Maxie Cheer and The Millions of Hands
Before the pandemic, I was going to a lot of gigs on my own. At those gigs I met many people who have since become an integral part of my life, most of whom were the ones I came to see on stage. But I didn’t always have the courage to say hello the first time. It seems funny now to think I was apprehensive about approaching the guy dad-dancing on his own in the middle of the dancefloor, a situation I’d witness not for the last time.
Image Courtesy of Maxie Cheer.
I’d just seen them drumming a set with engineer and producer Max Blue Churchill under his musical project, The Motion. I’d see this band many times in 2019, but I’d also see this drummer playing with a multitude of other artists that year.
Because Maxie Cheer is a full-time session drummer, living and working in London. As well as The Motion, I’d later see him playing behind the kit for Attawalpa, Dead Writers and Horny Robots, amongst others. After missing the boat to see DIDI, the musical project by producer and songwriter Charlie Deakin Davies, I’d finally see that band reformed for Trans Day Of Visibility in early 2022. They appeared as part of an event for the Trans Creative Collective, on a bill featuring Mary In The Junkyard and Wahl, with Maxie drumming in all three of the bands.
Wahl are and were a duo whose history we first documented in 2020, and later upon the release of their last single ‘Split’ the following year with our first live Instagram interview. Together with songwriter, vocalist and instrumentalist Rachel Still, they released an album in two halves entitled ‘Exit’ between 2019 and 2020. Rachel and Maxie played their last show as Wahl in July, supporting Junodef at London’s Paper Dress Vintage. That same week, the duo announced the band would be renamed to Just Kids to reflect the music they’re currently writing and recording behind the scenes.
Maxie’s work has taken them far beyond live drumming too. As well as drum tuition, he offers mentorship, a deeper dive for aspiring career drummers with Cheer’s warm and friendly character well positioned to deliver both. Some of this work is undertaken in their own studio, a space that has expanded to encompass his recording requirements since the beginning of the pandemic.
Over the years, Maxie Cheer’s session work has put him in studios with the likes of Tony Visconti, whose production on records by T-Rex and David Bowie are culturally significant. During lockdown, Maxie embarked on their first soundtrack recordings for the BBC’s critically acclaimed drama ‘Guilt’. Earlier this year they played with Poppy Ajudha at Maida Vale Studios in a session for BBC 6 Music. Lately, Maxie performs as part of drag queen Bimini’s band, whose slot at this year’s Brighton Pride saw them opening for Christina Aguilera.
Bimini at Download Festival. From left to right: Kit, Bimini, Tyler Damara Kelly and Maxie Cheer. Image Courtesy of Maxie Cheer.
This abbreviated résumé really is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the stories and experiences Maxie has to share. Moths and Giraffes recently sat down with Maxie Cheer over Zoom to talk about their wider career in their first solo interview. We asked about his drumming origins, their session work for ‘Guilt’, the latest on Just Kids and his upcoming tour with Bimini supporting MUNA, plus much more!
Teri Woods: So you’ve got your own studio space, tell us about that, what goes on in there?
Maxie Cheer: So it’s a small room that I initially just wanted to build up to practice in. I just soundproofed it and things like that for practice, and then, I got fascinated by the recording process, because I’ve done loads of recording work, but it’s always been in other people’s studios. I sort of avoided learning about the engineering side of things because it felt quite intimidating, and a lot to learn.
But when we went into lockdown one, I had just taken on my studio, and my friend Charlie came by with loads of microphones and a MacBook and gave it to me, and was like, ‘I don’t know how long this whole lockdown thing’s gonna last, here’s some stuff I’m not really using.’ They’re a producer so they just had stuff, and they were like, ‘Just take it and see’. (laughs) Yeah, so gradually over lockdown I set it up to also be a recording space, and then towards the end of 2020, I started doing commercial recordings from my own space, and then I realised – it’s the dream! (laughs) But it happened kind of almost accidentally. You know, I didn’t set out to build a recording space, it just came about that way. So now I’d probably say the majority of my recording work is from my own studio.
I also teach in there, I teach my students, I do my mentoring, and practice my own stuff as well, so, yeah, it is the dream! It does feel a bit like my man cave. (laughs) You know? I escape there, sometimes not knowing what I’m gonna do, but I just know I need to go to that space. Everything I need is there to be creative, so.
