It’s amazing that the young Keith Moon got any education at all. At his Wembley school he was hyperactive, easily distracted, addicted to practical jokes – the sort of boy who, in the 1950s and 60s, got quickly spat out of the educational system. A friend later told Moon’s biographer: “You never felt: ‘One day he is going to be famous.’ You felt more likely that he was going to end up in prison.” Nowadays he’d be diagnosed with ADHD, drugged into discipline and eased into some of the gentler GCSEs. Fortunately for everyone else, he discovered drumming and joined the Who.
Playing the drums makes me think of Karl Kraus’s famous crack about psychoanalysis: it’s the mental illness for which it considers itself the therapy. Is drumming the symptom of lawless restlessness, showing off, a desire to make a very loud noise – or the cure for it? Recent research provides the answer: it’s the cure. A 2018 survey by Dr Ruth Lowry at the University of Essex suggested that drumming improved the motor skills and social health of kids with behavioural and emotional challenges. A new survey, led by the same researcher and organised by the Clem Burke Drumming Project (Burke is the terrific drummer for Blondie) goes further. The new study divided 36 teenagers with varieties of autism into two groups, one receiving drumming lessons for two months and one going without. The teenagers who played the drums showed a marked decrease in hyperactivity and inattention.
