Irreplaceable ... Led Zeppelin's Bonzo. Photograph: Neal Preston
A drummer, tired of being ridiculed by his peers, decides to learn how to play some "real" musical instruments. He goes to a music store and says to the owner: "I'll take that red trumpet over there and that accordion." The manager looks at him a bit funny, and replies: "OK, you can have the fire extinguisher but the radiator's got to stay."
Ba-boom tsch, followed by a comedy drum roll. Like 1,001 similarly themed gags, this one supports the time-honoured theory that drummers are as thick as mince, musically ignorant and completely dispensable. Ten years since Bill Berry announced he was leaving REM, it seems as good a time as any to bury this tired idea once and for all.
It's Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie who lays claim to the quote, "A band is only as good as its drummer". Outside of Pete Best's close family, there'll not be too many takers for the theory that the Beatles went downhill after replacing him with Ringo. But pop history is generously littered with examples of bands that hit the skids the minute their drummer checked out.
Indisputably, REM have shown fleeting moments of brilliance (E-Bow the Letter, At my Most Beautiful, She Just Wants to Be) since Berry skipped off to milk cows in Georgia. But, given the patchiness of their recent albums, you can't help thinking they'd have been better off following the example of Led Zeppelin, who sensibly realised there was no point carrying on after Bonzo snuffed it in 1980. Keith Moon's death didn't stop the Who soldiering on but you rather wish they hadn't. Keith Richards has often said the only event likely to force the Stones into retirement would be the departure of Charlie Watts. Topper Headon received his marching orders from the Clash in 1982. Joe Strummer would later admit the decision was his greatest mistake and that "we stupidly tried to fix a clock that wasn't broken".
In terms of making records that mattered, Oasis's clock effectively stopped in 1995 when Tony McCarroll was drummed out of the band. Unlike Strummer, Noel Gallagher had no regrets, stubbornly bonkers in his belief that drummers are easily replaceable. "They're like monkeys," he once said. "All they're good for is banging things. I'm the best drummer in Oasis and maybe that's why I have a problem with them."
In arguing that a band is only as good as its drummer, at least Bobby Gillespie is in a decent position to judge. It was Gillespie who drummed on the Jesus and Mary Chain's debut masterpiece, Psychocandy, before jumping ship and forming Primal Scream. The Mary Chain found an ideal replacement in the Guardian's very own John Moore. On the face of it, the Mary Chain experience would seem to refute Gillespie's argument. Then again, after appearing on their greatest single, Some Candy Talking, Moore himself was replaced by a foul-sounding drum machine that made most of the Mary Chain's subsequent records all but unlistenable.
So, is Gillespie right? Or, as another old gag has it, are drummers simply people who hang out with musicians? You be the judge.
