THIS must be how The Beatles felt in 1970. Like them, our band – once called The Misfits and latterly renamed The Rockhoppers – has decided to… um… disband.

Like The Beatles, some of our members may go on to play in other bands and enjoy solo careers, but not me. It’s the end of an era.

But it’s been a great lesson – and in all kinds of ways. I hadn’t even held a pair of drumsticks before I was 40, so my message to people who regret that they never did (or any other regret) is: you probably still can.

The first thing you will learn is that while young people can pick up new things almost instantly, it’s much tougher when you’re older, but anything is possible. Even playing in a band.

A lot of people have good intentions about learning an instrument and like to think they could have played in a band, but relatively few get to do it.

As a late starter with no natural talent for it, I never expected or intended to be asked to join a band, but I’m glad I was, and to my fellow members Roy, Des and Neil, and former members Dave and Alan (and my drum teacher Paul), I owe a big thank you.

You can listen to music all your life, but if you really want to understand it, you need to play some yourself, and play with others.

Getting to see, at first hand, how a band puts together a performance is, in itself, a fascinating experience, and, as with any team, really rewarding when it all comes together.

But when you are inexperienced and are given the opportunity to play with ‘proper musicians’, you have to be especially grateful.

That’s not to say that I agree with that often-heard joke about the definition of drummers being “people who hang around with musicians”.

It’s true enough that I’ve done a lot of hanging around with musicians in the last few years, and a lot of what they’ve done has gone above my head. I have to admit, for instance, that if they played a wrong chord or even a wrong key in practice, I never spotted the error, since my brain and my ears don’t do pitch.

But really good drummers understand as much about music as any other musicians, and sometimes more.

For example, that other joke about Ringo Starr not being the best drummer in the world and, in fact, not being the best drummer in The Beatles (as Paul McCartney can drum too) belies the huge contribution he made to the success of some of their greatest songs.

The best thing about Ringo is he understood the key to any art – that, sometimes, less is more.

You can probably tell he’s my hero, and my only drumming regret is I never did get to play on a Ludwig kit like his.

But the story isn’t over. I’m giving up the huge challenge of playing in front of an audience, but have been rediscovering the reason I took up drumming in the first place, which was to play along to recordings – and not solely The Beatles – in private, for my own pleasure and education.

If you’re reading this and regretting you never did the same, or some other thing you think you’re too old for, then stop wasting time regretting it, and just do it after all.

When I joined the band – and not unlike The Beatles, really – they said they wanted somebody who was “not too good looking and not too flash”. Mission accomplished.