Second in our occasional series on bands at the halfway point between bedroom demos and mass success. This month, a cosmopolitan six-piece with a distinctive stage presentation, and a brilliant fusion between ethnic rhythms and modern technology.

From the moment Roland unveiled their CR78 Compurhythm to an unsuspecting industry, through the advent of the Simmons SDS5 electronic kit, right up to the current fad of the DX7 Log Drum preset, electronic alternatives to traditional percussion have become increasingly important to modern musicians. Thus far, the drum machine has been hailed as everything from an invaluable songwriting aid to a mindless source of mindless rhythms, while the electronic drum kit is still regarded by some as the potential executioner of its acoustic parent.

Realistically, there's no reason for this conflict. It's just that the musical fraternity has an age-old tradition of resistance to progress, be it turn-of-the-century revulsion of the saxophone, or eighties abhorrence of synthesised drums. It's a sad reflection on today's supposedly enlightened musical world, that it's often left to lowly pop musicians to show the way to serious artists.

Let's speculate on the existence of a band fascinated by rhythm in all its forms, and unhindered by Luddite blinkers. Their scope would be enormous: traditional rhythms of worldwide sources from Brazil to Tibet; instruments ranging from a LinnDrum to a talking drum. Arrange these elements within a pop context, and you have Drum Theatre.

Drum Theatre are a six-piece band drawn from homes as far afield as Chicago and Sheffield. They draw on both modern technology and ancient tradition with equal aplomb, fusing them with strongly melodic songs to a single end: to make good pop music.

'Pop music does get slagged a lot', as the band themselves admit, 'but it's very, very difficult to write a good, catchy melody — and that's what good pop music's about: good melody. It's far easier to come up with something that's obscure and arty, like banging a couple of pieces of pipe for a few hours, no doubt to great critical acclaim. And just regurgitating old ideas with a commercial feel will sell records, but that's bad pop.'

All very astute, but is this evidence that Drum Theatre are just another example of record company speculation on the pop stock market? A little money in — a lot of money out? Fortunately, it isn't.

'It's not our deliberate aim to write pop songs for the sake of it — it's just the sort of music we like writing.'

Fair enough.

It's almost three years since founder members Kent B and Gari Tarn first met in a London club, drawn by a common interest in African music. The result of this introduction was the nucleus of Drum Theatre, formed along with American keyboardist Patrick Gallagher, and with Tarn falling into the singer's role when there was nobody else to sing on the first demos. The fledgling Drum Theatre existed with this line-up for a short period, but added the remainder of the present personnel — guitarist Simon Moore, bassist Paul Snook and drummer Myles Benedict — when they wanted to break free from the confines of the recording studio.

Demo tapes were duly recorded and sent out. One of the selected targets, Epic, received a tape with no covering information or contact address. The contents of the tape, however, were impressive enough for the label to search for its creators, a contract was eventually signed, and a debut single 'El Dorado' was released towards the end of last year. It received some heavy airplay, but the pandemonium of Christmas shopping habits prevented it from being a big hit.

So here we are in the first month of 1986, sat in a London recording studio, surrounded by the tools of Drum Theatre's trade. Brightly-painted guitars, kotos and mbiras litter the floor. Present are five of the six band members; the absentee, keyboardist Gallagher, is in the States avoiding pressure from Her Majesty's Government over his work permit.

We begin, not unexpectedly, on the subject of fusion. Have Drum Theatre had problems merging two musical genres (western pop and ethnic) that could so easily fight each other for air space?

Kent B: 'I think one of the problems we've had with incorporating ethnic instruments into our music is that, in their native environment, they don't go through any chord changes. They remain with one chord or in one key, so we've had trouble adapting them to western music.'

Wouldn't sampling help?

'Even if you sample something, so that you've got every key available to you, it loses part of its quality — it doesn't quite translate. Sampled sounds are very different to natural sounds.

'Although technology is widely used in our music, we keep it transparent unless we're trying to achieve a certain effect. A Fairlight will colour a sound, so sometimes you sample a drum to get a different kind of sound because of that distortion. We've used sampled drums just in certain places, like amid a Caribbean groove to give a certain effect. It's especially effective if you sample with reverb, because the reverb stops the moment you stop the sample.'

Gari Tarn takes up the subject. 'I think the technology is transparent in most of what we're doing, but, for example, we'll use it where you might not be as tight actually playing a part. "N-n-n-nineteen" is a very obvious trick, so we tend to avoid that sort of thing.'

The solution to the puzzle of translating tribal groove into mass-media commerce turns out not to lie in assaulting tradition with technology, but in the number and variety of musical instruments used. Kent B explains.

'There are tons of them! If you look around you'll always find something, so you're not really limited in that way — different drums, different strings and so on. We tend to put them into groups, so Simon will play thin strings and prongs, Paul plays fat strings and thick prongs, Myles plays sticks and tricks.

'Every day someone finds something we haven't seen before. And that poses the question: "What do you do with this? Pluck it, blow it, kick it, or sample it?"'

Tarn: 'Sometimes you can see a picture of something and say: "it must sound like this", so you've got the idea for a new synth patch. We derived a cora patch that we think sounds better than a cora.'

