WHAT’S the link between The Who, Slade, Eighth Wonder, The Clash and the Ted Heath Orchestra? The answer is Steve Grantley, who plies his trade as the drummer with cult bands Stiff Little Fingers and The Alarm. This punk pugilist is no mere Neanderthal tub-thumper, bashing out tunes at 100mph and sacrificing soul for speed, for Grantley was schooled in the art of big band jazz, and as a teenager found himself on a dream ticket with jazz gigs galore and the honour of occupying the hot seat for the Thames Television Big Band.

Steve’s a writer, too. Not just songs - although he wrote an American dance hit, ‘Drum Down The House’, and has penned tunes for both Stiff Little Fingers and The Alarm, plus his erstwhile side project ‘Percussion Orgy’ and ‘RTZ Global’ – but books too. This December, his book on The Who – ‘The Who By Numbers’ - will be published. It’s basically a song by song glance at Keith Moon’s old backing band which is likely to be hugely popular with fans. He wrote it with Alan Parker, with whom he also collaborated on a book about Slade, which hit the shelves last year.

As if life is not exciting for the eloquent and charming Grantley, he’ll be one of the stars of a new film about Stiff Little Fingers, marking their 30 year anniversary, which comes out in September. Then it’s on the road with Stiff Little Fingers, before some dates with The Alarm and then into the recording studio for Stiff Little Fingers’s next album.

Have I missed anything out?

"Life’s good," grins Grantley, whose early career sounds like an inverse Spinal Tap, where the drummer survives but the bands don’t. "I am doing what I always wanted to do. I can’t remember ever not wanting to be a drummer.

"My dad Norman was a jazz fan and a drummer fan. He didn’t play but there was always a pair of drumsticks around the house. He used to say to me "listen to the drummer, watch the drummer. It was all Big Band Jazz, Ted Heath and stuff like that. Ronnie Verell was a big influence on me in the early days – dad used to go on about him."

A visit from ‘hippy cousins’ gave the young Grantley a chance to let loose on percussion, playing bongos as they strummed their guitars, and at 11 his parents bought him his first drum kit – a blue, mother of pearl Carlton kit which he wishes he still had.

"It’s only now I realise how much patience my family had," he acknowledges. "I don’t know whether I wanted to play drums to please my dad. I’m sure I did in some ways, but I took to it."

Drumming lessons at school nearly put Steve off, but at 16 his taste for drumming was revived by David Hodge, who had worked with Edmondo Ross, "King of Latin American music and who taught him technique.

"I always wanted to take it as far as I could possibly go. I always thought of myself as a professional. I think I was ‘big headed’, but I never thought about earning a living, making money. All I wanted to do was play the drums."

Hodge gave the teenage Grantley much more than lessons – he put him on the professional road, suggesting his pupil for gigs and even asking him to deputise for him, even for the Thames Television Big Band. Grantley remembers: "The reading they gave me I couldn’t make head nor tail out of, but I knew the songs by heart. It was the versions by Ted Heath which I knew backwards. I had been thrown in at the deep end, but was able to survive."

The lessons he had been taught by Hodge were reinforced by his new colleagues – it’s not what you play, but what you don’t play. "It’s the gaps in between. You have to know where the one is. It slowly dawned on me what David had been talking about. It suddenly made sense."

Seeing Cozy Powell playing ‘Dance With The Devil’ on Top Of The Pops with Pan’s People dancing all around him, and then seeing Buddy Rich, convinced Grantley he was on the right track. John Bonham, Keith Moon, Brian Downey, Sly Dunbar, Budgie, Ginger Baker, Charlie Charles and Mick Tucker were other early influences. As well as jazz gigs that were bringing in good money, he had also put a rock band together with friends.

"The jazz gigs I felt I had to do them because I was learning. They were improving me as a player and I was enjoying them, too. It was a chance to go and play drums. But I wanted to do more. Eventually, I stopped having lessons because I was too busy. I couldn’t find time to fit them in. But then I had a series of let downs, doing the whole A&R thing, which seemed to go on for ages and ages. The rock band didn’t work out. Four mates stopped being friends. So I started to answer ads in the back of Melody Maker. I had a failed audition for The Waterboys."

