New Frontiers with Maxie Cheer
Music is never a linear expedition. An artist can never say where they’ll be, even in a year. So it surprised us all when session drummer Maxie Cheer announced they were embarking on their own solo journey at the end of 2022. This culminated in his debut single, lovingly named after their favourite producer ‘rick rubin’, and now, Maxie has played their first live solo set. Join us as we give you a run-down of their performance, and chat to them about it afterwards.
Maxie during their debut gig at Bar Doña. Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
We’ve written about the career of Maxie before, twice for their band with songwriter and producer Rachel Still where we charted their journey together as Wahl, and later for their last single ‘split’. The duo have since renamed themselves Just Kids, and have recently released their single ‘california’, which features the vast desolate setting of Death Valley as the backdrop for its monochrome music video.
With Maxie’s involvement in so many projects as a session drummer and live performer, we sat down and conducted his first solo interview back in September 2022 to talk about their own musical history. This also included his work with Bimini, the Trans Creative Collective, Dead Writers, and forming part of the soundtrack for BBC’s ‘Guilt’ drama. More recently, Maxie has been seen behind the kit for Kate Nash, and for the new Charlie Deakin Davies project charlieeeee.
With some of these projects, creative collaboration has been key to their development. Before the official announcement of his solo project, Maxie Cheer participated in such a collaboration with musician George Lloyd-Owen and TCC film co-ordinator Colleen Lee.
Together they made a piece called ‘24,901 miles’, the title based around the distance it takes to travel around the Earth to end up back where you started. The two-minute track is composed of an array of synth sounds with airy vocal and bass accompaniment from Lloyd-Owen. An electronic fusion between the tight and natural sound of Maxie’s reduced Tama kit, with jazz and breakbeat sensibilities.
The video itself features Maxie playing a stone’s throw from a London runway with the paired down kit as the sun descends, dynamically captured by Colleen Lee. With ‘24,901 miles’, this three-piece team shows an example of the kind of vibrant creativity a one-off collaboration can yield.
But ‘rick rubin’ would be Maxie’s true solo debut. Prior to a UK tour with Bimini in support of MUNA in November, Cheer spent a few days alone at the end of October putting together what would become this single. It relied heavily on crowd-sourced decision making, with Maxie putting questions to their Instagram following.
First, they asked for inspiration. Responses such as samba, a Leonard Cohen best-of, Lady Gaga documentary, Brian Eno and the ‘Making Mirrors’ documentary by Gotye were suggested. From there, Maxie explained what their starting point would be – miking their kit up and seeing what happens. During this process, they pondered whether they should, in a bid to break away from session etiquette, not record their drums to a click-track. After an attempt, Maxie put the question to the audience.
As the recording progressed, Maxie also explained the kind of equipment he was using, and the techniques used to record the single. Capping the voting process on whether Maxie should or shouldn’t use a click-track, they decided to close the vote during the time it took to pick up some vital equipment – a new coffee machine for their studio. The vote was divided into three, the options were: ‘Click’, ‘No Click’, or the abstract ‘Powerpuff Girls’.
The latter won with 60%, whilst ‘Click’ and ‘No Click’ were in a tie of 20% each. Choosing to honour the process, Maxie downloaded the Powerpuff Girls theme-tune to be used in the creation of the piece. They also decided to livestream their drum tracking, with all drums completed on the first day, allowing for other ideas to take shape over the rest of the week.
‘rick rubin’ single artwork by Jesse Glazzard.
Day 2 began with mixing the drums he wanted to use for the project, a task that was performed in a café and explained by Maxie to his following. A patron of the establishment even got to hear some of the process! In the café, they continued recording with a MIDI keyboard, adding pad sounds and moulding them with effects.
After a break to see Bon Iver with Rachel Still at Wembley Arena, Maxie continued the project in the early hours of the morning on Day 3. It was during this time they laid down the percussive sounds, deciding to use just their laptop microphone for its distinct lo-fi quality. In absence of real percussion pieces, Maxie substituted a shaker by rubbing his hands together, rattling their keys and tapping a glass bottle while tilting it over the mic.