But, as every synth programmer knows, searching so hard for sounds can all too easily get in the way of writing music. Drum Theatre admit to being vulnerable to this malady, but believe they have it under control.

Tarn: 'We do suffer from an obsession with sounds, but only after the song is written. Once we know where we're going, we'll muck about with the details for hours. By then it doesn't really matter, it just gives us something to do. We've got to argue about something!'

Kent B: 'But if we didn't pay any attention to it, we'd end up without a style. The songs we write are generic — if you listen to the bass drum pattern it sounds like a lot of other songs — so it's the way we layer the sound on top that makes it ours. That all comes from the production side.'

Kent B credits new technology with exerting other, more significant effects, too. 'It makes it a lot simpler to play and to write music — especially if you write on your own. A big change that music's been going through lately is that individuals now have an entire band at their fingertips, so a composer can create a song exactly as he sees it. Before, a band used to get together and all contribute something to the finished result.'

Tarn: 'I think it also leads individual musicians to develop a much stronger style than they might otherwise have done. For example, Simon's guitar style has developed in ways that it probably wouldn't have done in the traditional band context. Having had to use the guitar to fit in with other sorts of sounds, the next step forward is to use the instrument in a way that can't be emulated by anything else. Take the saxophone: you'll never be able to replace that sort of instrument. You can get that sort of sound, sure, and it may sound OK some of the time, but you'll never replace the way that it plays. It seems to me that, over the next few years, there's going to be a greater demand for more versatile musicians.'

Moore: 'You can be a bedroom guitarist, and practise your scales every day, but you'll then find it takes time to adapt to a situation within a band, when you have to be very aware that other sounds are present.'

Tarn: 'Both Simon and Paul are going through a transition where their instrument stops being just an instrument creating a note, and starts to achieve a sound that fits into an overall musical collage. When you think of the number of different sounds a synthesiser will give you, you realise that you have to be able to do the same sort of thing with, for example, a bass. If you can't do that, then the bass end is always going to sound the same. If everything else is changing, you have to be able to change with it.'

With a prestigious touring support slot to King safely under their belts, and DJ Mike Read plugging their single, 'Living in the Past', at every available moment, Drum Theatre have reason to be confident their approach to musicianship is paying off. But the reason they've already aroused such attention has little to do with music. To most people, Drum Theatre are a collection of strikingly-dressed young men who perform in front of colourful, unorthodox stage sets.

Benedict: 'I know a lot of serious "musos" won't take us seriously to start with, because of the way we look, but a gig is supposed to be about having a good time. It's not some mystical experience. I believe that if an audience can see a band are having a good time, they're far more likely to enjoy themselves.'

Musically, the band began their stage career using backing tapes and drum machines, but now adopt a completely live approach that's more satisfying than either of its predecessors.

Tarn: 'The first stage of the live six-piece involved using tapes, but we found we didn't actually need them. It was an attitude we had at the time: for some reason, we felt we wouldn't be able to reproduce all the little details live.

'We also decided we wanted to use a Simmons kit, because they look really modern, so we had Myles standing behind an SDS7 playing along with the tapes. When we finally realised we didn't need the tapes, we used a percussion player — Andy Duncan — and that, along with a Linn, was the first-ever live line-up.

'Seven people really was too many, so we thought that if we made more use of the Linn, we could manage without Andy. Then we decided we didn't like the Linn at all! We'd been doing some stuff in the studio with a full drum kit and it sounded great, so we thought "why are we mucking about with the Simmons when an acoustic kit sounds better?".

'So we cut the Linn, sat Myles down behind his drum kit, which was what he was best at anyway, and we were away.'

But while the concert stage has been friendly toward Myles Benedict's changes of stance, it's not looked quite so kindly on the multitude of unconventional instruments that had given Drum Theatre so much inspiration. Undeterred, they overcame the logistical problems, and now have a trick of their own up their sleeve.

Moore: 'It's impossible to take things like the mbira on stage because they're so difficult to mic up, though there are some with built-in pickups under development at the moment. But another problem is that it's really boring to watch someone play, it's like watching someone play keyboards.'

Tarn: 'The solution is to find a way of playing the sounds that you like and make it very visual. We've got something in mind, but it's still a closely-guarded secret at the moment. Come and ask us about it in six months' time! We first talked about it two or three years ago, and you can see something in the video for 'Living in the Past' that's our own design. Kent will be the first to use it as it'll use both his keyboard and drumming skills, and it'll involve sampling, but I'm saying nothing more at the moment.'

In keeping with the band's penchant for invention, even the Drum Theatre stage set and costumes are of their own design. On the clothing front, singer Tarn designs and makes clothes to match the band's colourful instruments, while the stage set consists of the cut up and gaudily coloured remains of a Morris Minor that once provided Tarn with a means of transport.

'I left it in King's Cross when it broke down one weekend, and when I came back it had been completely wrecked. At the time we were looking for a percussion rack that would look really good, so since it hadn't cost very much, we decided to cut it up and use it. In the end, it worked so well that we got a couple more!'

The moral? Don't leave your car unattended in London unless you want to see it on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon.