I first connected with John Stevens’s blue Launcher bass drum back in 1993. That was the year that Trevor Manwaring’s Chronoscope label reissued, for the first time on CD, Karyobin, the 1968 album by The Spontaneous Music Ensemble. I’d discovered the music of John Stevens and SME a few years earlier, in December 1990 at a concert at the Red Rose Theatre in Finsbury Park, North London. But this was the first recording by the group to be released on CD and its impact on a new generation of listeners not familiar with the original vinyl issue should not be underestimated.

On the back cover of Karyobin there is a famous photograph taken by Jak Kilby. John, Dave Holland, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler and Derek Bailey stare down the camera lens, all looking quite formidable. Also in the photograph is John’s drum kit, and very prominent in the shot is the blue Launcher bass drum.

Manufactured by Beverley in the early 1960s, the Launcher kit was a budget range, beginners instrument, comprising just a 10" snare and an 18" bass drum with pedal and a mounted crash cymbal. John used the Launcher bass drum with SME between 1967 and 1975, after which it appears he dispensed using a bass drum in that group entirely. Looking at an online library of Jak Kilby’s photographs from that period reveals that little bass drum provided the boom, boom to an incredible list of performers. Among many other prominent musicians, Peter Brötzmann, Don Cherry, Marion Brown, Trevor Watts, Julie Tippetts, Johnny Dyani, Maggie Nicols, Barre Phillips, Irène Schweizer, Peter Kowald, Mongezi Feza, John Tchicai, and Yoko Ono and John Lennon all benefited from John’s Launcher output. Rashied Ali also played it when he guested with SME for a recording session in March 1968.

Fast forward a few decades and that significant drum now resides in a corner of my bedroom. I wake up every morning and look at it. It feels like Christmas every day. At the behest of Ritchie Stevens, John’s son, I liberated it from storage around a year and a half ago. John died in September 1994, and soon after, some of his belongings were moved to a box container situated on Osea Island on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex. And that’s where the Launcher languished for 30 years.

Osea is privately owned by pop impresario Nigel Frieda, who launched The Sugababes and established Miloco Studios and accommodation on the island in the 1990s. (He’s also produced The Rolling Stones.) Rihanna recorded there in 2019 and Amy Winehouse attended a course of rehab on Osea in 2008. It’s also used for celebrity weddings and birthday parties.

Ritchie and Nigel have known each other for many years and that’s how John’s stuff ended up on the island. Over those 30 years, a dense tangle of ivy and vines had grown over the box container, and one of the groundsman on the island had to be tasked with cutting it all back to allow access. Osea can only be reached by a two mile, single track causeway, which was built by the Romans and is usable just twice a day, at low tide. On the day of collection, I had to time my visit to coincide with the very early morning low tide, and be out again before the sea began to rise.

I promised Ritchie that the drum wouldn’t just become a museum piece, and that I’d use it on my own gigs. I dusted it down but have done little else to it. I haven’t even straightened the drum head, so the word Launcher is still off centre, in exactly the same position as in the Karyobin photograph from 1968 (incidentally, the same year I was born).

It’s been particularly lovely reuniting the drum with Maggie Nicols. John used it with Maggie on her first ever recording session, in January 1969, and in subsequent SME concerts together. I’ll be using the drum, together with Maggie and others, at the upcoming John Stevens: Another Little Life celebration at London’s Cafe OTO on 11 September.

The Wire has published numerous articles on John Stevens and Spontaneous Music Ensemble. Subscribers can search for and browse them all in our online library.