By now, the Millennium Drum has hammered its way around the country's main festivals, and apart from its implicit design as half-Lambeg, halfbodhran, a pointed rhythmic episode within the Carnival stage show is a duet between a Lambeg and a bodhran, as a kind of virile, symbolic reconciliation.

Opposite Kila's Ronan O Snodaigh on bodhran, the man playing the Lambeg is John Arbuckle, a young guy from Lisburn who, at 24, is one of Macnas's key percussionists and drum-teachers.

The Lambeg is a big, deafening, politically iconic drum, three feet in diameter, and two-and-a-half feet wide. Arbuckle: "It's the biggest autonomous drum in the world, as far as I know - autonomous, in that other drums are mounted. It's big, loud, heavy, awkward . . . I never saw it as a drum I thought I'd end up playing."

Yet, coming from good loyalist stock, Arbuckle says: "It was all around me growing up, and as a kid I'd follow the marching bands and all that crack, but by the time I was old enough to join my local band, I didn't want to, I stayed away."

Instead, he started drumming at 14 for a local rock band, and he got into the more anonymous music scene in nearby Belfast where, "no one was really interested in asking where you came from". His highest point was with a ska/reggae outfit called Four Minute Warning. "We were only kids, just played cover versions or our own stuff, we weren't very good. We played anywhere which would have us, usually small pubs . . ."

Now, as a trained percussionist, he says: "In the Millennium Drum show, we're not playing traditional Lambeg, we're incorporating the Lambeg into a show with about 40 different instruments in it. We're playing mostly fast triplet rhythms - traditionalists up north would have a far more structured way of going at it."

He admits he hasn't studied Lambeg drumming in depth. "I just played stuff I remembered them playing as a kid, and with the bodhran player, we worked it out together, answering each other. There's gaps when the bodhran stick doesn't hit, when the Lambeg should, so we adapt to each other."

Of this year's Millennium Drum shows, he says: "The Belfast gig is the big deal for me. I don't think there's been many Lambegs and bodhrans ever played together in the King's Hall. The more stuff like this that's done - the whole handshake between the drums of two traditions - even if it's only on a small scale, it can only be positive. And without getting too hippyish about it, everything that's positive has to have some impact, even if it's very subtle, like just another positive drop in the ocean."

That said, with regard to the audience: "I'm facing that with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. All the gigs are free, so anyone could just walk in . . ."

He left Northern Ireland six years ago, before the ceasefires, to live in Galway. "Up to that, it was like living in a wee Orange bubble. At the time, I would have nothing to do with the Protestant band scene, and I wanted to put as much distance between me and it as I could."

Yet he has happy memories of a surer time in that culture. "During those 12th-day marches, the atmosphere is raised, and even if you just had one-fifth of that energy, you'd blow the roof off anywhere you'd play it.

"This is not me being pro anything - I'm just saying this is the way I saw it, and I've been to a lot of other festivals and carnivals, Notting Hill and all this - but I've never experienced that kind of energy, it's nearly nervous energy.

"When I was a kid, I remember as the band went past, you'd feel it in your chest - and it's visual as well as aural. Here in Southern Ireland, with all this folklore and music and poetry and writers, it's steeped in history and tradition. The Protestants in Northern Ireland only have a couple of hundred years of tradition, but what they do have is full-on blood and thunder."

THE phrase, "Blood and Thunder", comes from the way the Lambeg is played: strapped to your chest and whacked flaton with canes. "The thunder is just the sheer noise, obviously, particularly when the drummers come together in the field. But when a lambeg player is giving his all, and the intensity's going, his knuckles will tear with the speed and force of the playing, and it's like an arc of blood lashed up the side of both skins."

How about his own knuckles? "Well, I've a row of calluses right across the top of them, but my piece in the show lasts only five minutes, but Lambeg players play for hours, so by the time they get to the field, they nearly need extra knuckles.

Can he imagine other ways of using the Lambeg? "Sure. If I was getting a solo project together, I'd like to get about 10 Lambegs together, that would open people's mind - I mean, they'd wake up. I would have them going off, say, as part of a finale of a show, as a really loud battery sound. If 10 Lambeg drummers played reasonably slowly and it was milked up, every single person in the crowd, no matter how many there was, would have their stomachs moving.

"And with a big rolling beat, I'd work it up from very slow to . . . the word's not aggressive, but intense. I'd use traditional beats but progress off them. It's good to have traditional elements, but you have to move on . . ."

The ESB Millennium Drum Carnival takes place at Belfast City Hall on Saturday October 30th at 7 p.m.