From 5:30am, the track as its heard in its final version began to take shape. Maxie even added acoustic guitar, performed very quietly so as not to wake their housemates. This was processed in a shoegaze style with heaps of reverb, transforming it to something more ethereal. The guitar was also used for less musical sounds, such as the fret noise produced when running their hands over the neck.
This early morning session would be instrumental in determining the direction of ‘rick rubin’. It’s also when the opening monologue was sampled from another Instagram user, Andrea Gibson, ‘You know Einstein said time is relative…’ with a bit of the Bon Iver concert providing the guttural male voice, copied and pasted over the track.
Image Credit: Jesse Glazzard.
But time was limited, Maxie had only allocated five days to work on their solo music before concentrating on the tour with Bimini. Towards the end of the sessions, Maxie put an important question to the Instagram audience. Should they try and work on multiple pieces of music in this timeframe, or should he concentrate on putting their efforts into just one?
The answer was one. With the fate of the piece determined, Maxie embarked on the tour, and left the ultimate sequencing and mixing of the track for further down the line. The result, ‘rick rubin’, named after his favourite producer, was released in early February. At the time, Maxie described the composition as ‘An accidental 7 minute meditation on all the people I’m so grateful to have in my life, and the communities I get to be part of.’
The music video is a portrait compilation of footage taken by Maxie in social and professional situations, with a sprinkling of close family members. It’s a snapshot of Maxie’s life from the past year, a celebration of friendships, musical projects as a drum teacher and their live work with Bimini in 2022.
With the release of the single, Maxie Cheer teased the idea of performing live for the first time as a solo artist. This eventually came to fruition on Thursday, June 22nd when Maxie served as the first opening act for Lara Jones’ ‘Fig’ EP launch. The set at Bar Doña in Stoke Newington would be followed by trumpeter Sam Barton before Lara Jones would take to the stage.
It was possible you could walk past the red sequinned door with its equally red frilly canopy overhead on the street. Sandwiched between a taco shop and chippy, you wouldn’t know this would be the entrance to a sold-out evening of experimental dance music. Inside was a staircase, which led to a softly lit room of many corners, in pinks and reds. Masks hung on the walls and the place was already buzzing in anticipation of Maxie’s set. Many of their students had come to support the artist - it could’ve been the largest gathering of drummers this side of London. Other audience members included bandmates past and present, family and friends.
Maxie emerged behind their set and began a final soundcheck, hitting each drum in turn. A call to attention for the conversational audience, who immediately assembled a few feet in front of the drummer. The house music cut, and taking up a microphone, Maxie spoke to the crowd solo for the first time.
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
‘Well hello. Thank you all for coming so early to see the opener! We actually sold out, whilst everyone’s at Glastonbury. Now, I feel so blessed to be here, I’ve never done a solo project before. My name’s Maxie, I play drums for a lot of other people, but this is the first time I am attempting something artistic. So, I’m gonna hit my playback thing and it’s gonna start the set and it’s gonna be about twenty-five minutes long, and there’s gonna be no breaks in it whatsoever. But at one point, I’m going to try something experimental.’
The crowd cheered. With the whole set being something of an experiment, what would this additional layer of the experience be?
‘There’s a track with no click and I’m gonna put my fingers on my throat and try and find my pulse which I find gross. So just bear with me whilst I do it, and then I’m gonna try to build essentially a groove that suits what I’m playing to, using my pulse as my tempo. I didn’t go to Goldsmiths, but I could’ve! So yeah, without further ado. I’m gonna crack on. Oh yeah, about half the set is improvised and about half of it is stuff I’ve sort of planned, so it wasn’t totally shit. But yeah, thank you so much for sticking with it. I feel very lucky to have so many friends turn up for me. Thank you so much.’
