audition in the afternoon and went on to play the show later in the evening! I got to meet Cozy Powell (RIP), Finley Quay, David Seamen, amongst others. It’s definitely one of the highlights of my career so far and I’m grateful to have had that opportunity. (And yes, I was so little that I wasn’t wearing the Ben Sherman shirt; the Ben Sherman Shirt was wearing me! lol!).
I did my GCSE in music in year 8 along with another student who was a guitarist in the same year. We both passed with A’s and started to learn for AS level exams but I ended up dropping out shortly into studying.
It was around this time, at the age of 14, I was having a lot of stuff going on at home with my parents divorcing amongst other things and I went into the ‘rebellious teen’ stage of my life and my character completely changed. I stopped playing drums, started bunking off school and eventually dropped out, started smoking and drinking, getting up to mischief with my friends and basically being a little s**t!
My mum was completely devastated when I stopped playing and realised that I was really sticking to my decision.
I won’t go into too much detail here, but from around age 15 up to 18 I was getting myself into some serious trouble unfortunately due to a lot of alcohol abuse and anger. The range of this behaviour extended to me punching through 2 glass doors in a fit of rage when I was 16 and losing 6 pints of blood, bleeding to death and having to be resuscitated back to life. This amongst other life changing situations were occurring at the time and I very narrowly missed doing time in prison. These were some of the darkest times of my life and I’m lucky and grateful to have survived all the s**t that happened.
But even though I wasn’t playing drums during this period I was still musically active and got heavily into UK Garage and Hip Hop music and started learning to DJ with record decks. This completely took over my life for a couple of years…Learning to scratch, learning how to line up records, learning how to control a DJ mixer, going record shopping and collecting vinyls etc…So much fun! That era (late 90’s/early 2000’s) was a great time for UK Garage music!
I was also using a version of Cubase on a Packard Bell PC at home while I wasn’t drumming and used to lay down some rough ideas for Hip Hop beats now n again.
At 18, after attending an offenders college I started to work in offices being an office junior (which I absolutely hated!). After doing this for a year or so my mum randomly called me one day asking if I’d like a drum kit a friend of hers was getting rid of. I remember sitting in the office I was working in and hearing this and looking at the computer screen thinking to myself ’what the f**k am I doing this for?!’…So I agreed to take the kit and see what it was like to have a play again after all them years away. It was a beautiful little Pearl Export Chrome finish 5 piece kit.
I would have a little play on it at home now n again but I could feel my heart wasn’t really in it.
That was until one day I was on MySpace (who remembers MySpace?!) and I was logging out of my account and I noticed a small picture on the sidebar of a clown hitting a keg with a baseball bat and seeing Slipknot written underneath it. Out of curiosity I decided to ‘see what this s**t is all about’, meaning I’d heard of Slipknot before but never bothered to check them out properly cause I was sure it wouldn’t be my kinda thing (Ignorance is bliss, right?). The link was to their new single ‘Duality’ from their 3rd album ‘The Subliminal Verses. Vol 3’.
This changed my life.
I was completely taken in by the chaos in this video and this song…The people falling through the ceilings…Clown beating the s**t out of the keg with a baseball bat…Joey playing drums like I’d never heard before…Corey’s scream…The tasteful madness of the songs riffs and lyrics…The masks and the numbered jumpsuits…All of it grabbed me in that moment of watching that one single video. I’d never heard or seen anything musically like this before! I felt like this is what I wanted to be part of…like this is what I should be doing. (For any Slipknot fans: Apparently everything you see in that video was unplanned…All the fans falling through the ceilings, breaking through the walls etc was all real and the band and video directors just went along with the madness and let it all happen!). After a few more listens I decided to Youtube their drummer Joey Jordison (RIP). This is when I saw his drum solo from the Disasterpieces concert DVD. The drum kit, the mask, his playing, the black drumsticks, the drum riser going up and spinning around with the pentagram lighting up underneath him and everyone throwing up horns…It blew my fu***ng mind man!…Seeing and hearing all that and then seeing him smash the s**t out of the cymbals at the end of the solo and stick his middle finger up at the crowd and them all starting to chant “Joey! Joey! Joey!” - I knew from that moment on I wanted to play my drums again!!!
The impact that day I found Slipknot had on my life will stay with me forever.
This was where things completely changed for me again. I left the soul sucking office job I was doing and everything I lived and breathed became about drums again. I started getting heavily into bands like Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Deftones, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Korn, POD, Mudvayne, Blink182 and so on.
After getting back on the drums and practicing for a few months I made a pact with myself to get into a band before I turned 20. I did this and joined a band by the name of Polanski. We started rehearsing in a local studio and eventually played our first gig at a little festival in east London.
When my dad realised I was serious about playing again we built a semi soundproofed room in our house where I could practice and would spend about 3 or 4 hours a day in there.
