INTERVIEWNATAL
Natal attraction
A full year after the range was announced, Marshall is finally shipping its Natal drums and percussion brand. Gary Cooper spoke to worldwide sales and product manager Craig Glover about his ambitions for the brand and the likelihood of seeing the launch of major British percussion brand again…
I
t has been a year since MI Pro last looked at the surprise takeover of – well, possibly of the past decade -
the mighty Marshall Amplification buying the respected, but decidedly small, Natal Percussion. If that year has seemed to have flown
by, think how much more quickly it must have passed for Craig Glover, the former drum store owner, later PMT manager, who has been charged with transforming Natal into a top-flight manufacturer of drum kits, to be sold alongside Natal’s hand percussion line.
22 July 2011
Brian Tichy, who has played with Ozzy Osbourne and, more recently, Whitesnake, has endorsed the Natal range
Visitors to NAMM and Frankfurt will
have seen a considerable Natal presence but, until now, no actual kits they can sell in their stores. However, Natal says the first shipments of its eagerly anticipated kits are about to arrive. It has been a hectic year for Glover and
Paul Marshall – the company’s highly respected artist liaison manager, who has been tasked with establishing Natal as a presence with key artists – a crucial task for any drum manufacturer. “A lot of people were surprised when they saw the new Natal kits at the shows,”
said Glover. “People had assumed it was going to be yet another generic drum kit from an amplifier company – but what I had said to Jon Ellery (who had driven the programme since the start) and Graham Young, Marshall’s joint MDs, was: ‘If you want to do that – I don’t want any part of this project’. It was always agreed that Natal kits would be designed from the ground up – not assembled from generic components. “At the start of the Natal project, I
took them for a walk through Frankfurt and I showed them main drum
ww.mi-pro.co.uk
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