Gene Krupa was my big hero, and I used to play on my mother's flour cans and sugar cans with the kitchen knives, listening to the big bands on my dad's records. Gene Krupa and Harry James.
I think at one time every drummer wanted to play like Krupa or wanted to win a Gene Krupa drum contest. This is the big inspiration for drummers and naturally it has to be the same way for me.
I think that drummers have come a long way, but they haven't forgotten players like Gene Krupa, or the other jazz players.
I have all the rhythm in my left hand, and I use the rhythms that Gene Krupa did on his drums.
I thought of Gene Krupa's drumming, his staccato drumming. I went and put 'Misirlou' to that rhythm.
If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.
My father was a part of that generation, and my mother, too - the late-'30s, early-'40s big-band generation. Frank Sinatra, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday - all that stuff was in my background.
A band that we supported called Blackfish in Manchester, played the most insane gig I've ever been to. Everything was set on fire, and then they came on and played one of the coolest gigs I've ever seen.
Do you believe this is simply trickle-down Machiavellianism in much the same way that Communism trickled down as an aberration of its original intent?
I'm never happy with anything I've done! If you sat me down and played everything I've ever recorded, I'd just sit there going, 'No... that could be better.'
When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.
I based my tuning on Gene Krupa, Buddy and Joe Morello. I knew how I wanted the drums to sound and we did the best we could with a beat up Ludwig kit. I spent a lot of time around drummers learning how to get sound. I knew the sound I was after and what would work for what we were playing.
Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.
Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.
I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump was born without the embarrassment gene or the moral reservation gene.
Every cell has certain knowledge. I think knowledge is contained within the genetics, even. I think scientists will find that. I don't think there's a gay gene, though. They may argue that down, but I don't think that, because that's a preference.