AP: I was actually inspired to start playing by some people that my mother and father knew and they ran a little grocery store. My mum worked in the grocery store and my dad, because he was a shop fitter, he actually built some shop fittings for the store as well and they had a son...erm, Mr. And Mrs. Trout believe it or not and they had a son called Peter Trout. This must have been about 1963, I think, maybe 1962 and Peter started playing the drums. He was about four years older than me and he went to Max Abrams for lessons and he was an amazing player. I mean, I know everything probably always seems better with rose-tinted glasses, but he really was an amazing player: he could read fly shit and he started playing for... he did some gigs I think with Shane Fenton, or Alvin Stardust, that's how long ago it was, when he was called Shane Fenton, and Peter was the one who started me. I just saw the drums and saw him play and that was it, I wanted to play. I'd love to meet him again. He went to America and he was playing jazz and I'm determined to try and get in contact with him because I think from what I remember, he was such a player and going to Max Abrams, he was no slouch because Max was the top teacher at the time. So, he was the guy, he was the one. I also had some lessons with Francis Seriau at Drumtech in London.

AP: ...on the verge of packing it all in. I'd turned professional in 1978 when I was just over 26 years old, so it was quite late for me, but I wanted to turn professional. I'd played in various bands and I played in a Mecca band called Whisky Mack with Andy who is the bass player of The Hamsters now and he was playing guitar at the time. I did that, then Andy and I sort of broke away from that and formed our own original band, which everybody does, but it was really the wrong place at the wrong time because punk was just starting to come through and we couldn't get a handle on that - I still can't; it was totally alien to me. I went through various things; did sessions and played with little bands and eventually I went to work for a company in London where I did all the overhauling and tuning of all the percussion that they hired out - all sorts of percussion, glockenspiels, everything and I'd been playing on and off with various bands, but to be honest I got to the point where I was fed up with it because it's the usual thing with a lot of bands, where people don't turn up for rehearsals, or they don't know what they're doing or it's all a bit ... and I'd really got to the point where I thought, 'now I think it's about time I call it a day', because I've never played anything unless I've enjoyed it. I think that's rule number one without any shadow of a doubt. I'd virtually given up, so there you go and it was just a fluke meeting with Barry (guitar) and let's try and do something because he'd had a band called The Hamsters a few years previously and he'd come back from London, he'd been up there and it was like, 'Ok, we'll just do something for a laugh', so it started from that.

AP: Ha, long list! When I started, people like Sandy Nelson, Gene Krupa, the guy who played in the Glen Miller orchestra and I can't think what his name is, because my dad used to like listening to a lot of Glen Miller stuff; early Buddy Rich, although at the time I didn't know I was listening to early Buddy Rich because my dad had some albums by, I think it was Tommy Dorsey and he'd got a record of Buddy Rich and Frank Sinatra singing - he was the singer in the band. In the end, they didn't get on they ended up having a row and Buddy Rich threw something at him, but that was that.

When we got into the pop era which was when I really started wanting to be in a group, that was the main focus, it wasn't... well, I wanted to play the drums, but the important thing was I wanted to be in a group and one that springs to mind is Bobby Elliott from The Hollies who still is a fantastic player and in those days, one of the few who could really play. Obviously Ringo, you know, goes without saying; Bob Henrit, who, I believe if I'm not mistaken, was the original drummer of The Roulettes, Adam Faith's band and then also went on to Unit Four Plus Two and then after that, went on to Argent. He's a lovely guy, great player, and then moving on from there I suppose like everyone else; Gadd, Porcaro, who else? All those sort of guys. I've never been wild about really 'fidgety' players, I've always liked guys that laid a groove down: Vinnie Colaiuta, for me, is probably the most gifted all-round player I think. I've got to say that. It's difficult to be an all-round player, you know, people who can cover all the bases, but I think Vinnie Colaiuta is. But there are great guys, Jim Keltner, who else? Richie Heywood out of Little Feat, I mean, he's a great player and there's a guy who plays a great shuffle, he's John Mayall's drummer, a guy called Joe Yuele. I've met Joe a couple of times and he plays a shuffle like it should really be played, you can't get a fag paper between the dotted notes. Instead of it going 'dah-de-dah-de-dah', he plays, 'de-da-de-da-de-da' and he makes it bounce. He's a lovely guy as well, great player and there are lots of guys around nowadays who are great players: Larry Tolfree with Peter Green's Splinter Group, Elkie Brooks' drummer, Mike... I think it's Anderson, I'm not sure, but Mike's a great player. But there's loads: I mean, I like a lot of the old big band drummers; they were great. Buddy Rich obviously, and my teacher as well, Frank King, god bless him, who died a long time ago. Frank was a great all-round player. He could play the shit out of anything: he could play swing bands, jazz; he could play funk and he could play it really, really authentically as well. Frank was the one who did all the Burt Hayes things on Crackerjack. Frank did all that. He used to play for Burt Hayes and he played on all that and also things at Buckingham Palace, Windsor and all that, but Frank was a great player. He really was. Phil Collins went to him for a while, so did Bill Bruford. So Frank was a superb player, but yeah, I mean there are probably loads of others that I've seen and forgotten, but all those guys.