Then Grantley spotted a potentially career defining advert: ‘Internationally successful band seeks drummer. Must play reggae’. "I thought it might be The Clash," he recalls with a smile. "I went down to Camden Lock and was asked to play along to tapes in a studio. The first track was ‘The Magnificent Seven’ by The Clash. I thought "Hang on". Then a voice came through: "Try this one, and play as if you’re on stage". It was ‘Complete Control’, then ‘Rock The Casbah’ (both Clash songs). I had my photograph taken, filled out a questionnaire, asked about my favourite drummers. I asked if it was The Clash, they said: "We can’t say". I walked through the door and there was Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon. Mick Jones was in America at that time. They were looking for a new drummer and I was one of two. I would go and play in the morning, while Pete Howard, who got the gig, would play in the afternoons.

"Mick came back for the final audition along with Bernie Rhodes (Clash manager) and I a lost my bottle. I dropped my sticks. Mick started the intro to ‘London Calling’ and I wasn’t ready for it. I was about 21, I loved The Clash. It was a dream gig. I went home and just felt terrible.

"I got a phone call at about 11.30am the next morning and was told "sorry, mate, but you’ve not got the job". Joe came on the phone and told me I was a world-class drummer, but I just needed to build my confidence. "I’m so sorry," he said. I nearly cried."

As it was, that failure may have been Grantley’s saving grace. The Clash imploded, but another punk was just around the corner. After Jake Burns disbanded Stiff Little Fingers, he was looking for a new drummer for his Big Wheel project. The stage was set for Grantley. Learning from his previous audition he sailed through the selection process and was suddenly propelled into a whirlwind of studio sessions, gigs, TV appearances, even his first Peel Session. "We even supported The Alarm," he grins. "I was green as you could be. It was great doing all this. Jake’s a very musical guy and he made it easy for me."

A single ‘She Grew Up’ did well, but Jake Burns And The Big Wheel failed to live to its early promise and petered out. Then fate intervened and took Grantley in a whole new direction – to stadium tours in a bubblegum pop band fronted by Patsy Kensit – Eighth Wonder.

"That was mad," he recalls. "One of the guys from my teenage rock band was in a fluffy pop band called Eighth Wonder. They had just signed a big record deal with Sony and kicked the drummer out. He suggested I might like to try out."

Eighth Wonder’s manager Steve Dagger got Grantley in for a TV show and a video, and then offered a session fee to go out to Italy. Grantley agreed and became a member of the band. Meanwhile, with Eighth Wonder’s star on the ascent, Jake Burns had decided to reform Stiff Little Fingers and called Grantley.

"I had so much work on I felt I couldn’t do it. And anyway I thought Dolphin Taylor, who had been the last drummer with Stiff Little Fingers, should do the gig. He is a great drummer, very under-rated. I had also written some songs and had a deal with a publishing company, and ‘Drum Down The House’ got me a record deal with Chrysalis America. It was a big hit over there on the dance chart. Your career kind of changes when you’re in a number one band. Eighth Wonder were regularly playing gigs to five or six thousand people. We had number one records in Italy and hits in Britain, France, Spain and Japan."

But Patsy Kensit’s burgeoning acting career, bolstered by her role in Lethal Weapon II, saw the curtains come down on Eighth Wonder, just before a second album.

"It was a very different album. It was more rock than pop. There were some good songs on there. I don’t regret it at all, but I sometimes do wonder how the hell I got there. I guess you’ve just got to follow opportunities. I was getting well-paid, seeing the world and drumming. It was great."

A phone call "out of the blue", saw Grantley pick up the sticks for Scottish band Horse, supporting first Tina Turner on her European tour and then Aztec Camera, before working with Julian Lennon.

"He’d gone through a lot of drummers because all they wanted to do is talk about his dad and The Beatles. I’d been told that so kind of gave him a wide berth. One day he called me over and asked if things were alright between him and me. He said I laughed with everybody but didn’t even talk to him. I told him I didn’t want to bother him and what I’d been told and it was okay after that. He’s a great musician and we became good friends."

By this time the "kid from Fulham" was truly widening his musical wings. He worked with Soul singer Oleta Adams and Nicki French on her dance version of Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’. He was also laying down tracks with side project Percussion Orgy, writing and producing when Jake Burns got in touch.

"He rang me, asked: "Are you doing anything? Do you want to join Stiff Little Fingers?" I’d said ‘no’ once and wasn’t going to do that twice. I was really touched that he’d thought of me."

Grantley spent "months" in the rehearsal rooms alone "trying to get the songs right. For me punk is about power and precision, passion and energy. It works on a visceral level. I wanted to play the songs in such a way that the band (at that stage a three piece with Bruce Foxton, from The Jam on bass) wouldn’t notice the join. I had to raise my game. Stiff Little Fingers tracks are very precise, very powerful, there’s not much room for improvisation."

