Ben Glasstone – drums and singing

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Roehampton hospital, Spring of 1970. Doctors exchange anxious looks and fiddle with their stethoscopes.  The midwife lays a nervous hand on my mother’s abdomen. “Is the heartbeat irregular?” “Not irregular, as such. It’s just that it seems to be…off the beat.”

Permanently syncopated from birth, I’ve done my best to adapt and remain reasonably inconspicuous. Childhood was relatively easy: five-year-olds beat to their own drum, as they say, and Johnny and Fiona’s pat-a-cake didn’t seem so far removed from my own. But in adolescence my tendencies started to become more apparent, and my decision to join a band - as the drummer - was probably an attempt to “hide in plain sight.” What nobody knew, as I rattled off a surprisingly convincing “blues shuffle,” was that THEIR OFF-BEATS WERE MY ON-BEATS. 

After years of struggling with my condition, I have come to find joy and acceptance in DDB, where we try to set aside notions of mere temporality and instead focus our minds on the approach of Armageddon. And without wishing to hasten on the end-times, I must express my earnest wish that - should the apocalypse be as imminent as predicted - its resounding boom will at least land squarely OFF the beat.