Wonderboom drummer
GARTH McLeod, who died in Johannesburg at the age of 44 after crashing his motorbike into a pole, was one of South Africa’s leading rock drummers.
After starting a band called Helter Skelter with a cousin in the early 1990s, he joined the respected rock band Sugardrive and was with them for 12 years until they broke up.
He joined the psychedelic rockabilly group Martin Rocka and the Sick Shop after their first drummer, David Clarke, committed suicide in 2005. He took the band to a new level. In the year that he joined they won the South African round of the global Battle of the Bands and took part in the finals at the London Astoria.
The band went from strength to strength with multiple gigs and two successful albums, Through Sick and Thin and It’s a Filthy Song but Someone’s Got to Sing It.
McLeod joined Wonderboom in 2008. So entrenched was his reputation that they did not even audition him when they heard that he wanted to join.
He was then playing for Martin Rocka and the Sick Shop, Wonderboom and Sugardrive at the same time and also fitting in a hectic schedule of corporate gigs. These included backing bigname singers in the popular Samsung summer sessions at the V&AWaterfront in Cape Town, usually with minimal rehearsal time. His last performance before his death was a corporate gig for Barloworld in Cape Town.
He loved rockabilly. It was what he grew up with, his “home ground”. But the truth was that he just loved playing. No matter the band, the style or the occasion, as long as he was hitting the drums, he was in heaven.
McLeod was born in Kempton Park on the East Rand on September 21 1968. From the age of five or so, he tapped away on anything that came to hand, usually a table top or empty coffee tin. What quickly distinguished him from other children was his remarkable rhythm.
When he arrived as a boarder at Potchefstroom Boys ’ High School, he immediately became a drummer in the cadet band. He was second in the Western Transvaal inter-schools drumming competition and became drum major of the school cadet band.
He urged his parents to buy him a moped, but his mother refused. Instead, she bought him a drum kit and, from then on, there was only one career for him.
He spent his two-year national service in the army band and played at countless funerals for young soldiers killed in the operational area in the mid-1980s. He found the experience deeply distressing. He said that the hardest was watching the parents of the dead struggling to contain their grief.
His playing was hard and precise to the point of obsessiveness. This matched his personality. His colleagues considered him “very German” in his approach to everything, except that he was also very funny, with a humour characterised by repartee so dry that most people thought that he was the band’s straight guy.
For the past eight years, McLeod’s day job was manager of the music instrument retailer Marshall Music’s flagship store in Woodmead, Johannesburg. It sells top-end gear to working musicians and his knowledge was indispensable. He was the go-to man when stores elsewhere in the country had esoteric queries that they could not help with.
He is survived by his wife, Anne-Mari. — Chris Barron
1928-2013