Maxie took up their sticks and hit the playback. Crowd noise singing the Liverpool anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ gave way to a voice counting Maxie in. The set would be full of vocal samples especially, giving this drummer a voice throughout. This early segment had musical vibes of dub, getting the packed room to dance to their beat. Maxie’s bassline was an essential component in ‘So, Jazz.’ In addition to the live drums, he had augmented his beat on the playback with extra percussion, formulating a groove interspersed with layers of triangle and conga.
In a brief pause, the chaos of ‘Fred’ began with a fast breakbeat and Maxie soloing over the top. Prior to their set, he warned me that the live drums might not be so loud in respect of neighbourhood noise pollution. But either this rule was thrown out, or they overestimated their volume. The perfect mix presentation was in the attentive hands of producer and songwriter Rookes, whose album ‘POPNOTPOP’ we recently wrote about.
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
The playback settled down, and Maxie’s rhythm turned to their double floor toms. Standing up, Maxie placed their left foot on top of one drum to subtly adjust the pitch, revealing white socks with the Trans Pride Flag. His t-shirt was self-designed, black with small white lettering that read: ‘protect trans kids’. Maxie himself is trans, who prides themselves on working with many members of the LGBTQ+ community, including some of the students they teach.
A sampled conversation played out over this section of the set, as Maxie adjusted the tempo and rhythm, adding flourishes while the music itself was quietly accented. The next section was called ‘Kae’. The music dropped out and broke down, revealing a thudding that brought back a jagged beat more assertive than Maxie’s passive floor tom work. A speech rang through the room, Maxie’s beloved Kae Tempest imploring the crowd to ‘Hold your own’. The pitch of the backing climbed as they dramatically rolled around the kit, the cymbals, snare, and then-
‘You know, Einstein said time is relative…’
This cacophony of scratchy voice, feedback and screaming brought in the chill groove of Maxie’s debut single. With no breaks in these transitions, time had become irrelevant. By this point in the set, the audience were truly locked into this moment, swept away by Maxie’s curation. This reviewer closed their eyes and drifted to the gentle sway, the combination of subtle synth and tinkling cymbals. Bar Doña was small, but inside Maxie created a cavern, at the back of which could be heard their distant voice on the playback, singing to themselves as if lost in a moment. Closer, the drums picked up with a simple bassline, leading to one of the improvised moments Maxie had mentioned earlier. The screaming sample returned and the drummer reduced their beat to the playback.
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
Putting his sticks down, Maxie tilted their head back, closed their eyes and placed two fingers on their neck. A voice continued in reassurance as Maxie pushed through their own revulsion. Seconds later, his foot picked up the beat on the hats, then with added bass drum. This was ‘Kin 2000’. They double-checked their pulse, carrying on with the beat and adjusting the tempo as necessary. The feel changed when the trademark vocals of South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo were faded in, a group adored deeply by Cheer, who matched their style with an appropriate rhythm.
The set took another brief pause, then a thumping bassline pounded the audience with a vocal sample that sounded eerily like Maxie themselves. This final piece was called ‘Fathers’, where only snippets of their voice bled through the combustible sound of other voices, synthesizer whir and the climactic percussive swell emanating from the live drums in the room. Becoming more frantic, the outro combined snippets of other samples from the set, the screaming from ‘rick rubin’, and Kae Tempest’s emphatic ‘Hold Your Own’.
With all the sound cutting, Maxie’s final self-recorded vocal sample was hardly discernible above the deafening applause from the packed room. If the audience weren’t already standing, they surely would’ve risen in this moment. This set was a sincere embarking of creativity that was anything but indulgent.
‘Thank you very much, that was that! I was aiming for interesting, so if I landed on interesting, then I did my job of that tonight. So I hope you enjoy the rest of your night, thanks for coming down here, I love you all so much.’
The response from the crowd immediately afterwards was incredible. A universal reaction rarely seen at intimate gigs, everyone with wide eyes mouthing ‘That was amazing!’ to the people stood alongside them. For twenty-five minutes, the attentive audience immersed themselves in this sonic journey from an artist throwing caution to the wind.