AP: I think in nearly every case, we've learnt the song and I think goes the same for the other guys as well, although obviously with the melody instruments with the bass and the guitar there's certain links to be played, as there are with the drums with certain things as well, but what I think we've tried to do is play it in the spirit of Hendrix but we haven't dogmatically copied it. I can't play like Mitch Mitchell, I'm not out of my face all the time either and they were you know, it's a common known fact. I think the frightening thing about them was, when they put in a good performance, it was stunning, but a lot of the time, the performances probably weren't as good. And it wasn't only that, they were working so hard... I've got a book at home, I think it was written by Mitch Mitchell that lists the gig schedule for the Jimi Hendrix Experience when he had his first single and it's frightening, it's absolutely frightening. They'd go into a studio and have an hour's recording, then they'd be in the van and they'd be off gigging somewhere.

It's the same with ZZ Top, we try and get the feel of it and obviously you play the songs as much as you can, but I certainly couldn't slavishly copy Mitch Mitchell anyway because Mitch had a style all of his own and in a way, I wouldn't want to do that. It's not a cop-out as such, but I just wouldn't want to do that. The band has sort of formed it's own identity with those songs and it's much the same with the ZZ thing and with that, it's the same sort of thing; we try and play it in the spirit of ZZ Top and basically if people waggle their arse to it and tap they're foot, then that's job done. So there you go.

AP: [after some laughter] The last thing that goes through my mind is what I'm playing... I don't know really. Sometimes you're thinking about things you've got to do tomorrow, band business occasionally, what the audience is like... the worst thing I think, and I've spoken to other musicians and they find the same thing and Andy does as well, occasionally you'll catch the eye of someone in the audience who is looking completely and utterly bored and if the wind is in the right direction, suddenly you are fixated with these people and then, you start thinking about what you are doing and the minute you start thinking about what you're doing, game over. It's like if you're driving a car, you drive a car automatically, but if you start thinking about driving a car you'll probably hit something and it's much the same. So when I'm playing, not a lot really, no.

Perhaps thinking about the next number that's coming up although I don't really know it because Slim (Barry) writes the set out and he'll just shout them out. There may be one or two where he'll say we'll probably do this tonight, but that's only so I can change mini disks to get the right track if we've got some keyboards or things on a disk, but no, not a lot really. In fact, it's the only time I can have a rest mentally; it's quite nice.

AP: Say we've got a three-day gig week, generally I suppose that would be Thursday, Friday, Saturday, so we'll start at Sunday.

Sunday, day off: I try not to do a lot on Sundays, but generally I just pull the money together from the previous night, get the banking sorted out, stuff like that. Monday, do the banking; if it's the end of the month, try and pull the VAT together, taking off any mail order, ordering any mail order stuff that we might need - t-shirts, cds and things and then hopefully Tuesday would be a free day so I get to spend a bit of time with my wife. Wednesday, if we're working Thursday, Wednesday is a fairly free day but then I'm probably just checking the van and seeing what's going on there and then it's Thursday morning, into the van and off we go. That's generally about the gist of it really.

