Long regarded as the ace of double bass, the late Danny Thompson celebrates the highlights of his wide-ranging musical career with his 2012 album Connected, which he discussed with Prog on its release.
“I didn’t want it to just be a collection of big names,” says Danny Thompson of Connected, his album of musical collaborations. “It needed to be complete in itself. I wanted it all to make sense and feature great songwriters.” And importantly, as the name suggests, people with whom Thompson has had a personal connection.
He chose recordings that he particularly loves, and which demonstrate him serving the song rather than showing off his virtuosity – “flying about catching my cufflinks in the strings,” as he puts it. There’s no Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Rod Stewart or David Sylvian on show; but if some of the names are less stellar, there’s no compromise on quality in this handpicked selection of musical compadres, including John Martyn, Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch and Martin Simpson.
Thompson’s extraordinarily diverse CV is testament to decades as the leading in-demand double bass player. “It feels like the discography was put together by my granny!” he jokes.
He played in Ronnie Scott’s house band for more than a decade alongside Tubby Hayes and Phil Seamen; in Alexis Korner’s hugely influential Blues Incorporated; in a trio with Tony Roberts on sax and John McLaughlin on guitar; as a member of pioneering jazz/folk band Pentangle; with the great John Martyn on his series of groundbreaking 70s albums and with scores of other musicians and singers – including recent sessions with Blur’s Graham Coxon. And let’s not forget one of his rare appearances playing bass guitar, on Cliff Richard’s Congratulations, runner-up in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest.
In the 60s, Thompson was a sought-after session player seen purely as a hired hand; “a tool in their work box,” as he puts it. “The phone would ring and it would be, ‘Can you get to Olympic Studios for 10 till one, and then EMI for two to five?’ It was three sessions a day with stars such as Engelbert Humperdinck, Shirley Bassey and Matt Monro. That’s bread and butter; but it’s also great experience because you don’t know what you’re going to get until you get there. They whack the music in front of you and you just have to play it.
“It gave me discipline as a musician, because you weren’t that free to express yourself. If it’s John Williams and an orchestra you can’t say, ‘I’ll just stick a bit of this in.’ You have to play the charts. And if it isn’t you they’ll get somebody else. It also really makes you nervous. I know a lot of people had serious health problems from that. You got three hours to do that piece and if you muck it up you’ve got an orchestra looking at you. It’s frightening.”
One of the album’s most affecting is No Love Is Sorrow, one of Thompson’s own songs, which he recorded with Jansch in Paris in 1972. He found it when going through his “big trunk” of tapes. “I did an arrangement for the orchestra and you can hear me counting in my fantastic French,” he says. “He did it in one take. I had a copy of it on two-inch tape and forgot all about it. The terrible thing is Bert never heard it.”
The centrepiece of Connected is a 13-minute in-concert version of Outside In with Martyn from 1975, which also features free jazz drummer John Stevens. Martyn was drawn to Thompson’s jazz background and spontaneity, which had a liberating effect on his own music. The song achieves momentum with the juddering rhythms of Martyn’s guitar fed through an Echoplex, before it all breaks down to a subtle, near-freeform section underneath his vocals.
Thompson’s own playing is particularly impressive: nimble melodic figures on the higher strings; rich, rounded notes that bounce lightly upon the rhythm; and sonorous slides that dig into it. It’s hard to reconcile such a sensual performance with Thompson and Martyn’s recreational habits. They had a well-deserved reputation back in the day as being a two-headed monster.
“We were all completely and utterly out of it,” Thompson confirms. “Brandy and crème de menthe I remember very well – Pernod and Irish whiskey was another one. People used to say, ‘How on earth did you put up with him?’ I said, ‘How did he put up with me?’ It wasn’t one-sided.”
Alcohol-free for 20 years now, he marvels at how they ever got on stage, let alone played so well. (And being the 70s, someone from the audience would present Martyn with a spliff mid-set, just to add to the fun.)