But there is more to come. Following their debut gig at Bar Doña, we sat down with Maxie Cheer over a Zoom call to discuss the show and their music. We talked about the earlier drafts of the set and some of the samples they used. Maxie also revealed their next gig would be with T-Boys Club at Rich Mix in London on Trans Pride Day – Saturday July 8th.
During this interview, we also asked Maxie what their favourite Taylor Swift song is and why. Their answer is displayed among the selections of fourteen other artists (including bandmate Rachel Still), favourable to his drum students and linked to the LGBTQ+ community.
As we’ve previously seen, Maxie thrives in the interview environment, talking freely and openly about their experiences, and always living for the music they create. Read more about Maxie’s solo music below.
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
Teri Woods: So you’ve just done your first solo set, how are you feeling about it?
Maxie Cheer: I am feeling euphoric about it. Yeah, I am feeling ecstatic! Erm, I was very nervous beforehand and so the payoff (laughs) of doing it and it going well and, the reception of it being so positive, has just been (sighs) has just been lovely (laughs). It’s been lovely, yeah.
TW: You went through a few drafts of your set when you were putting it together, so why was that?
MC: (deep breath) Right, so, when I first agreed to doing a show, I only had one song that I had written and released, and that song had been- A lot of the parts of it had been improvised and so it wasn’t necessarily something I could even recreate live. And so when I accepted the opportunity to play at Lara’s show, I decided to build something to suit the show, like, I had no other back catalogue to pull from so it was, create something now for then.
And in typical me fashion, I had like six months to do it but I didn’t actually start working on it until about two weeks before the show. I tried to! But because there wasn’t that deadline and that pressure, and because of neurodivergence, I just can’t, so. So I started late, and what I really wanted to do is some of my own writing. I wanted to perform some of my own writing in some way. And by writing I mean like spoken word poetry stuff. Erm, because I’ve been writing for maybe the last three or four years, quite consistently in a very sort-of, short blasts of poetry and prose, kind of way. And I really wanted to share that, but I’ve never so much as even shared that in written form with anyone else.
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
And so (laughs), the first set that I put together was based around the concept that I would speak a lot, right, but then I attempted to perform that to a very small audience of one, to my partner, and I just couldn’t do it. And I realised in that moment, there was no way. If I couldn’t perform it to this one person, who arguably is going to just love whatever I do, then I definitely wasn’t ready to perform it to a room full of people. It felt too vulnerable, too raw, and you know having never done a solo show before, it was like just jumping in at the deep end, and it was just too scary, so that’s kind of- my ultimate goal is to get to the point where I can share that stuff.
But I decided, seeing as this was my first attempt at a show, and it would just be me on stage, and I was having so much nerves about it, I decided that we’d stick with the drums being the leading voice. And that’s when I got inspired to find other voices of other people who are artists that I really admire and to incorporate that speech into what I was doing, but I wouldn’t be the one having to speak it. But I knew that it would say everything, probably far better than I could.
The people I was sampling or, the people whose voices I included are people that are fantastic with words, do you know what I mean? They’re my inspirations, so. Yeah, so the first big scratch was I just scratched everything, and started it completely again. So I did make a spoken word set at one point, but that is now on the shelf waiting for me to have my confidence up. I think it’ll be a good idea, my friends have said it’ll be a good idea for me to go secretly and silently to a few sort-of like poetry, spoken word open mics, and have a go at reading from a book or from the page first, and then try getting to the point of doing it without prompts. And then incorporate it into my performance. So it’s nice to know that there’s more, do you know what I mean? Up the line. There’s more I wanna achieve with what I’m doing.
But it definitely made it all a lot more enjoyable for me to lean back into a space where I’m mainly speaking through the drums. And also that was a challenge in itself. Like, how do I- Like thirty minutes is a long time to just listen to a drum kit playing, so it pushed my production level up and it pushed my playing up to make it interesting.