This time of year (December) it gets more manic because luckily we've got a lot of mail order coming in, so that's good, but it means you've got to process that, people want the stuff for Christmas and generally we're working harder as well. That's about it really. Oh, and drinking quite a lot of red wine wherever possible.

AP: If I'm right I think it was Dougie, our roadie and driver who suggested it. The guys got transmitters on their guitars and that was the start of it. They would go walking in the audience at the last number and then Dougie said why don't you all change over and you know... So we thought about it, and Barry used to play the drums anyway: it's not rocket science by any stretch, it's three notes for me on the bass, but it seems to entertain people and we can't not do it now.

One night I think we didn't do it and a bloke came up to me afterwards and said 'I brought my mate 200 miles for you to do that and you didn't do it'. It's entertainment that's what it's about and it just gives me a chance to get out and try and intimidate the audience a bit - play a silly pratt. I think people enjoy it. That's how it came about, it was just a chance remark by Douglas and there we were, we had a crack at it and thought 'Yeah, this'll work', so there you go.

AP: No, absolutely not [laughs] and so all the bass players of this world can rest easy.

AP: He started doing the sound for the band... I'm trying to think how long ago it was: it's probably got to be four years ago, perhaps even longer than that and the reason that he started doing it was that, like most musicians you tend to think that sound engineers know what they're doing. Now, some of them do and some of them don't. Now unfortunately at the level that we work at, a lot more don't than do. Probably a lot of sound engineers are going to hate me for this, but it was a particular gig we were playing and the guy was getting the sound on the drums and Barry just happened to walk into the room and he couldn't believe it because basically every drum sounded the same; it didn't matter if it was a tom tom or what, they all sounded the same. So from that point he started to get involved in it and it takes us quite a time to soundcheck and obviously you get difficult rooms and difficult situations but we try and make it as easy as possible because it's the old adage - shit in, shit out, so I try and keep the source of the sound as good as it can possibly be; i.e. I pay attention to tuning and I check the drums in the room when I take them out just to see if there's any particular frequency that might be sticking out because rooms do have a habit of doing that. And just make sure that the heads are in good condition and about mic placement, I've got my own mikes and everything else. I'm just stunned that talking to sound engineers, a lot of drummers don't take an interest in that and hence the reason why they get gates put all over the kit which makes the kit sound totally unnatural and I won't have noise gates. I know occasionally you might have to put a little gate on something, but I'd say 99.9% of the gigs we do I don't have any gates on the kit at all because it's not needed and if you pay attention to the tuning, it hasn't even have to be new heads all the time, it's nothing to do with that, it's about paying attention to what the drum sounds like about two or three inches away from the drumhead because that's where the microphone's hearing it - not where you're hearing it from two feet away and that's the important thing. Most guys don't even think about that. That's the reason; it's just being methodical.

AP: My bank manager keeps my interest level [laughs]. I don't know. It's a job, you know, it is a job. It's difficult to explain it really, it's got pros and cons like every job has. There are some days, you're travelling in the summer and we always try to find somewhere to have a proper meal of a lunchtime; we don't eat junk food on the road and if you find a nice pub and have a nice lunch and I don't mean drinking and all that, I mean food, it's the greatest job in the world. It's lovely. But then, if you're sitting in a traffic jam on the M25 and it's pissing down with rain, it ain't a very good job, but then I suppose when we get to the... sometimes when we think 'urgh I really don't feel like playing tonight', the first thing you've got to remember is people are coming out paying they're hard earned money for you, which people do with us; we don't go out on guarantees a lot, it's nearly all what comes through the door. The second thing is when you get talking to some people and when you realise some of the horrible jobs they have to do from week to week and probably not get that well paid for it, that maintains your interest in it because you realise that, you know, you are fortunate really. It is bloody hard work, but then so is a guy who changes lorry tyres on the hard shoulder of the M25 and I know which job I'd rather do - mine.

