Just heard Addicted to Love on the radio, and thought about what a great drum track that is. Turns out Tony Thompson is the drummer, right? Long line of excellent recordings from this dude! Note, Mr. Thompson is evidently not the drummer in the video for the song....
www.drumforum.org
"
MD: Let's talk about that big drum sound you created in the 80's.
Tony: All these years, people wanted to sample me. Everyone always assumed that there was some kind of special knobs turned when we did that first Power Station record. All it basically was, was a brand-new Yamaha kit (which I still play) in a very live, brick, recording studio in London called Mason Rouge. I hit the drums very hard. That's it! [laughs] We did "Some Like It Hot," and everyone had all these stories, saying all kinds of things, about tricks that were going on. Samples weren't even around back then. So, bottom line, the sound came from a good kit, hit hard, in a nice live room.
MD: Was this the same recording process for Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love"?
Tony: No. Out of all the recordings I've ever done, that was the first time anyone ever spent time to get a drum sound like that. We did "Addicted To Love" in a recording studio in the Bahamas called Compass Point. At the time Robert lived across from the studio. So Bernard Edwards, one of my favorite guitarists, Eddie Martinez, keyboardist Jeff Bova, Andy Taylor, who also played guitar on that track and me went down to do Robert's record and I remember my drums were set up in the room, and there was a door that led to a hallway. The engineer, Jason Casaro, took a tube the size of my bass drum and built this tunnel from my bass drum all the way out into the hall and up the stairs. It was this weird thing he hooked up. And it worked. The groove in the house was so thick, and what am I playing? A simple, Boom-Bop-Tish-Bop-Boom-Bop. It was unbelievable - I locked into that with everyone else swinging, and it brought the walls down. That song was a masterpiece"
