The beat falls silent: Vale Clem Burke and James Baker

Drummers are in the news this week, with a range of stories from the tragic to the straight up perplexing. IA's music columnist, David Kowalski, is on the beat.

IN THE NEWS this week is the tragedy that yet another couple of legendary drummers have left the planet for good, but not without making their mark on the ears of music fans everywhere.

If it wasn’t enough that this year already we have lost Gordon “Snowy” Fleet of The Easybeats and Rick Buckler of The Jam, recently it was revealed that Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil isn’t doing all that well of late. And now, we have Clem Burke of Blondie and James Baker, formerly of Beasts of Bourbon, Scientists and Hoodoo Gurus also added to the list.

Burke, of course, made his mark with some deceptively simple yet complex playing on the Blondie classics like ‘Heart of Glass’, ‘Atomic’ and ‘Union City Blue’. He wasn’t a flashy drummer and didn’t try to steal the limelight for himself. However, the drum grooves on the aforementioned songs have been appropriated by a million drummers in indie bands in the 1990s and beyond, including the likes of Franz Ferdinand and The Strokes.

Less well known perhaps, but no less relevant, is Perth-born drummer James Baker. He was something of a journeyman musician, never seeming to stay in one band for any length of time, although he was with The Dubrovniks for eight years. He first came to prominence with a local Perth punk band called The Victims, with Dave Faulkner and Kim Salmon. Baker co-wrote (with Faulkner) the now highly sought-after yet impossibly rare single, ‘Television Addict’.

When The Victims split up, Salmon and Baker formed Scientists, who went on to be hugely influential (via export mail order record sales) on the Seattle Grunge Scene, with Mudhoney citing them as a big influence. Faulkner moved east to Sydney and formed Hoodoo Gurus, with Baker joining on drums in 1982 for the release of their first single, ‘Leilani’, and the debut album, Stoneage Romeos.

Baker then left to join one of Sydney’s wildest and dangerous bands, The Beasts of Bourbon, and he played on their legendary albums The Axeman’s Jazz, Sour Mash and Black Milk.

Baker was inducted into the West Australian Music Industry Hall of Fame in 2006 and the ARIA Hall of Fame as a member of the Hoodoo Gurus. His ferocious drumming is a staple of any record he played on, especially the Victims’ frantic I’m Flipped Out Over You. It’s lucky the song is only 76 seconds long, otherwise he’d pass out from exhaustion!

Vale Clem and James, we will miss you both.

Zak Starkey out and back in The Who

Recently, the news cycle was tied up with the bizarre tale of Zak Starkey, son of Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, being fired after serving as drummer for The Who for 29 years and then being rehired almost immediately after the tabloid reports had hit the shelves.

The trouble started with a gig at the Royal Albert Hall to raise funds for the Teenage Cancer Trust, which is singer Roger Daltrey’s charity of choice. Despite there being a noise shield around the drums to prevent the rest of the band from being blasted with loads of drum noise, Daltrey complained on stage in front of a packed house that he couldn’t hear anything except the drums. He complained he couldn’t hear any instrument to pitch his vocals to and he put the blame squarely on Starkey.

There are a few issues with this. Did Daltrey forget that he played in The Who in the 1960s and 1970s, which was largely fueled by the manic lunatic drumming energy of the late Keith Moon, who incidentally was Starkey’s mentor and first drum teacher? Singing with a band on a small London pub stage in 1964 with Moon on drums would’ve been difficult at best, especially with the rudimentary stage gear they had back then.

Did he ever think that maybe, at 81 years old and over 60 years singing in front of loud rock bands, that his hearing isn’t all that it once was? Did he ever think that maybe the mix in his in-ear monitors wasn’t right? Neither of these things is the fault of the young drummer.

Starkey made a couple of Instagram posts thanking the band for the opportunity, before the band’s guitarist, Pete Townshend, made a statement saying that after a mediation meeting, Starkey had been rehired. We still don’t know what the real reason was, except that maybe the famously hot-headed Daltrey threw his toys out of the cot in frustration after a gig he felt didn’t go the way he wanted it to.

A storm in a teacup? Perhaps. But why is it always the drummer’s fault? Given the age of the two principal members of The Who, who knows how much longer the band will continue? Maybe Starkey’s days with the band are numbered anyway.

Best of British chart results

Every year, around this time, I report on a music countdown that is held annually on Easter Monday on UK radio station Radio X that chronicles the Best of British music as voted by the station’s listeners. The station enjoyed some notoriety when the 2016 countdown featured four of the top five songs all by Oasis, sparking confusion in the media, with some speculating as to what British music fans were thinking when they came up with that list.

If nothing else, this is a good alternative countdown for those who annually lament about the contents of the Triple J Hottest 100. It is also interesting to see this as a temperature check of music culture as seen through the eyes of the Brits.

The 2025 list is a little less egregious than in 2016, however, it is still very biased in favour of the Manchester lads, with 16 Oasis songs in the countdown. By comparison, the nearest contender in terms of number of songs in the list was Arctic Monkeys with eight tracks and the Stone Roses with seven. By comparison, the Beatles had two songs and Queen had only one: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, predictably.

So what was number one? ‘Live Forever’ by Oasis, for the third year in a row. A great song to be sure, but is it better than Queen’s immortal BoRap? I’ll let you be the judge.

EDIE enters the scene

Something new that crossed my path this week is actually a couple of months old, however, it is still something fresh to my ears. It comes from a Perth-based singer songwriter Edie Hooker, who prefers to go by the mononym EDIE (stylised all caps). She has a polished indie pop sound, big on hooks and crunchy guitars. Her bio on the Triple J Unearthed site says that she ‘bring[s] her bold, fiery and unapologetic main character energy’ to her music and that she has ‘an edgy blend of indie pop and grim imagery, that flows with a specific kind of feminine energy’.

Her latest single is entitled ‘Bleed’ and it wraps a lyric of emotional frustration and relationship-borne despair around a sweet hook that has a sting in the tail. Highly recommended.

Until next week…

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David Kowalski is a writer, musician, educator, sound engineer and podcaster. His podcasts 'The Sound and the Fury Podcast' and 'Audio Cumulus' can be heard exclusively HERE. You can follow David on Twitter/X @sound_fury_pod.