Happy new year, everyone, and welcome back—or maybe I should be welcoming myself back—to this newsletter!
I had to put things on ice midyear in 2023 so that I could finish my next book. It’s called Why We Think What We Think, and it’ll be out next month through Sophia Institute. The book is a survey of Western philosophy from a Catholic perspective; I couldn’t find a single introductory volume that did what I thought one should do, so I decided to write my own version. (It’s a fair piece away from the subject of drum machines, I suppose, but if you’re interested, you can find out more here.)
Something cool that happened during this hiatus period was meeting up with Nick Rhodes, who was kind enough to write the foreword to Dancing to the Drum Machine. I was able to give him a hardcover copy of the book before Duran Duran’s Pittsburgh show (which was swell) last September.
A pretty nice moment for a guy whose adolescence—and life, subsequently—was shaped in innumerable ways by DD.
Over the past year, I’ve done a series of pieces for Reverb about drum machine-related stuff. The latest of those was just published yesterday: a look back at the late, not-always-lamented Movement Percussion Computer—”The Most Influential Drum Machine That Nobody Knows.”
Some folks from the book appear in this piece, including Daniel Miller (who didn’t care for it at all), and Mike Howlett, John Foxx, and Martyn Ware of Heaven 17 (who were more equivocal).
I was also able to do a new interview with Tom Bailey of The Thompson Twins, who—along with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics—might be the single biggest booster of the Movement. It was a great conversation, in part because the TTs were also a big, big part of my teenage years (they were the first live act I ever saw, along with the tour openers, Re-Flex).
Sometime soon, I’ll be posting my full conversation with Tom here—I want to get back to doing that sort of thing. And I’ll be continuing to do new interviews with folks whom I wasn’t able to track down for the book. I have a couple of pretty cool ones lined up in the next month or two.
I also have some other drum machine-related material to share, some of it related to an upcoming trip I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.
And whenever there’s time, I’m still planning to work up a print version of the notes for the book. They had to be left out for space reasons, but I want them to be available.
The carrot will be a chapter that also had to be left out of the book: about how a drum machine broke up the Gang of Four, which includes what may be the last interview the late, great Andy Gill ever gave. Subscribers to this newsletter will get all the details first.
So, long story short: even though I have a new book coming out on a completely different subject, I’m not through with the subject of drum machines by a long shot!
If you know someone you think would be interested, please share this newsletter—it’s free and will continue to stay that way.