Up and coming: Drums of Death - Face of a new beat

Published on Thursday 16 July 2009 16:44

DRUMS OF DEATH IS A ONCE-SEEN, never-forgotten live experience, and that's saying something in an age when almost every conceivable style and genre of musical performance is accessible online.

There's nothing quite like him; a tall, barking man-in-black with a microphone, a thousand-yard stare and a table full of electronic kit that he intently flays with his hands. It's the face you remember, though – a death-mask of skeletal white theatrical paint (and black around the neck, for added disembodiment in a dark club) which gives him the look of a voodoo priest or a Marvel Comics villain of the 1970s.

"He is a supervillain," says Colin Bailey, the dancefloor-terrifying lone Drum-man's mild-mannered alter ego, "and everyone knows the villain gets the most beautiful girlfriend." We might not be talking world domination here, but the 30-year-old London-based musician certainly has a masterplan that is working so far. He will shortly be releasing his debut album on Greco-Roman (the label part-owned by Joe Goddard of intelligent electro-pop outfit Hot Chip, whom Bailey has also supported on tour). He has recently remixed for Franz Ferdinand and Mando Diao, and also contributed his production skills to I Feel Cream, the latest album by Canadian electro queen Peaches.

Even as we talk on the phone, he's cabbing through London to meet his manager at a TV On The Radio show in Brixton, having just remixed their version of Heroes for a new David Bowie covers project.

So what's the secret origin of one of the year's most innovative, exciting and attention-grabbing new electronic producers?

"I come from a small Scottish fishing town," says Bailey, who was raised in Oban, "so I started out viewing the world through magazines, radio and computer games. I didn't grow up in a bustling metropolis, and my early influences were things like Tears For Fears and Michael Jackson. Then you get to a certain age and you want to be cool, so when people tell you about bands you go and check them out. And hearing this strange music makes you very excited, and brave. I was quite a sheltered child, quite religious, and that all changed when I heard Metallica."

Playing in hardcore punk bands from his teens into his twenties, Bailey moved to Glasgow at the relatively early age of 17, in what he describes as a "survivalist endeavour".

"I was living in a small town with all this energy and no focus," he jokes, "which I'm sure would have brought me to an untimely end. That's nothing against where I'm from, it's just that the equation didn't work. I had to go to a larger place, and after ten years in Glasgow I had to move somewhere larger again, which was London. Now I almost fit in too well in London, because it's full of people who don't come from here and you almost have to be from elsewhere to introduce a new sound to the city. It's like Berlin; the people who keep the dream of it as an artists' haven alive aren't German, they're from Canada or France or America."

It was in Glasgow that Bailey moved on from performing in bands to producing his own electronic music, while also DJing under the name Kid Twist at a weekly 13th Note residency, at Kaput (a monthly club at the Admiral bar run with members of Dananananaykroyd), and at other venues.

"It took a long time for me to make music on my own," he recalls. "I was scared of songwriting. The whole process was mystifying, because I didn't just want to write music, I wanted to write it well. I wanted to live up to, you know, David Bowie. But do you go from zero to a hundred right away? No, you relax, you be patient and you work and work. You can't really analyse music too much and expect to write something original, so the starting point is the summation of everything you've listened to and everything you love, and beyond that you have to go with a feeling. So I just did a lot of diving in and a little bit of drowning at the same time."

The nervous, tentative approach of his younger self is hard to imagine when you see Bailey as Drums of Death, flaunting the confidence of a rapper and the channelled aggression of a heavy metal vocalist.

"Drums of Death is Colin Bailey," he says, "but it's me letting something else out. This music is different from anything I've ever written before, and I intentionally take myself out of the comfort zone and put myself somewhere weirder and maybe more confrontational. It's like putting on a new sweater and seeing how far you can stretch into it."

It's also, I'd imagine, the kind of project that could be played out and then put away, with Bailey returning under an entirely different guise and style, and very few noting the change. "Well, maybe," he ponders, "but I'm not thinking about the future that much. To be honest, I'm having far too much fun with Drums of Death right now, because he makes me feel like the 17 or 18-year-old me, except now I have my s*** together, big time."

&#149 Drums of Death plays the Wickerman Festival, East Kirkcarswell near Dundrennan, on 25 July, and How's Your Party? at the Sub Club, Glasgow, on 31 October.

What other people are saying …

"If this is the future of music, it's loud and frightening, switching between grime, booty bass and a sophisticated approximation of hardcore techno with a ferocious BPM which doesn't relent."

– The List

"One of the most innovative, unusual and downright scary performers to erupt onto the dance world in some time."

– Clash

"A voodoo-faced electronic-occultist."

– Time Out