Brown/Who do we think they are, 3.Speed King: Setting the Paice

As Simon Poole importantly notes in Chapter 3, it is Ian Paice’s ‘energising’– not to say ferocious – 242 beats per minute, constant single stroke, double kick sixteenth-note drum intro to Deep Purple’s ‘Fireball’ (1971), that arguably defines the double-kick style that later metal drummers would replicate and advance, into the world of the blast beat in thrash, death metal and grindcore. Yet, happy with the single-bass drum kit he had bought as a teenager, for Paice it was the intros, fills and trills that highlighted his virtuosity, but never at the expense of the group sound, underlining the maxim that it is not ‘where you put the note, it’s where you don’t put the note.’ Poole argues that it is this disciplined ‘non-attention seeking’ approach by Paice to his work, and drumming for Deep Purple in particular, that goes some way to explaining why his position in the canon of heavy metal drumming is often marginalised, despite the fact that Paice, along with Bill Ward of Black Sabbath and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, are equally credited with founding the rhythmic rules of the genre.