On 15 April 2020, almost a month into lockdown, BBC North West weatherman Owain Wyn Evans decided he wanted to do something different with his work-from-home weather bulletin. With his husband Arran, he tried to work out how he could make drumming along to the BBC News theme music ‘fun’ and ‘accessible’. ‘Then I had the idea of starting it with this really over-the-top flamboyant weather forecast – because that's kind of what I do – and then running over to the drums when the music started,’ says Wyn Evans over Zoom, fabulously dressed as usual in a pattered shirt and well-fitting blazer. ‘Any drummer who watches that knows that it's completely over-played. It's nothing like the original drums on the track – it's just me smashing the drum kit like there's no tomorrow.’ Given that the video, which Wyn Evans casually tweeted, has now been viewed 6.2m times, you've probably seen it.
‘Within half an hour, I knew it was doing something that none of my other content had ever done,’ says Wyn Evans, seemingly still in shock two years later. ‘I remember I was refreshing my Twitter and my phone was getting red hot because Twitter was trying to keep up with the number of notifications coming in, and my phone was like, what the hell is going on?’ The video ended up reaching people all over the world, perhaps resonating with so many because of the iconic status of the BBC News music globally, but also for other reasons specific to the moment. ‘At the time, we were all glued to our TVs, and we were watching the news because people were terrified,’ says Wyn Evans. ‘My anxiety was through the roof, I was getting upset, and I was missing my parents because they were hundreds of miles away. I think the fact that this was a little moment of joy using something we were all familiar with at the time – the BBC News music – and in a familiar setting – home – was why it did what it did.’
Wyn Evans, who is just as warm and infectiously joyous as I had hoped, thinks that one of the video's USPs is that it was unexpected. ‘I don't think people were expecting this camp weatherman to run over to the drum kit and actually be able to play reasonably well.’ Growing up in Welsh ex-mining town Ammanford as a young gay man, Wyn Evans says he felt like an ‘alien’ – ‘there weren't any other gay drummers when I was younger – it was just me,’ he says. ‘I've always wanted to try and change the perception of who can be a drummer.’
Playing the same beat
That 57-second-long video propelled Wyn Evans into the public eye for more than just his unashamedly flamboyant weather presenting – ‘it's absolutely bonkers how doing that one afternoon in April changed my life completely.’ Since then, his most notable projects include the BBC Breakfast 24-hour Drumathon for Children in Need in November 2021 and, most recently, appearing on the BBC series Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof. The Drumathon saw Wyn Evans playing the drums – including a marching drum for when he had to move away from the drum kit – for a full 24 hours, combined with interviews with drummers and other special guests from around the world.
Although Wyn Evans was heroically drumming throughout, the show-stopping moment came in the form of the ‘Big Bang’, which saw around 50 drummers fill a BBC studio and play the BBC News theme music, with Wyn Evans at the centre on a red DW drum kit (courtesy of Blondie's Clem Burke). ‘Oh my gosh, Harriet, sometimes when I watch it now, I cry,’ he says. ‘Somebody once told me something that stuck with me. They said that your heartbeat is with you your whole life – the first thing you experience as a human is your heartbeat, and then the last thing you have before you pass on is your heartbeat, and then it stops, and you're gone. Being part of this thing where everybody is playing the same beat was so magical.’ Some of the drummers who joined him included eight-year-old Anabell Tang, Cherisse Osei from Simple Minds, Dame Evelyn Glennie, and Skunk Anansie's Mark Richardson, who acted as musical director.
Since the Drumathon, which raised more than £3m for Children in Need, lots of parents have told Wyn Evans that after watching the show, their children want drum kits for Christmas. ‘I feel sorry for the parents,’ he says, smiling, ‘because the drum kit is not a discreet instrument, but that just fills me with joy because anyone can be a drummer.’ The Drumathon team worked to achieve a ‘good representation of people’ in the studio, ensuring that viewers, especially children, could see themselves represented behind the drums. ‘I don't read music, I'm not academic, I didn't do well in school, and I didn't particularly enjoy any of the other subjects in school,’ says Wyn Evans. ‘The drum kit is often seen as a stereotypically masculine instrument, but I hope that things like Heartstopper and the Drumathon get more queer kids to drum.’
