If you can't play it . . . by John Hargreaves

 ‘I’m the best drummer in the country’ John Hargreaves would jokingly say. Then add, self-deprecatingly, ‘Pretty average in the city, but in the country I’m tops’. This is public persona John, cocky and cheerful. His memoir shows  another more complex, more interesting John, who, although born into the hey day of white privilege, found himself, at fifteen, out of school, homeless and obliged to support himself. Undaunted, optimistic, gay, recklessly promiscuous, doggedly self-sufficient, he drummed his way from job to job, from gig to gig, from lover to lover, from Johannesburg to New York, from pop to classics, from dance band to orchestra. And then from contentment to despair …