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
TW: You mentioned having vocal samples, my next question actually was, who are some of these samples? We’ve obviously got Kae Tempest, and you’ve got Ladysmith Black Mambazo also, so who else are you sampling for this set?
MC: So there’s an amazing, amazing poet called Andrea Gibson? And they are super inspiring. It’s their voice at the beginning of ‘rick rubin’ that’s reading out a poem, and I took that from an Instagram video. They’re a huge influence.
And then there’s also an interview cut up between Zane Lowe and Fred Again.., and that’s on the song ‘Fred’. I cut bits out of that, and it’s interesting because the interview is about an hour long, it’s quite a well-known interview because of the finger drumming thing that Fred does at the beginning of it which is the bit that I played drums on. But anyway, that was interesting because their conversation went everywhere, and I just pinched lines here and there that resonated with me the most. But when I put those together, it was like a new conversation emerged that they had never had, because it was still really coherent if that makes sense? That was fascinating, I hadn’t explored that before.
Then there’s also, who else is in there? Er, Rick Rubin’s voice isn’t in there but his production techniques are all over it. I don’t know if it’s fair to say I sampled him. There is, uh, Duke Ellington and Count Basie on the first track which is called ‘So, Jazz’. And there is Sun Ra and his Arkestra in the track ‘Kin’.
There is also a voice note that I took of the ambience of the warehouse that I’m actually sat in right now, which is where I lived for a year and a half. I actually wrote some of the tracks that became some of the beginning building blocks of the new stuff I wrote. Erm, and one of them had this sample of all of my friends just chatting in the kitchen and stuff, so. That was in there. Also, my friend Billi tap-dancing is in there. Bits of conversation, my own voice that I finally felt brave enough to put in, on the day of the gig I added that! Erm, right at the end.
There’s also Young Fathers, a band called Young Fathers which is the last song, was essentially their song, with drumming on top. And I think there’s more, I just can’t remember, but yeah a lot of mixed influence from the communities that I associate with. So, musicians, drummers, creatives, and queer people.
TW: Yeah, it definitely all comes through.
MC: Yeah!
Image Credit: Mattia Ghisolfi.
TW: You’ve already released ‘rick rubin’, as you said. So is there more music to come, or more live sets? What do you think? What do you think happens next?
MC: What’s quite nice about this project is it’s very much at the moment secondary to my session work and it’s something that I want to pick up when I’m not out on sessions and tours. It’s for me to enjoy when I’m at home. And so because of that, I don’t have a strict, erm, set of goals with it, or a timeline, I’m just letting it be and seeing what comes. So I would like to put out one of the songs, I don’t know which one yet. But one of the ones that I wrote for this set, and then I do actually have another gig, that I only found out about yesterday. Which is very exciting, it’s not announced yet but I think it will be in the next few days. By the time this goes out, it probably will be announced.
It’s an existing event, so, on trans pride in the evening, there is a gig being thrown by T-Boys, I don’t know if you’ve heard of T-Boys? It’s a trans masc-specific night. It was happening at Superstore, and it’s got bigger and bigger, and it’s become a regular night now and I’ve been asked if I’ll perform as part of their line-up on trans pride day, which I was like, ‘Yes!’ I can’t think of a more appropriate and exciting space for me to perform my music in. And I think it’s a 350-capacity venue, and it’s sold-out so. It’s a big jump from the thirty or forty people I performed to last week! It’s also in a week and a half and I’m gonna write a whole new set for it, but you know.
It’s what I mean, I’m kind of gonna swing from opportunity to opportunity and just see where it goes. And I have a feeling that after each performance, another performance will arise at some point and I’ll switch focus to that. Yeah so that’s exciting! That’s something that I’m excited to do.
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For more information about the work of Maxie Cheer, visit their official website.
Explore the music of Just Kids on their YouTube channel.
For more information about the work of the Trans Creative Collective, including upcoming events and their directory, visit their official website.
Follow the adventures of Maxie Cheer on Instagram @maxieplaysdrums.
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