“The highlight for me was John,” Thompson says. “In a musical career of 55 years plus, that was the most magical time of the lot. When I think of him now I really, really miss him. He lost his leg and then we had some time together in New York to get his new leg. I’ve got a picture of me holding the leg and we had a play in Joe’s Pub.
“That was the last time I saw him, just before he died in 2009. We had our last waltz in New York, me wheeling him around in his chair. It was great. We weren’t mumsy – we never used to say, ‘I love you, man,’ and all that crap. But he said to me in New York, ‘You’re my best friend.’”
Looking back, wasn’t Thompson’s career strategy a bit strange, in that he made a heavyweight reputation as a jazz player and then gravitated towards song-based music? “If you play jazz and play with a folk group, it helps both types of music,” he replies. “But jazz people in the clique said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ I said, ‘Because it’s great.’ They said, ‘But what about bass solos?’ I said, ‘That’s all I do!’”
Although that’s stated slightly tongue-in-cheek, Thompson has found playing songs liberating in itself; rather than just following the chords in a jazz tune, he interacts more with the vocal melody. A perfect example on Connected is Martin Simpson’s One Day. Jazz guitarist Martin Taylor had written a few lines about his son who’d taken his own life in his 20s. He gave them to Simpson, resulting in a beautiful song on which it feels that, with smooth purring notes, Thompson duetting with Simpson rather than backing him.
If I start playing out of tune or getting an attitude, it would be time for me to pack it in. But I’m playing with lots of young people who inspire me
It feels that a bittersweet or melancholy feeling runs through many of the songs. Thompson answers with reference to American singer-songwriter Darrell Scott – who also plays in Robert Plant’s Band Of Joy – and his marvellously weathered- sounding Come Into This Room. “He’s singing about that moment: come into this room, we’ll make some music. Because that’s what we did. You say ‘melancholy;’ I look back and I’m happy about that time together. But you also think we’ll never have that feeling again, because even if you set it up it ain’t ever going to be the same.”
Are there likely to be further delvings into the tape trunk? “If people want to hear more I’ve got loads,” he says. “Allan Holdsworth, McLaughlin, Duffy Power doing Hound Dog. I said to my wife, ‘When I snuff it, don’t chuck all that stuff out – there’s there’s some really good gear there.’”
Connected suggests that his true role is collaborator rather than bandleader. But surely there could have been a Danny Thompson Band for the past 25 years if he’d wanted? “I don’t want to become cabaret; I want to keep moving on and, although I’m getting on now, I still want to do new things. If I start playing out of tune or getting an attitude, it would be time for me to pack it in. But at the moment I’m playing with lots of young people who inspire me.”
One of his favourite songs on the record is the title track, on which he plays with contemporary American blues singer Eric Bibb. He remembers being one of the first kids in school to be into blues music, and a moment of epiphany hearing Sonny Terry’s Train Whistle Blues on the radio. He marvels that he later got to back Terry, and other great blues artists such as John Lee Hooker and Little Walter.
“You get people who say they’re blues players, British blues players, and people don’t know the difference until they hear someone such as Eric Bibb. You’ve been playing what you think is the blues for 20 years, then you hear Eric play two chords, and he’s the real thing.”
Connected is further testament to the fact that, although Thompson has played every style imaginable, his playing has never sounded incongruous. It’s pretty remarkable. “It’s weird when I look at the list of people – Joe Strummer, Gomez, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. If you’d said to me, ‘Who will you never work with?’ I’d have thought, ‘Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey!’
“I got a call from Roger saying, ‘Would you do the Emirates Stadium as The Acoustic Who?’ I dug out all the Who LPs and listened to John Entwistle, bless him, and you realise what a great player he was. I’m standing there playing the double bass to Pinball Wizard, and thinking, ‘Is this really happening?’
“Or I’m working with Red Rodney, who actually played with Charlie Parker. I’m standing next to the geezer who played with Charlie. Blimey! I’ve been really, really lucky and privileged. It is mad, isn’t it? If you go folk or blues or jazz or rock, I’ve actually been there. And I’m still in there.”
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