Maxie and their UDO. Image Courtesy of Maxie Cheer.
TW: I think you’ve picked up a new drum kit just recently, would you be able to tell me about the first drum kit you ever had? What you started on?
MC: (laughs) Yes, I can tell you about that. You’re a drummer as well, so you’ll understand this. Someone once said that everyone starts off on a ‘UDO’, which is like an ‘Unidentified Drumming Object’. Everyone has a kit that is not a big brand kit that someone buys them in like good faith (laughs) and it sounds so bad, and when you’re a beginner as well, you sound bad as a player.
That’s what I think is the real testing ground, to see if you’re gonna stick to drums. Because you sound awful, on a kit that sounds awful, for a long time, and my one was, it was some really small brand that was someone’s initials. I won’t say what in case- (laughs) I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but it was, yeah, it was probably like a real budget beginner’s kit, but I was incredibly excited about it. My parents bought it for me for my, I wanna say like my thirteenth or fourteenth birthday? And I had been, yeah, telling everyone I was a drummer for years. And so it was a real act of belief in me when they bought it. But they put it in a shed, in the garden, and I went down there and made bad noise for many years. (laughs)
TW: Was there an epiphany, a moment where you realised you wanted to play the drums?
MC: It was the hands clapping in Queen at Wembley, that was it for me. You know in like, erm, ‘Radio Ga Ga’.
TW: Oh, Live Aid?
MC: Yeah, when you had the (simulates crowd participation) the hands, the millions and millions, or it seemed like millions of hands. So my Dad is a big classic rock music fan. And some days in my house, he would do all the ironing. And he had all these VHS tapes of big concerts, and he, oh he loved Live Aid. He loved all big stadium stuff. He had the Pink Floyd one.
Anyway, he would rinse them, he would put them on every week and watch them through and he never seemed to lose the joy of it. It was like he was watching it for the first time every time, you know it took him hours to do the ironing because he’d keep stopping and be like, ‘Oh wow, this bit with Bowie and Annie Lennox, wow!’ (laughs) He was into it so much and I think that was infectious, like that excitement about what was going on. So I loved music anyway and I loved watching these videos with him.
But, yeah every time I saw those hands, I got that shiver down my spine moment. I can’t remember a specific moment where I was like, ‘I want to be a drummer’, but the moment I realised I wanted to do music, it was always from the perspective of drums. It was never a question, like, there was no- I didn’t go through a guitar phase, you know? It was straight in, I just wanted to play the drums, so yeah that’s probably the moment.
TW: Was Roger Taylor your early inspiration or was it another drummer?
MC: Yeah no Roger Taylor was, I think, amongst the first real people where their drumming moved me in some way, you know, where I felt this physical reaction to what I was seeing. My favourite drummer of all time is Max Weinberg for Bruce Springsteen, because again my Dad is a massive Bruce Springsteen fan. And so by osmosis, so am I. And the drumming in Springsteen’s music is just the most energetic, powerful but simple drumming.
As you can imagine, when you start learning to play, you haven’t got all the technique, you haven’t got your chops down. So to play along to something and feel like you’re really able to do it, it has to be quite simple, but I just loved big, loud energetic music. Finding drummers like that, that I could play along to almost straight away with the basic stuff, definitely motivated me that it was all possible, you know? They were important in the beginning.
TW: At what point did you make the transition into wanting to be a professional drummer? You moved down to London, what made you want to be professional and not just have it as a hobby?
MC: That was a very specific moment in time that I can remember. I can’t remember the date (laughs) because I don’t have that kind of memory but I do remember the exact moment where I decided that I was gonna give it a go. Still to this day I wonder if it is a career that I can have. There’s a lot of risk involved and you can never see what’s round the corner, and that includes amazing things, and it also includes pandemics where suddenly your skillset is rendered a bit useless (laughs). To have a career in music, I still get imposter syndrome about that sometimes or I can’t quite believe it’s happening. You know it still feels like something that will happen but I make all my living from music now. Yeah, I feel very lucky to be doing that, but it often catches me off guard where I realise that’s what’s happening.
