A Gavin Harrison drum solo is rarely a solo in the old sense of one drummer alone on a stage. His best-known features on record are the percussion pieces he played with two other drummers in King Crimson, a television solo spot, and the drumming on his own albums and instructional releases, while with Porcupine Tree his playing lives inside the songs. This guide goes through them one by one – where each is, when it was recorded and who else is playing – so that you know where to look.

The player, in brief

Harrison, born in London in 1963, worked for two decades as a session drummer before joining Porcupine Tree in 2002; he has played on every Porcupine Tree album since, from In Absentia to Closure/Continuation. He joined King Crimson in 2008 in a two-drummer line-up with Pat Mastelotto and played with the band live from 2014 to 2021, and since 2016 he has also been the drummer of The Pineapple Thief. Modern Drummer readers voted him best progressive drummer every year from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2016 and 2019, and the magazine placed him among its 50 greatest drummers of all time.

“The Hell Hounds of Krim” and “Banshee Legs Bell Hassle” — King Crimson, Live in Toronto (2016)

From 2014 King Crimson toured with three drummers, and the band wrote pieces for the three of them alone. The first full concert by that line-up to be released, Live in Toronto, recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on 20 November 2015 and issued in 2016, has the recorded debut of two of them: “The Hell Hounds of Krim”, credited to Harrison, Bill Rieflin and Pat Mastelotto, and “Banshee Legs Bell Hassle”. Reviewing the album for Louder, Jo Kendall describes Harrison as the band’s musical director and picks out “Hell Hounds of Krim” among the album’s highlights. Line-up: Robert Fripp, Jakko Jakszyk, Mel Collins, Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto, Bill Rieflin and Gavin Harrison.

The Letterman drum solo (2011)

On 23 August 2011 Harrison was one of the featured performers in the second “Drum Solo Week” on the Late Show with David Letterman, a series that also included Sheila E, Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart and Dennis Chambers. It is not on an album, but it is a Harrison solo performance filmed and broadcast in its own right.

The instructional releases

Harrison has also written and recorded a body of instructional material for other drummers. His books Rhythmic Illusions and Rhythmic Perspectives deal with beat displacement and other ways of playing one rhythm against another, and Bill Bruford, who received a manuscript copy of the first before King Crimson’s Thrak sessions, has called them highly influential. The DVDs Rhythmic Visions and Rhythmic Horizons put those ideas into practice, and Rhythmic Designs (2010), a book of transcriptions with a three-hour DVD, won Best in Show at the summer NAMM show.

Cheating the Polygraph (2015)

His second solo album reworks Porcupine Tree songs for a big band, and Harrison has described it as a record of many drumming styles, from double bass drum passages to funk. One track fuses two songs in different tempos, “Hate Song” and “Halo”, using metric modulation to move from one tempo to the other, the kind of rhythmic device his books describe.

Where to start

For the drum features, go to “The Hell Hounds of Krim” and “Banshee Legs Bell Hassle” on Live in Toronto. For Harrison on his own terms, Cheating the Polygraph. And for his drumming inside the songs, Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) or Deadwing (2005) are the natural places to begin.

Go deeper

For drum solos across the genre, see the best prog rock drum solos of all time and the countdown of the best prog drummers of all time; his predecessor in King Crimson has a guide of his own, Bill Bruford’s drum solos. For Porcupine Tree, start with the Porcupine Tree band guide, the best Porcupine Tree albums, the best Porcupine Tree songs and where to start with Porcupine Tree; for King Crimson, the King Crimson band guide; or browse the prog musicians hub. The story of progressive rock from the 1980s to today, Porcupine Tree included, is the subject of Beyond the Decades, the fifth book in my Beyond the Sound series.

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