Victor Lancaster : Beat of the City
June 6, 2002
Street dummer Victor Lancaster has made his first CD.
Lucinda Strahan reports.
Everybody knows Victor Lancaster. He is probably one of the most recognised characters in the city. But most people only know him as “the drum guy”, the one sitting on a street corner banging away, on his makeshift drum-kit, to the rhythm of the street.
Lancaster has been drumming in the city for more than 10 years now. Before he came to Melbourne he drummed in Sydney for a few years.
He is out on the city streets almost every day, outside Nike on Bourke Street, or the State Library on La Trobe Street (his two favourite places at the moment) with his drum kit – two metal icecream containers, one small bucket and one larger one, a plastic water cooler bottle, one cymbal, one small chocolate tin, a cowbell and 13 drumsticks.
He drums from morning until night and sometimes longer, setting up on the corner of Bourke and Russell streets to play for the post-movie crowd on Tuesdays and the weekends, and not getting home to Abbotsford until two in the morning.
Why does he do it?
“It’s something to do; it makes people happy,” he says. “I just drum to everything. There are a lot of rhythms around – cars blowing horns and stuff. The sounds are like the African beats on the streets.”
Lancaster, who is “36 or 34, or something like that,” picked up his first drum kit at high school in Kyogal in country New South Wales.
He didn’t like school much and left in form one, but one thing he did learn was how to bang a drum in the school band. He has done a few gigs here and there over the years and has a band called The Victorians.
Melbourne recording outfit Citylights Records – an offshoot of the Centre Place and Hosier Lane public art spaces – last year invited Lancaster to record an album of his drumming. The result is Mr Mention, Lancaster’s solo album, which will be available in record stores later this year.
But success has not gone to Lancaster’s head.
Everyday he is out on the street – except for Wednesdays when he sometimes likes to sleep in – drumming because he loves it.
“I’ll do it all the time, 24 hours if it’s not raining. In Bourke Street sometimes I do it when it’s foggy. When you walk past and hear someone playing the drums, it’s probably me behind the fog.”