The specific moment where I chose to at least give it a go was when I played in a band at school, and we won a battle of the bands competition. And the prize was to go to the local music college in Kendal and record some songs. And so we went in, and I’d never been in recording studio, I’d never really seen that side of it other than on like the rockumentaries that my Dad would watch endlessly. So it felt huge to me, it felt like this really big experience and I remember we played in the studio and it was quite hard work because I’d never played with a click track but they needed me to play on click and I remember really wrestling with that and sweating and we did loads of takes and then we finished. I think we did three songs or something like that.
We finished, and everyone else cleared out of the booth because we were all live tracking in a little live room together. The rest of the band cleared out of the booth and it was just me in there and I just leaned back against- like I can still feel it, like I leant back against the soundproofing that was on the wall behind me and I still had the headphones in and I could hear them start to play back what we’d just recorded in the other room and it was coming through the headphones. And I just realised, I honestly had the thought, I was like, ‘If I did this every single day of my life, I would be happy.’ Like this is something I could do every single day, and I think I was about sixteen or seventeen at that time, so I was at that age where everyone’s pressuring you to pick something you can do for the rest of your life every day. And the things that you really enjoy, like hanging out with your friends, or maybe playing a bit of football or music, were not considered things that you should be picking. Do you know what I mean? Like to do for the rest of your life, but in that moment I was just like, ‘No, there is really nothing else that I think I could do every single day, but this.’
So yeah, I decided to defer all my university offers because I was gonna go study English Lit, because that’s what I was good at, I wasn’t good at music, I just loved it. I deferred all of those offers and moved to London on my nineteenth birthday with absolutely no plan, other than, ‘I want to be Roger Taylor.’ (laughs) I’m going to try, and that is very much still exactly where I’m at, but just, further up the road in terms of what I do for work, but it’s still the same excitement, it’s still the same feeling.
Like I was in a rehearsal room this week, when I had that exact same moment where everyone else cleared out of the room at the end of practicing, everyone’s exhausted and sweating. I have worked really hard, and I leant back against the wall, it’s like an anchor through time, or a handshake through time, as my friend would say, where I always end up in that space, every couple of weeks, of being like, ‘Yep, still wanna do this every single day, this is still the funnest thing.’ (laughs)
TW: So a big part of what you’re doing now is session work. What’s been the most unique session drumming gig you’ve had, do you think?
MC: (laughs) I’ve had many a unique session gig. Oh, it’s hard to pick. I’ll tell you one good one and one bad one. (laughs) The thing with session gigs is, you do not know what you’re gonna get. You’re sent work opportunities, they always look great, they always look like they’re gonna be a blast, or they do to me anyway because I just love it. But they can go in all kinds of directions. I think that’s part of the excitement of it.
But yeah, one that was incredible and life changing was, I played for a band and I was a member of that band and I wasn’t doing it in a session capacity for a few years. And then, I left that band. We parted ways. And a few months later, they had the opportunity to go record with Tony Visconti, who’s like a very, erm, yeah, needs no introduction (laughs) in some ways. But they had that opportunity, and their drummer couldn’t make it so they hired me in a session capacity, and, working with Tony, we did a week at Visconti Studios, which is in Kingston.
That was a real life-enriching experience from a musician perspective because we were recording on tape, and I had never done that before. Tony was very generous in explaining his process as he went along, so I learnt a lot about analogue recording in that space. But it was also incredible to just sit there, having a takeaway at the end of a long day of recording and hear him casually talking about like when him and John Lennon got high in New York and stuff.
When you’re in those spaces sometimes, it just feels like, privilege doesn’t even feel like a strong enough word to be there, you know? And hearing that, that was life changing. And that was probably one of the most memorable sessions of all time for me.
But then, (laughs) a bad one. It’s not bad, it’s just funny, and it’s one of those where you look back on your life. It was actually, it was my first ever paid session gig, in London. I must’ve been nineteen and I got hired by this band, erm, who were an Italian goth rock band and (laughs) that really wasn’t my music. I was so new in my session world that I didn’t understand yet that I had the power to set boundaries and say, ‘I’m happy to do these rehearsals, I’m happy to do this gig, but I’m not gonna wear a ripped up, goth t-shirt thing, I’m not gonna dye my hair pink, I’m not gonna-’ I didn’t have the confidence at that point to do that. I just thought if I said anything that rocked the boat, I’d be taken off the job.