A young Wyn Evans playing the second-hand Pearl Export drum kit his parents bought him © COURTESY OWAIN WYN EVANS
‘I didn't have any role models’
Heartstopper, the graphic novel/webcomic and now Netflix series by Alice Oseman currently taking the world by a storm, follows protagonist Charlie Spring as he navigates his teenage years at school as a young gay man. One of the central parts of Charlie's character is that he plays the drums and is often shown using music to deal with his emotions. ‘I was at the BAFTAs a few weeks ago presenting some awards – which is never something I thought I'd be able to do –,’ says Wyn Evans, ‘and Joe Locke was there, who is the actor who plays Charlie. I went up to him and said, “I just wanted you to know that your character was basically me when I was a child”. It was lush to tell him that.’
Wyn Evans has been open in the past about his anxiety, and he tells me now that a lot of it stemmed from the ‘gay shame’ that hung over him as a child. ‘It was this kind of “you're not normal” feeling, and the feeling that you always have to try and fit into a mould that isn't you, and almost apologise for who you are.’ He continues: ‘But the drumming has always been a thing that I could just do, because it completely removes you from anything. Whatever I'm thinking and however I'm feeling, when I put my headphones on and my monitors in and I play my drum kit, anything else that's going on just goes, because the drumming is what I'm concentrating on. I didn't have any role models around me as a young gay man growing up, and the drumming was a thing I could turn to to shut me off from the rest of the world.’
Different path
There was a time when Wyn Evans planned to become a session drummer. Largely self-taught, he knew that to study percussion at university, he'd need to get his grades up and learn to play ‘correctly’. While psyching himself up for this ‘mad scramble’, he was applying for jobs ‘because there wasn't much money.’ A job came up for a children's TV presenter role, and he got it. ‘So, then the drums went back to being a hobby, but I do wonder sometimes how different things would be if I hadn't got that job and I had ended up studying percussion,’ he says. Wyn Evans’ interest was piqued while still in primary school when he saw his friend's dad playing drums for the school's production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. ‘I can still see it now,’ he says, ‘a red Pearl Export drum kit with Zildjian cymbals.’
‘After that, my parents bought me this little cardboard drum kit from Argos – I played that thing until it fell apart and my father was gaffer taping it together. They could see that this was an interest that was more than a flash in the pan, so they saved up and bought me a second-hand drum kit, which was coincidentally the same red Pearl Export kit.’ While Wyn Evans’ school didn't have a drum kit, he joined school bands and felt that it was ‘the one social thing’ that he could be part of. ‘School wasn't a particularly happy place for me,’ he says. ‘At the time, you didn't have the LGBT support network, and I was bullied. I just hated school really, but the one thing I really didn't hate was my drums.’ We talk briefly about the recently published National Plan for Music Education in Wales, which promises that all children will be offered ‘taster’ instrumental lessons. ‘I would have loved to have had drum lessons every week,’ says Wyn Evans. ‘I know it would have completely transformed my skill as a drummer – I love that these things are available now.’ He also adds that ‘having instruments in school is super important’, particularly drum kits, because ‘they are not easy instruments to have at home’.
Most of your music students will go on to experience music in the way that Wyn Evans does, rather than become professional musicians. For him, the key to fostering this life-long love of music is to let people ‘embrace whatever kind of music they want to embrace’. Wyn Evans tried to model this during the Drumathon: ‘I didn't want to play rock music for 24 hours. I wanted to start with River Deep, Mountain High by Celine Dion and end it with Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time, because why not?’ In the words of the simply fabulous Owain Wyn Evans: lush.
