Music Arcades: Bill Bruford: An Introduction to Bill Bruford’s Summerfold

We are taking longer and longer to grow up. It's barely a generation ago that someone my age would have had a first grandchild who was a stroppy toddler, not a first child (though admittedly in my own family, I'm only a couple of years off the pace). For sure, writing silly notes about your record collection was something you left behind when you got your first paycheck. These days I know people who've devoted most of their career to music and, in their thirties, just got the one album behind them. It's not much different for the successful ones. Bill Bruford is an Old Tonbridgian. Look at fellow Old Tonbridgians, Keane, who are in their mid thirties with all of three albums behind them. Then read the note on the back of this CD, "By the age of 28, drummer Bill Bruford had co-founded or featured in four of the biggest progressive rock groups of the day: Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, and [drum roll…] U.K."

I didn't see the Prog Britannia shows on TV a few years ago, but I caught a clip where Bruford remarked that his one great stroke of genius was to have been born in 1949. So he understood the once-in-several-generations nature of his opportunity.

I got this CD for free by sending off the token that came with my copy of Bill Bruford's autobiography, which, with a copywriter's feel for a viral catchphrase, he titled Bill Bruford: The Autobiography. No natty play on words involving sticks or skins. The publishers naturally insisted on the subtitle "Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks and More," but if you're looking for tittle-tattle about the personalities of seventies rock and eighties jazz, you came to the wrong place.

The book starts off with an honest attempt to describe the challenges, rewards, and everyday struggles of a musician who, over 40 years, has chosen to play to audiences of 20,000 and also to audiences of 200. It ends with a good 50 pages explaining how, after all those years, Bruford has had enough — in fact, more than enough. He's fallen out of love with his profession and seems genuinely ill at ease that he can't impress (and I'm not making this up) a Wimbledon Estate Agent at a party. What drives him, he says, is the gaining the respect of his peer group, which includes other professional drummers, but also, bizarrely, home counties airheads.

The note on the back of this CD continue: "Summerfold Records exists to chronical [sic, all those school fees for nought] the second part of [Bruford's] ensuing 25-year career as a drummer, writer and leader of the some of the most exciting bands of their age." Summerfold is one of the independent record labels Bruford owns, along with Winterfold Records. To adapt Frank Zappa's dictum, "Just what the world needs: another two record labels." The music on this introduction is spliced with a sympathetic interview with Bill, during the course of which he explains that his "primary interest is contribute to drums and to drumming," and "If you're interested in tennis, you go to Wimbledon; if you're interested in drumming, you go to jazz."

Do they give OBEs for "services to drums"? This continuing public commitment to his mission somehow doesn't fit with Bruford's ennui with a career where he's had more opportunity to fulfil this mission than most in similar positions. He openly admits he's had a charmed career compared to most musicians, as he's been able to play what he likes, when he likes, with whom he likes. Perhaps, then, the peer pressure of others doing socially useful things, like estate agency, makes him feel the drums are an unworthy preoccupation for a career, an indulgence in trivial frippery. It reminds me of the comment of another Old Tonbridgian, Colin Cowdrey, made when he ended his cricket career and wondered aloud what had been gained by a quarter of a century spent standing in the slips.

Despite such doubts, two of Cowdrey's three sons followed him into the life of a professional career. Bruford's own son haunts his dad's autobiography, and I can't imagine what he must think of it. For he also followed his dad into drumming. Now in his thirties, his band Infadels have got, you guessed it, two albums behind them.