So, I went along with it. I just remember doing this photoshoot in a graveyard and feeling awful about that (laughs) and knowing I was going to regret it for the rest of my life, but just thinking that was something I had to do to be Roger Taylor eventually so! I remember that conflict in my own body when I first started out in sessions, and it happened a lot, but that one was particularly awful.
One more notable thing about that session was they wanted me to be in control of all the playback? So I was looking after a rig, a playback rig on stage at the gigs. But they didn’t have like an iPad or even a MacBook or anything to run the programmes off. They were running it off a laptop that was connected to a huge, like, widescreen TV? And they didn’t even have a stand for that, so I was on the drums and on the floor next to me, taking up half the stage is a widescreen TV and I have a little mouse that’s connected to an extension, that’s connected to an extension that’s connected to the TV. And I’m wiggling the mouse on the floor tom, selecting the next tracks. Can you imagine doing that?
We had an opening slot at Borderline, near Soho, and, yeah, the entire venue emptied between the beginning of our set and the end of it, and even the sound engineer was gone, to have a cigarette. (sighs) And that was my first baptism of fire into session life, and now obviously I have a completely different way of working and I take on projects that I know I’m the right drummer for and that I will enjoy and I set boundaries on what I’m willing to do as a hired musician, and what I’m not. But, yeah, it makes me smile to look back and see (laughs) where it all began, you know? (laughs)
TW: So I know one of the things you did enjoy doing was the soundtrack to the BBC’s programme ‘Guilt’. How much creative freedom were you afforded in your performances when recording those pieces?
MC: That was a really exciting project. One of my favourites, I think that I’ve done. I hadn’t done any soundtrack work before then, so I didn’t really know what to expect? So I was very grateful for the trust of Arthur Sharpe, who was the musical director, and he was the person who offered me the work and was sort of my go-to line manager.
The way it worked was he wrote everything, he wrote out every instrumental part, and then he sent me a score of all the parts. He knew some of them were physically impossible to play on a drum kit. It’s quite a chaotic soundscape they used for that programme. Which is really exciting, but was a bit of a challenge to convert over to me actually playing it, because it was written in MIDI and on a score. He just explained that we were aiming for that stylistically and there were certain things that he had written that he needed me to play very exact, but there was some creative freedom in how I interpret the score and make it playable on a drum kit with only four limbs, you know?
And how to create some of the sounds as well, so probably, that was my first exploration into sound design and soundscaping, because I had not done that before. So as well as learning the parts and playing them on the drums, which is something I’m very confident in doing, I do that all the time, I also had to think about, ‘This sound is like the reversed sound of a xylophone.’ How am I going to create that, with the instruments I have, with the things I have? ‘Cause he wanted a fully sort of acoustic performance. So, yeah, I just threw myself into it and got really kind of nerdy (laughs) about it.
I took a long time, or as long as I could over each song and trying to get the sounds right and built a bit of a toolkit of sounds. I recorded a lot of one-shots at the end of each take and I sent them to him as well so that he could drop things in on top and layer the sounds back up. In the end I was like, more than happy with how it turned out. It was a labour of love, that I was working with someone that really was trusting me to do something new and exciting. And it felt like a collaborative experience but something really different to what I’d done before, I wasn’t playing with a band, there was no other instrumentalists in the room. It was just me and pots and pans and bin lids (laughs) you know?
TW: Yeah! Is that available to listen to anywhere?
MC: There was talk at one time of putting together a soundtrack release, but I don’t think that has come to fruition yet. So the only place to hear it is on the episodes that are still- I believe both Season 1 and Season 2 are on BBC iPlayer, I think.
TW: Well something else you did earlier this year was you volunteered as part of the TCC’s first social. What was your role in that event?
MC: So I’ve actually been involved in a couple of TCC events, and sometimes it’s in the capacity of volunteering and that often means just helping out with what needs doing on the day. It can be anything from welcoming people in, sorting out name tags, or just helping pack away afterwards, down to facilitating a little bit, where needed.
