Few drummers can claim to have played at events as culturally diverse as the Edinburgh Military Tattoo and the Woodstock festival, but both fell effortlessly within the remit of Bruce Rowland. Along the way he taught the young Phil Collins, played on the original recording of Jesus Christ Superstar and drummed with folk-rock innovators Fairport Convention.
His appearance with a military band came before he found fame as a rock drummer, backing Joe Cocker during his explosive performance at Woodstock in 1969. He provided the backbeat behind the singer’s interpretation of the Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends, one of the highlights of the Woodstock movie. His versatility was wittily celebrated in a spoof job description that Fairport Convention placed in the music press shortly after Rowland had joined in 1975. The ad required a “sarcastic percussionist” who “should be able at all times to ply cross-rhythms, poly-rhythms, quadruple flam-paradiddles, triple beat dim-flarapiddles and all that flashy stuff”.
Bruce Rowland was born in 1941 in Middlesex — a time of nightly German bombing raids. He joked that they must have contributed to his interest in all forms of percussion. By his early twenties he had such technical command of paradiddles that he was giving lessons while playing in a number of unsuccessful bands. According to his future Fairport Convention band mate Dave Pegg, one of his pupils was the teenage Collins.
Rowland and the Grease Band backed Cocker on his 1969 American tour, which culminated in Woodstock. When Cocker dispensed with their services, they served as the studio band on the recording of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat and on its even more successful follow-up Jesus Christ Superstar. He regretted accepting a flat fee rather than a royalty.
His association with Fairport Convention began in 1972. The third drummer in the course of a year, he stayed fleetingly but returned in 1975 and recorded Rising For The Moon, one of the band’s finest albums. The group’s showpiece, Dirty Linen, was sometimes introduced from the stage by Fairport’s fiddle player Dave Swarbrick with the words: “This is an instrumental and it’s dedicated to our drummer’s underwear.”
Rowland married Swarbrick’s ex-wife, Brigitte, and left the music industry for Denmark. After their divorce he lived quietly with his partner Barbara in Devon, where for a time he ran a paint business.
Bruce Rowland, drummer, was born on May 22, 1941. He died of cancer on June 29, 2015, aged 74
