In 1968, the Shadows split when rhythm guitarist Bruce Welch decided that 10 years with the Shadows group was enough. Along with Hank and John, Bruce formed Marvin Welch and Farrar, a CS&N-influenced trio which lasted for two albums. Meanwhile, Brian Bennett concentrated on sessions, production and writing, all with considerable success.

The situation now with the Shadows is not too clear. In 1973, they recorded a reunion album 'Rockin' With Curly Leads', and since then have toured, taken part in the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest and released three more albums, including '20 Golden Greats' which went to Number One. Last month saw the release of 'Thank You Very Much', a live set of Cliff and the Shadows, recorded at their reunion season at the London Palladium last year. With the rest of the group involved in production, sessions and writing, it seems the Shadows exist only as far as recording goes, although they usually find time to tour once a year.

Brian Bennett, throughout his career, has usually been associated with Premier drums and it comes as no surprise to discover he still favours the brand.

"I've actually got about six different kits," he reveals, "but I do tend to use Premier quite extensively. The after-sales service you get with them is great - anything you need, you can phone up and get it straight away, whereas with a Gretsch or a Ludwig, you can wait six months for a screw. Premier are one of the few companies who actually spend time working on new plans and talking to drummers. The stands are rock-solid with big wing nuts which is great because, with some of the old ones, you'd bust your nails tightening up a wing nut and you'd be bleeding before you'd set the damn thing up. Mind you, I love my old wood Gretsch and I've got the old silver Ludwig kit I bought in New York 17 years ago. I'd never part with it.

On stage, Brian uses a fairly standard kit with 22" bass drum, although the number of drums and cymbals change from tour to tour.

"I used to use a bass drum, snare, two tom-toms and a couple of cymbals. The last tour I did, I had four tom-toms, six cymbals, the usual snare and bass drum, a piccolo pedal tympani and various odds and sods. One concert, I hired a gong - it cost £20 for the night and I only hit it twice. It looked good though."

In the studio, Brian has his own "recording kit": "I call it an ASP kit, which stands for 'all spare parts.' I've got a great snare drum for recording which is made up from Ludwig hoops, Slingerland lugs, a Gretsch shell and a Rogers snare fitting. The heads are the really old Everplay ones, full of dirt. They're great heads - I go and buy second-hand heads from Footes when old kits come in. It's a great kit - very dry. You could literally just put one mike over the top of it and get a good sound if you wanted to. On the snare, I've got the name of the mike I use written down and I've sketched in where it should lie but the kit is so in tune with itself, one mike can get a good sound. What I usually do is to mike up all the drums individually and then mix them with an overhead ambience mike. I couldn't tell you the names of the mikes but I only work in about six studios and engineers like Tony Clark, Peter Vince and Dick Plant all know the kit and know how to mike it up best."

With many drummers getting involved in drum synthesisers now and various companies bringing new models out, I wondered what Brian thought of this recent innovation.

"They're OK." he replied. "I had a problem with one because it was rattling but I like all the new sounds. The thing is with drum synths is that it's a bit like the sitar in the Sixties - people flog Ôem to death. The trick is, like a lot of things, to use it sparingly."

Brian is actually spending more and more time writing these days and, unfortunately, drumming is being pushed into the background. He has been writing a lot of library music for TV and films, plus material for other projects including solo work under the name of the Brian Bennett Band who released two albums on DJM last year, 'Rock Dreams' and 'Voyage'.

"The thing that interests me about library music is that a company will send you a brief and it might be for a film, a documentary or even a news caption and you get the whole spectrum of writing in there."

"So all the musical ideas that have been bubbling under in my subconscious can be used. I can now divide my musical activities into certain definite groups which is great, although it can be hard work."

"The bulk of my time is spent sitting down working on my writing. I get up as early as I can and plan a routine for the day. If a tour is coming up, the first thing I need to do is to get out the practice pads to keep the chops in shape - any drummer needs to do that. On a show, I've probably got to do a 15-minute drum solo on 'Little B' and you can't just sit there and play like a crud. With me writing is so much now, I need to practice to get in shape."

"The funny thing is that I find that I'm playing better now than when I was playing all the time for some reason. It's a mental as well as a physical thing. I'm happy to sit down and play without worrying too much about the reaction. Once I've practiced a bit at home and I feel that I'm in shape, that's it. I go on stage and it's a case of 'This is the way I play and if you like it, I'm very happy.' That's a lot better than sweating on a coach on the way to a gig with a practice pad, worrying about every little beat. By the time you get to the concert and actually play the thing, you're already knackered."

As well as drumming, producing and writing, Brian is also an accomplished arranger. When the Shadows used to tour regularly in the early Sixties, he took a postal course from the Berkeley School of Music in the USA to teach himself the complex art of arranging.

"The postal course helped me a lot and our producer Norrie Paramor was a great help as well. He'd come along with a score and let me read it and arrange and conduct some things. One of the first things I did in that direction was Cliff's 'Silvery Rain' with Spanish guitar, harp and a string orchestra. The song was about insecticide and crop spraying and I ended the piece with a piccolo representing the last cuckoo on earth. Needless to say, it was lost in the final mix and no-one ever heard it!"

"I wouldn't say it was an easy thing to learn arranging. I mean, I still need to do revision and brush up on things. For instance, I'd never written for a string quartet before last year so I had to do a lot of homework and revision for that project. I actually got my old violin out to work out positions and to make it sound good. There's a difference there between just writing down notes that sound good, because other things will sound better. also, the range of the instruments has to be taken into account. That's one of the first things you learn in arranging but I still have to get a book out from time to time when I've forgotten something. Trumpets, trombones and saxes are fairly easy to remember, but if you're working for a contrabass clarinet, you have to think 'Does it go down to D or D flat?' There's nothing worse than standing in front of an orchestra and someone saying 'Excuse me, this instrument doesn't go down that far' - you just want the earth to open up beneath you. Usually, the people I work with are friends, though, and they are helpful and sometimes suggest things that might work better. There are those that say 'You write it and I'll play it,' so you don't book guys like that. You book musicians who are interested in their craft - and I really believe we've got the best musicians in the world here."

Brian is a firm believer in letting musicians have a free hand in injecting something of their own into the part.

"You can go through all of your books on rudiments and things but you get with a band, and you really have to kick something in of your own. Reading's just a guide to what's happening - you don't just sit there and read the dots. There are a lot of guys who read anything but you put them in a band and they start to slow it down. Then you get the guys who can't read and you put them in a band and they really kick it along. a lot of the emphasis on reading is a form of snobbery in a way. Like one night, we were talking about Elvin Jones and someone said ÔHe's the greatest' - somebody else turned round and said 'Yeah, but can he read?' and we all cracked up."

Brian listens to everything, not just drummers, but when asked what modern he liked, he had no hesitation in citing Steve Gadd as one of his favourites around today.

"I really rate Steve but I listen to loads of different things. Like Billy Cobham - within his framework, he works perfectly. To hear him do his thing is absolutely fabulous on one hand and then to hear Mel Lewis sitting there and just laying back, hardly doing anything, is just beautiful. The whole underplay thing."

"That in itself is something a lot of people come unstuck on - underplaying. When I started I used to put it all in. Playing and writing is the same in that respect. It's easy to overwrite, and it's the same with drumming. I've been guilty of it for 20 years. When I've done live albums and listened back to them, I've thought how desperate I had played, putting everything in and trying too hard. I can understand why it's done though. It's just enthusiasm, total enthusiasm. Of course, showing off comes into it as well."

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, with the exception of a few drummers like Brian, Tony Meehan and Clem Cattini, the standard of most pop/rock drummers was pretty low compared to their jazz counterparts. Brian puts this down to the fact that a lot of drummers hadn't gone through jazz in those days.

"I used to go down to the record shops and get second-hand records and listen to them. The nearest thing to rock and roll in the early days was Fats Domino records and then, soon after, early Presley stuff. But if you listen to them now, you'll hear a kind of dotted jazz thing going on. All I wanted to be was a big band drummer. The only gigs at the time were dance bands - there were no rock bands. I did some gigs with the Don Rendell Quartet and I thought I was going places. The thing is that when rock came along, a lot of people wouldn't play it. There were a lot of narrow-sighted musicians around then. They didn't want to know and now they're probably not working - they're driving a cab somewhere listening to Billy Cobham."

Brian agreed that, out of most musicians, it seems to have taken drummers longer than most to develop their craft, and it's only in the past decade that they've come "into their own".

"I think a lot of it is to do with brain damage when you were a kid and you lived in a block of flats trying to practice and all the time people would shout 'Stop that bloody row' at you. Even on a practice pad, I used to bug the people on the floor below. Even now, it happens. When you go on stage and there's a soundcheck going on, maybe you want to check your snare drum. Because of the mere fact that it's a loud instrument, you hit it a couple of times and you get 'Hang on, man, we're trying to tune up.' Three hours later, when the guitars are in tune and you think you've got time to get your kit nicely in tune, they say 'The audience are coming in now can you stop making that damn noise.' It's a never-ending battle. And when we were talking about over-enthusiasm, that's the same thing. It builds up inside you, particularly with drummers, until it all comes out in that drum solo or that two-hour set."

"The same thing happens in sessions so when you do one, you want to get asked back and you don't want to upset anyone so you have to explain diplomatically that, if you're to get a good drum sound, you'll need 10 minutes or so to sort it out. Diplomacy, amazingly enough, has to come into it."