Get Yer Kit Off: Wayne Bell

Tom Atkinson, drummer for SJD, HMX, one million dollars and Foghorn talks to Splitter's Wayne Bell, session drummer to the stars, including Bic Runga, Greg Johnson and Dave Dobbyn.

Not long back from a three week tour with Dave Dobbyn, I caught up with Wayne Bell before he flew off to London for a one-off Waitangi Day gig at the Brixton Academy – a repeat for Wayne who did the same gig last year with the Finn/Runga/Dobbyn collective. Despite Wayne's extensive pop/rock session career my knowledge of his history was minimal; so I chose one of his albums I was already familiar with; Bic Runga's "Drive' to break the ice.

How much preparation did you have for that album?
Absolutely none! I got a call late on a Tuesday night from her manager Campbell, and I said 'Yeah that'd be great, when? Can you send me a tape of the songs?'. And he said 'Yeah well, I can't send you a tape actually, and it's tomorrow morning'. I replied 'Oh okay yeah, tomorrow morning's fine. I'll come out to the studio. Just a couple of tracks?' 'Yeah um, about 11 or 12!'

I ended up just going out there and we did all the drums tracks in two days. When you work with Bic you realise that actually she's a real talented drummer herself, she knows exactly what she wants. Apart from one track maybe I felt like I basically just did what I was told on that record. My first production work was recording some of those demos for Bic and then the single Drive.

I refer to my favourite tracks Swim and Suddenly Strange.
It's funny, we did Swim in the first 10 minutes that I arrived in the studio. I walked into an iso booth at Revolver, and there was a drum kit set up and I sat down, moved a few things, and the producer said 'Okay we'll just play you this first song down'. So I put on the headphones, didn't even get a chance to do a rough mix and just started playing along to this song – something on the toms. We just whacked it down. I remember thinking 'It doesn't sound too bad, I'll get a couple of things changed in my headphones and I might tune this and retune this and move this over here,' and they said 'Yeah okay got that one, so the next track...', and I was like 'What?' It was freaky!

Some of the stuff reminds me of Ringo Starr.
[Wayne laughs.] Funny you should say that, because that's what Bic was saying when we did that album.

When did you start drumming?
I started playing when I was about 11. My older sister's boyfriend was a drummer and one day he set up his drum kit in our garage and I just started playing from that point on. He gave me a pair of drumsticks and a little practice pad and I just played on that for years, then it was a kit from school.

Your first drum kit?
I would have been about 12 or 13. It was a little 18" Premier bass drum, 12" and 14" Premier toms. My dad was really supportive of me playing music, I started playing in pubs and stuff when I was like 13. He would load all my drums into the car and take me to the pubs and pick me up afterwards. It was good because I ended up playing with people who were much, much older than me and had huge amounts of experience in playing in pubs and just playing covers and stuff like that. Being 13 you just shut up and play along and watch those guys and learn heaps.

Where was this?
Up in Warkworth (an hour north of Auckland). A lot of the work we did was in Auckland. All through school I started playing jazz with guys much much older than me and a lot of our gigs were in Auckland, so I spent a lot of time down here. I started playing with really experienced guys like Jim Langabeer who could have his pick of great players to play with.

He's like Obi-Wan Kenobi of the sax.
Yeah, yeah [Wayne laughs] he is. I learnt so much off him and similar guys. I became sort of like a jazz snob for quite some time where I thought that if you didn't know everything about Coltrane and didn't know every Blue Note record ever recorded, that you didn't know anything about music. And then I discovered bands like The Clash and The Jam and stuff like that, and started listening to that and thinking 'There's really something going on here', and it really changed my life.

What was your first record release?
It was two singles for Dianne Swann's band called Everything That Flies. We made a few singles, no album, then I started playing in the original line-up of When The Cats Away and did that for about five years from the mid '80s to 1991. It was a good workout and a good contact for a lot of people and after that gig, which was kinda the biggest gig in the country at the time, I started getting work with other people. I did so much live work after that. I was working with everybody up through the '90s. And then all the live work kinda dries up and you end up doing a lot of albums for people... it never seems to balance out! It's never two albums a year and two big tours, it's always like six albums - no tours, and then no albums - four tours, that sort of thing.

What gigs were you doing around the late '90s for example?
In '96 I did an album for a band called Bike, and then the Bic Runga album in '97, and then '97-'98 was all working with Bic. After that it's pretty much been Greg Johnson for the last seven years and Dobbyn for the last six . Added to that the Finn/Runga/Dobbyn 'Together in Concert', Splitter, and a few other albums...

The last time I've spent days in studio doing a record was the second Splitter album 'Devil In The Detail', which I co-produced with Andrew [Thorne]. The days of going into studios for lockdown for six weeks or something and just doing tracks – it's over eh? It just doesn't happen. Most recently I worked with Godfrey de Grut and Justin Pilbrow the other day at Radio NZ doing some music for TVNZ for Americas Cup.