But I also have the privilege of attending a lot of the events, just as an attendee. Because I’m not part of the core team of the TCC, I’m on the peripheral volunteer team. But yeah for anyone who doesn’t know what it is, the TCC is the Trans Creative Collective. My friends founded it and the goal was to bring as many trans people and allies of trans people together as possible who work within the creative industries, and create spaces where there could be learning and where there could be collaborating and where there could be performance and work being shown. And also where there could just be solidarity and conversations around the issues that trans people are facing.
They created a directory of all the trans talent that came forward when they first started and they now take that directory to lots of big companies and record labels and management companies and it’s available as a resource for anyone who wants to hire more diversely. So, yeah, it’s like creating safe spaces for trans people, and creating collaboration and promoting that is something I’m really, really, really passionate about. I wish I had even more time (laughs) in the week so that I could be even more involved, but at this point, just being able to volunteer at the things that I can get to on a regular basis is super wholesome and I’m just incredibly proud because it’s my friends that started it.
You know when you look back over history when you go to museums and things and you hear about these groups of people, these founders, these really brave people that do something new, and to know that’s my friends, that’s my close circle of friends, like, proud doesn’t feel like a big enough word.
I hope to do lots more work with them in the future. I feel that every time a trans person in the music industry specifically, but in creative industries as well, every time they achieve something, it’s a win for the entire community. It’s brought a lot more purpose I think to my own life of recognising that my own achievements now have a ripple outwards effect on my community and they create more work and more visibility for my community, so, yeah. It’s something I’m very proud about.
From left to right: Kit, Bimini, Maxie Cheer and Tyler Damara Kelly. Image Courtesy of Maxie Cheer.
TW: You’ve played some pretty big pride events with Bimini recently! What’s been the most thrilling to play out of all of these celebrations?
MC: For me, it’s been Brighton, when we played Brighton Pride. I have attended Brighton Pride quite a few times before in the past, and I couldn’t even put my finger on it but they really just got it right with the balance of events, the safety aspect, the involvement of corporations. There’s some involvement to create financial resources, but it doesn’t feel like a corporate event. It doesn’t feel like it’s for companies, it feels like it’s for queer people.
So I’ve always enjoyed Brighton Pride a lot and when I found out we were playing it, I only knew, that’s gonna be a big sort-of full-circle moment for me, but when we got there, we played on the main stage, and we were a couple of artists before Christina Aguilera on the Saturday. We were expecting possibly five to ten thousand people, which already would’ve been one of my biggest crowds that I’ve ever played to but apparently the count on the gate at the time we played was over twenty-five thousand, which is…huge.
So it’s my biggest crowd that I’ve ever played to, but to know that was a crowd of queer people and to know that I was playing for a queer artist as a queer drummer was just- There’s whole circle moments, and then there’s whole circle moments, you know? (laughs) That was something else, it felt like one of the happiest days of my life and I woke up the next day and realised that I again sort of didn’t have a roadmap now, because that was my Roger Taylor moment, you know? I did see all the hands in the air, I knew what it looked like from behind the drums. But it was with completely the right eyes at the right time in my life. It was divine timing, for sure. So now I get to reset my goals or my bar or what I want to achieve and that’s a privilege in itself to be in that position. That’s where I’m at, at the moment, just looking at what I now want to do.
TW: Expanding on something you said earlier, one of the things that you’re exploring with your career as well is mentoring, so, what does that entail, when you offer mentoring to someone?
MC: So, I think mentoring - there’ll be a different definition for it in each context. It’s quite specific to what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. Mentoring for me, means giving someone a skillset outside of the actual talent that they have to reach the potential of what the talent can do. So for me it’s about guiding someone who already plays drums into being a full-time musician, if that’s what they want. Or into being a session drummer if that’s what they want. Or into production, if that’s what they want. It’s relative to what their goals are, but, the difference between mentoring and teaching- because I do both- is that mentoring is much more looking at the whole picture.
So in mentoring sessions, I will sit with my mentees and we will look at their finances, and how they’re managing income and outgoings. We’ll look at how they’re doing, if they’re gonna be self-employed we’ll look at how they do their tax returns. We’ll look at what they’re doing in terms of rest, we’ll look at what they’re doing in terms of exercise and nutrition. We’ll look at what they’re doing in terms of their mental health, where they’re at, at all times, checking in, making sure that they’re looking after themselves, so that they are in the best possible position to do the job that they want to do.
And then it’s about connecting them with people who are already doing that job or people that are gonna hire them and giving them support through that process as they get their first few session jobs coming in. So it is really, really different, depending on the person I mentor, because for some people, they have heaps and heaps of drive and energy, but they’re just not sure where to direct that. And for other people, they are particularly business savvy but they’re not great at taking rest days or practicing and getting their practice routine in order in the background or making time to socialise.
It’s really different for each person, but, I’m very passionate about my mentoring because I feel that, because I didn’t have any formal education in music, mentoring casually, well informally and formally is the thing that has gotten me to where I am. And so I’m really, really keen to be giving that back and to be helping the next wave of drummers to come into the industry.
I think some people, especially people who are neurodivergent, like myself, they respond better to one-to-one intensive sessions than sort of group and class learning. So I also think that it’s a really important tool that we have available in society, because not everybody learns in the same way. I’ve been mentored informally through my whole life by drum teachers, by colleagues, on projects by line managers. It’s taken the whole village (laughs) to raise me to where I now feel I am. And I invest in my mentoring. I’m currently being mentored by a drummer called Kaz Rodriguez, and I’m on a mentoring programme with him. So it’s, I mentor and I’m mentored, and I think that’s, for me, the most valuable way for me to grow myself as a musician but also to give back to my community.
Just Kids are Rachel Still and Maxie Cheer. Image Courtesy of Maxie Cheer.
TW: Your band Wahl has recently been renamed to Just Kids, what’s happening in the world of Just Kids right now? Can fans expect some new music soon?
MC: Yes! I’m so happy to be saying that because it’s been a long time since we put out new music. So me and Rachel, who make up the band, we wrote a lot of music last year, and we did the shortlisting down to our favourite tracks and then we took them forward and we’ve worked with Charlie, who I mentioned earlier, who’s an incredible producer.
Over the last few months we’ve been recording those and then mixing them and we’re now finally at the point of mastering and planning the release campaigns. I can’t give exact dates and things yet, to be honest even if there was exact dates I would’ve forgotten them, so (laughs). Rachel can tell you! But, I know there will definitely be new music out before the end of the year.
Then we can get back to playing live and sharing it and working on even more new things, because it’s an endless writing process for us, so. Yeah, I’m very excited about it. It’s probably been our most positive recording and writing process experience so far. We’ve really found our groove with it, and I think that’s why we’ve renamed the band and have relaunched in some ways because we felt we’ve settled onto something that now feels really stable and long-term and exciting. We wanted to give it its own time in the sun and without sort of erasing anything from when we were Wahl, because we’re still proud of all that time. You know, it’s one of those, you can’t get to here without going through that. That still is music that we’re proud of, but it’s a new chapter so we thought, ‘Fuck it! We’ll go with a new name and we’ll start with a new bit of a new aesthetic idea.’ That’s the wonder of being unsigned and being an independent band, you can change things as much as you want. And we’re gonna use that whilst we have that.
TW: Going back to playing live again, I’ve seen you play in a multitude of bands. From The Motion, to Horny Robots, with Attawalpa, or Dead Writers, to of course one half of Just Kids. Often, as is the way, these are last minute gigs. How do you rehearse a set-up so quickly and maintain that confidence on stage?
MC: I think a lot of the session work I’ve done in the last two to three years has been dep work. And when you’re being a dep drummer, you often are given very little time to learn quite a lot of material. And you then are expected to play it not just pretty perfectly, but you are expected to play it in the style of a different drummer, because your job is to make it a sort of flawless performance.
Essentially you’re aiming to just replicate what usually goes on for a band live. A lot of drummers I know find that stressful, and it’s one of their least favourite things, but I actually get a bit of a kick out of the challenge of it? I always learn something when I dep because I try to imitate another drummer, and by doing that, there’s little things in their technique or in their sound or even in their set-up of their equipment and how they arrange it that I go, ‘Oh, that’s a cool way of doing that, I didn’t think of that!’ And then I add it to my own way of doing things in my own creative projects.
So, I really enjoy it, it’s a real adrenaline rush as well to learn things quite quickly, but because I’ve just done so much of that in the last few years, it’s a bit like a muscle that’s being worked a lot, and it’s just really strong. I have a specific method that works for me where I divide songs up into structure and then parts and then feel, and sound.
Performing with Poppy Ajudha at BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. Image Courtesy of Maxie Cheer.
And so I write out the structure of the song, and then I go in again and I write out or learn by ear, the parts, and then I go in again and I listen at the end for how they are creating these sounds. Do I need a snare drum? Is it an electronic snare? Do I need to put a trigger on my snare drum? The icing on the cake is trying to get the sound right at the end. But it begins with me just sitting and listening and writing out how many bars of each thing and then memorising that and that really works for me.
Sometimes it means that I have to go twenty-four, forty-eight hours in a row without sleeping to be able to show up and do, uh, as close to a perfect job as I can? But I really do love it. So, it doesn’t feel like a chore, I get excited when the work comes in. And that means that when I’m involved in projects like Just Kids, where it’s a band project and I’m a full member as opposed to a session drummer, I can still use that and tap into that skillset if we’re suddenly offered a gig two days later. You know I can, sort of go into that quick dep learning mode.
I struggled a lot with it in the beginning, and now it’s become just a comfortable repeating of a process and I know at the beginning of the process that it will get me to my end goal. So there’s no stress now, just time stress. (laughs) Recently I had about twelve hours to learn Poppy Ajudha’s set to go play it live on the radio, and that was one of the most intense challenges I’ve had, especially because I really wanted to do it justice because I’m a big fan of Poppy’s music. It felt like a huge privilege. Then the high I get off that with the feeling of achievement is tenfold to the gigs where I get lots of prep time, if you see what I mean?
TW: Obviously talking about lots of prep time, our last question is about Bimini and the tour you’ve got coming up in November. What are you most looking forward to about getting back out on the road again after so long?
MC: Oh! (laughs) Every single aspect of it. Even the bits that are hard work or gross (laughs). Even sleeping in a tour bus on a teeny tiny bunk. I could not be more excited for it. Like, you really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. That has never been more true with me, like when we took a break from all the touring through the pandemic, I knew I loved it but since returning to it, there’s a whole new kind of love and appreciation for it. I feel like it’s brand new again. I feel like the gratitude to be in a position to be doing it is, oh, it’s huge, and I kind of run off that as fuel for touring because I just feel so grateful to be there and I have so many moments of, just joy, just feeling pure joy.
You know something that I really, really missed, when I wasn’t playing live at all through the lockdowns, was seeing the faces of people on the front row. Because from where I’m sat, you can’t really see much further back than the front row but every time the lights would come up, you’d see those faces. And there’s something about watching people looking up at the artists or the front-person of a band and watching them have a moment that they’ve waited weeks or months and they’ve been excited for and you’re watching them have it and they don’t know that they’re being watched to some degree. They’re just feeling the music and you see just some of the most pure forms of vulnerable human expression from where I’m sat.
And then it sort of becomes a big swirl of that between the band and the audience because they’re also watching me having the time of my life and seeing me in my most vulnerable, joyful, or moved state. There’s a trust that comes with that and it’s why it feels so special, when you leave a venue, when you’re in the crowd and you’re walking out the doors and you get back on the tube or the bus and you just feel like something has changed within you forever, you feel spiritually uplifted.
The band feel that too. When they go backstage and they pack down the drums and they sit in the tour bus, it’s the same feeling, whether you’re out the front or you’re on the stage, it’s the two things being together that make the moment. It’s not one or the other. And me being able to sit on the other side of the barriers and see those faces and those moments again, and have them myself, it’s everything, really, that I’ve ever wanted and it motivates me every time to go back into the harder bits of my job. You know, the hustling and the getting the work and the doing lots of recording and social media and meetings and being measured for outfits, you know, like all those things that I don’t enjoy quite to the same degree. It makes it worth it and fuels me back until I’m on tour again. So, yeah, I cannot wait for every single bit of it!
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For more information about the work of Maxie Cheer, visit their official website.
To purchase tickets for the upcoming UK tour of Bimini supporting MUNA, visit their official website.
Explore the music of Just Kids on their YouTube channel.
For more information about the work of the Trans Creative Collective, including upcoming events and their directory, visit their official website.
Follow the adventures of Maxie Cheer on Instagram @maxieplaysdrums.
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