His first gig with Stiff Little Fingers was at Glasgow’s Barrowland, which has strong links with the band.

"Jake had talked about a warm up gig to ease me into the role, but I said ‘no’. Then when I heard ‘Go For It’ (Stiff Little Fingers’s pre-show anthem) being played you could feel the electric atmosphere and energy right in the bowels of the place, without being anywhere near the stage. I’d played there before and seen other bands play there, but I’d never experienced anything like it. It was a bit overwhelming."

He played on ‘Tinderbox’, Stiff Little Fingers’s 1997 long-play offering, but by the time of ‘Hope Street’ (1999) and ‘Guitar And Drum’ (2003) was writing songs for the punk survivors. Add into the mix his producer’s hat – he produced Stiff Little Fingers’s last live album ‘Fifteen And Counting’ - and it’s clear Grantley is in love with the whole process of making music. Steve also wrote a set of songs for an industrial album under the name RTZ Global with engineer, guitarist friend John Magner - this too found him in the producers chair. He has evolved his playing with Stiff Little Fingers to more of his own style over time, so that it was an organic process for his colleagues.

"They expect things to be played in a certain way. They know instinctively how the drums should sound. It’s great fun. You have to keep quite fit because it’s extremely demanding physically. We don’t mess about with the arrangements and if anything, I’ll see Jake signalling for me to go faster. I have a very spartan kit with Stiff Little Fingers. It very fast paced and I don’t need any more toms. I have two crashes, a china and a ride. I need economics of movement and I don’t want to think about anything else.

"Jake wants my playing to sound urgent, but there’s a subtle difference between urgent and frantic. Too many people sacrifice playing for pace. That’s not what it’s about. You watch Buddy Rich play and he’s fast, but he’s musical. He pulled everyone into his solos. When he went really quiet on the snare you were there watching, waiting, listening. It’s not about rudiments either, it’s about musicality."

And Stiff Little Fingers are no three-chord strummers. There’s a reggae feel to some of their recent output, an energetic re-working of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘You Can Get It (If You Really Want)’ and some melancholy, soulful numbers. Thankfully, for Grantley at least, it’s not all 100mph.

The gig with The Alarm came about through Stiff Little Fingers’s old manager, Ian Wilson, who also managed Mike Peters’ revivalist rockers.

"I get to play a bigger kit and get be more innovative with The Alarm. There’s always room for improvisation. For instance, we’ll be playing ‘68 Guns’ and in the middle Mike will go off and sing something else. You need to be watching him, listening all the time. It’s not rehearsed, it’s spontaneous and you have to go with that.

"It’s a completely different approach. It’s demanding on your imagination, for one thing. One minute you’ll be doing a special gig for about 150 fans, the next you’re playing in front of 70,000 at the San Sero Stadium. You never know quite where it will take you." Steve co wrote both The Alarms 2004 UK hit ‘45 RPM’ from their ‘In The Poppy Fields’ record and their most recent top 30 song ‘Superchannel’ from the EMI album ‘Under Attack’.

The Alarm have been busy releasing six special limited edition six-song EPs for their loyal fans from July. At the end of the year, the most popular tracks will be remixed, remastered, maybe re-recorded, for a new album. By which time, the new Stiff Little Fingers DVD will have come out – a warts ‘n’ all look at the band from Belfast. Don Letts, who directed The Clash’s ‘Westway To The World’, has directed the movie – another link to Grantley’s past. As are the books.

"I loved Slade. I was really into glam rock and Slade are a band who wrote some great music but seem to be a bit of a joke to some people. We felt they wrote some classic songs and the book tries to put the record straight."

Grantley has enjoyed a bit of down time watching other drummers in action at various clinics and has been impressed, but fears there is too much emphasis put on rudiments and technique.

"I do understand you need technique but it seems to be becoming like a science. I think it should be about creating drama, giving people an adrenalin rush. That’s why I loved what Keith Moon did! Watch Buddy. He had all the tools, but he created that drama. Drumming is an art, not a science. It’s there to entertain. Listen to Ginger Baker with Masters Of Reality and he is so groovy, it’s simple but it moves you.

"Bonham wasn’t just a heavy hitter. He was funky; he had much more finesse than people seem to credit him for these days. It should be about the music."

Interview by Mark Forster