After playing some more gigs with Polanski I felt I wanted to be out playing more gigs in a different kind of genre and I went on to join another band by the name of Once A Thief.
We gained a following over the course of a few years and played gigs all over the UK, touring up n down the country in places like Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh etc in various venues. We also gained the interest of a renowned photographer by the name of Roger Sargent. Roger’s a legend who’s worked with many other legends! He later became our unofficial manager for a while and helped us network and play some cool shows over London. He also gave me the opportunity to play a secret gig in Camden’s Proud Galleries with The Dirty Pretty Things and Liam Gallagher as a special guest. The opportunity came about due to their drummer Gary Powell having a leg injury at the time. As anxious I was to take this gig (Roger literally offered it to me a few hours before the show) I took the gig and went on to play one of the wildest shows I’ve ever been part of! Security had to stop it a few times cause the audience were going so fu***ng crazy, and then they went on to completely stop it early cause it was getting so out of hand in there! lol! It was one of the highlights on my career so far and an unforgettable night spent with Liam, one of my childhood heroes! (I used to play the ’What’s The Story’ album in it’s entirety at least once everyday after school!). I’m forever grateful to Roger for that opportunity and the unforgettable experience.
It was with Once A Thief where I also gained the name ‘H!Tman’ but I’ll speak more on that in a later post.
After some time together Once A Thief decided to part ways and I was without an originals band to play with.
I was mostly doing the odd recording session here n there but not gigging and felt a bit stuck because I didn’t know what was next for me. I was doing some Hip Hop production on my computer (mainly as a hobby), composing drum parts, laying down drum pattern ideas, and getting fat!
Some time passed and I was given the opportunity to audition to play a summer season in a bar in Ibiza. I was a little reluctant to do this as it was overseas and I wasn’t sure how I’d feel playing covers for a long time, continuously.
But I thought I’d give it a go and went for the audition. I flew over there and was greeted by a fellow bandmate and the owner of the bar at the airport. They took me into Eivissa and showed me the bar/stage/setup where we’d be playing. We had a quick play in the afternoon (just drums and keyboard) and played a couple songs to give me an idea of the vibes. They were covers but done in a very unique way, where they had their own funky/dance spin to them and the band made the songs their own.
Later that evening came showtime and we hit the stage basically winging the whole thing! It went really well and the owner of the bar said I could stay if I wanted on the first night. I was still a little unsure at this point cause it was all very new and scary for me to be in a different country by myself with people I didn’t know. But after a few more nights and some great experiences on stage I ended up staying and doing the whole season. This season comprised of playing 2+ hours a night (in 4 half hour sets, from 12am till 3.30am), 7 days a week, for nearly 8 months straight (not missing a single night). This was extremely hard work at times! Not only the duration of that many shows continuously, but the shows themselves too, playing in that Ibiza heat, in a packed out bar of 300+ people, full of smoke, on a small stage every night…I would come off stage some nights literally looking like I’d just gotten out of a swimming pool because I was so drenched in sweat (that’s not an exaggeration either!). I had other moments where I’d have to concentrate on staying seated on the drum throne and not falling off cause I was so dizzy at times from the heat in the heavy months mid season.
Over the course of the season I warmed to the island and it became my second home. I made some good friends there and started to gain a knowledge for the language, the way of life and the different areas all over the island.
I completed the 2010 season and was asked to go back to play the summer season of 2011…Which I did! (Sharing the stage with Amina Buddafly).
I was then asked to go back to play another season in 2012…Which I did! (Sharing the stage with Barbara Tucker).
I cannot begin to express the times, experiences and fun I had on this island for the 3 years I was there…The weather, the people, the food, the music, the drugs, the bars, the clubs, the beaches, the times on stage, the lifestyle etc…It was all something which literally felt like a dream at times! I could tell you stories of s**t that went on over there you wouldn’t believe! lol!
I was also lucky enough to be on the island when Spain won the World Cup 2010 and The Euro 2012!…It was complete madness in the streets!…I’ve never seen anything like it!
If I had to sum up my whole time over in Ibiza, I can only describe it as ‘an experience’.
(PART 2 & 3 OF POST TO FOLLOW)
PICTURES📸
1. 😊
2. My toy drum set 👶🏻
3. Playing at Saint Martins summer fete on my first full drum kit ⛪️
4. Royal Academy of Music 🏤
5. Junior Brass band rehearsal 🎺
6. Over the moon with resonant heads being put on my first kit ☺️
7. On TV Show TFI Friday as ‘The Ickle Drummer’ with Chris Evans 📺
8. First gig back playing Redbridge Green Festival with Polanski 🥁
9. Once A Thief rehearsal and NME write up with Dirty Pretty Things & Liam Gallagher 🤘🏼
10. Ibiza seasons 2010, 2011 & 2012 🌅
•
https://www.instagram.com/hitmandrums/p/C-DtnWeOwi-/?img_index=1
