Greatest Drummer of All Time

Arguments about the greatest drummer usually die on genre lines. A metal fan and a bebop fan are not really disagreeing about drumming, they are disagreeing about which room the question gets asked in. So the field here was not picked by us.

Every name below was voted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame, where the magazine’s readers have inducted exactly one drummer a year since 1979. Gene Krupa went in first. Because it is a readers poll rather than a critics list, the roster records what drummers themselves found undeniable, year after year, for almost half a century.

That gives you a bracket where a Blue Note bandleader meets an Iron Maiden gallop, where two Foo Fighters turn up separately, and where the man who made the drumsticks stands beside the break hip hop was built on. Forty-three inductees are here, each listed with the year the readers put them in. Four others are missing because no usable freely licensed photograph of them exists, which is a licensing problem rather than a judgement about their playing.