AP: [laughs] Rubbish. [more laughter] I really don't know. I hit the drums a lot harder now than I used to and it's something I've never been comfortable with. I could not, never in my life could I play heavy metal or thrash - I couldn't do it. I've got the greatest respect to guys that can do it, but it's just like an awful lot of effort. Its just, people are going to hate me for saying this, but I just don't find it very musical. I can certainly appreciate the tremendous technical chops that some of these guys have got; I mean it's frightening. I suppose you'd describe my technique as somewhat old fashioned in many respects because I was taught...basically I was taught by Frank King and Frank was the one who taught me all the rudiments and things and I suppose in that time, which was around about 1967/8, that was the way I learned to play the drums. So I wouldn't have said that I'm a particularly 'modernistic' player, I don't think I am at all. I've always liked swing and stuff like that, and jazz and I enjoy sort of rock n' roll and stuff like that, so I don't know, it's an amalgam of all those things really.

I think, without being big-headed, I've got the ability to make a band groove and we've got the ability as a band to make the audience feel that and for them to go home happy and enjoy it. But I'm not a particularly technical player and there was a period in my playing life when I got very hung up about that because I thought you should, you know, and there were all these guys around the area where I was in, Southend, you'd go and see them and think, 'Fuck me, that was clever', but at the end of the day, does the guy in the street give a toss about that? Not really. The guy in street doesn't really give a toss about that. Put it this way, I'd rather send home 198 normal people happy and 2 musicians who don't think much of it. I've got to say, you'll always get beards: you'll always get beards in every audience and if they don't like what we do, then they don't like what we do. There's an awful lot of people who do and I'm privileged and delighted that that's the case. So I don't know how to describe my playing, I just think I'm a very good jazz bluesy sort of player for the band. That's all I can say.

The band is very much... it's very much the three of us. Andy the bass player left for while and we had a bass player in who was a world-class guy, but it wasn't the same. Even the punters said that. Why, I don't know. It's something about the three of us, we don't know what it is, but the way we play together makes it work. And I guess that's the same with all bands where it's reasonably successful. It's a chemistry, you don't know where it comes from but it's there.

AP: Absolutely and I think the reason for that is probably because Andy was primarily a guitarist, which was strange really because Noel Redding out of Hendrix's band was primarily a guitarist and went onto bass. Now, Hendrix was left-handed and Barry, even though he plays the guitar right-handed, is left-handed. But Barry used to play the drums and I think this is where this chemistry thing comes. Andy and I used to play together, but on some of the R & B shuffle things, I'll actually push some of the guitar pushes that Barry plays; not with the bass drum because the bass drum is this [clicks out constant quarter notes] you know, rule number one, four on the floor with things like that, but I'll actually be hitting little accents with the snare and the crashes and it's just something, I don't know, the groove seems to be between the three of us. Yes, it does and I think it's because of our backgrounds, simple as that.

AP: No, not really, it was just one of those things where we decided that it would be nice to get some backing vocals and it came from there really; so I do a bit of backing vocals and so does Andy. That's it. We just gradually added them and I enjoy that probably more than drumming in some respects... yeah, I quite enjoy that. It's quite a nice... I don't think there's anything that gives you the feeling if you something and you get a harmony part, it's a great feeling. It just came about to try and expand the sound of the band, put it that way.

AP: [After some laughter from Alan and Barry] What technique is that exactly? Very briefly, I had a problem with my right leg, which seems to have been like a repetitive strain injury and it just got to the point where it would not function properly. It didn't hurt, but it just lost a lot of power - it just didn't work and one night it was a case of I've either got to stop playing or try something different and I put the double pedal on and just played the bass drum left footed and got away with it. It's taken a while to get used to it and that's what I do now. The trouble is with the right foot thing, it's like any injury that you get or if there's something that is preventing you from playing properly, it's a job to know where the physical side gives way to the psychological side and it might be something to do with that, probably. I don't know...a sports injury specialist may even throw some light on that. I've tried working with the right foot and I do odd things with it, it just feels...it's difficult to explain it, it feels as if it just doesn't want to work and I resorted to left foot playing just out of sheer panic. Simple as that.

AP: No, but then I never could with my right [laughs]. I think I can probably play as much with it as I did with my right foot, but I've never really played triplet things. Once you've heard John Bonham do it it's like, 'Oh well, that's the definition of being great'. Or Ian Paice. I think I've got about the same facility with my left foot as I have my right, so the only problem is now it means I haven't got as much use on the hihat, which is a bit of a piss-off, but it gets me by.

AP: I think probably with all of us we have a sort of match consistency of probably 90%, 95% on occasional nights when for god knows what reason, it could be the sound, it could be the feel you get off the gig, some nights it could be better than that; there are occasional nights when all three of us will just think 'Yes!', but then generally most nights, one of us will think it went really well for them and the other two might think, 'Well it was ok, but...'. So consistency wise from week to week, doesn't really change a lot I think. We just try and play the things as consistently as we can. Don't really think about it apart from that.

AP: Yes I do. I get support from Paiste over in Germany, they've been great. They're superb - just order something and it's there within two days. They're ever such nice people and their cymbals are great as well. That's not to say that all the other makes of cymbal like Zildjian and Sabian aren't, but I just love Paiste, always have done, probably always will do.

I get support from Premier - got a great kit, well happy with it, no problem with that. The other guy I get a lot of support from is Craig from The Music Shipping Company. I get my sticks from him which are Pro Orca, they're French, great drumsticks and also Aquarian heads as well, although I do use Evans heads on the snare because Aquarian seem to have this big gap in their catalogue where they don't make a snare head that I like. They make plenty that make it sound like a thing that goes bang with a bit of rattle, but I like something that's got a little bit more finesse, a bit more crack and buzz with it, so I use Evans. Good support from those people - very good.

AP: The only thing I can say is I think that we wouldn't be able to do the job that we do and we wouldn't have been able to do the job over the last few years if we'd have been stupid idiots and just don't drugs and drink and stuff like that. We lead a fairly boring existence which surprises a lot of people, but we've always made sure that we sleep in a Travel Inn or something like that; get a good night's sleep and just try to eat properly as well. We don't eat a lot of junk food, never have done. That's all we do, we just live like ordinary people - so no excesses I guess.

AP: Sometimes [laughs]. I guess so. Like I said before, it's a better job than most people have got; sometimes, you have to sit back and remember that, but you know, it does get hard sometimes if you've had a particularly shitty day, it's hard to remember that, but there you go.

AP: Yeah, I look after the finance side of the band, the VAT, just generally run that side of the business, Slim does all the promotion and actually fighting with people for the gigs and negotiating and booking hotels and routing things, so between us we run it...well first and foremost we run it as a business, always have done. That's why it's as successful as it is.

AP: Not really, no. I don't think so. I'd like a few more people to know about The Hamsters. It'd be nice if the media weren't such a bunch of arseholes as well and they actually gave normal working bands a bit more of a chance, because they don't really. All they want is manufactured things which is fine, but that's a shame in itself because a lot of the public don't to hear a lot of stuff they would really like because they're told what to hear. Apart from that - not really, just carrying on doing what we're doing, but I mean, once this finishes, that will be it for me; that will be drumming as well. That will be the end. I shall bow out gracefully, by which time everybody will be glad to see the back of me anyway probably.

AP: We started at the right time; we were fortunate to start when we did, no getting away from that. Barry was great at getting in contact with places; we were good - we are good. That's not being bigheaded; we are good; some nights we are very good. We give people what they want. We don't subject them to lots of meaningless drivel, we just give them good songs and they go home happy.

AP: There is a chemistry like I've said already; that's something we've got and we give people value for money. They don't have to suffer support bands, because we don't have them. We just go out and give them two/ two and a half hours of good music that they can enjoy and they can go home and they've had a good night.

AP: No they don't.

AP: No, I don't think so. I play the way I play and that's the way I am. I think anybody learning to play an instrument, the bottom line is you play the way you are, you really can't change things; you play the way you are and you've just to be happy with what you are doing and listen a lot and play for the song. Don't play because it's clever to play something clever, just play for the song - do that and most bands would be more than happy with a drummer who can do that. What they don't want is a drummer who is falling over things all the time [laughs].