The bass players who led me to create my own bass playing style

Bootsy Collins, Jaco Pastorius, George Porter Jr. and Boris Gardiner*

I picked up my first bass guitar at the age of fourteen. My mother had bought it for me from a mail-order catalog, an English version of the Sears catalog most likely. It cost £50, a small fortune for the family in those days. It’s worth to me was not measured in currency. Just feeling its heft was enough.

One day while tuning the guitar, the bridge pulled away from the body revealing the guitar’s lack of craftsmanship. Only the neck was made of wood. The body was formed from that odd, compressed mix of glue and wood chippings that I have no name for. The screws of the bridge could find no bite in the holes left behind so I fashioned a repair using two bolts that ran through the entire body. That worked for a while.

After landing two jobs, one as a paperboy the other as milk delivery boy (yes milk was still delivered to the stoop back then,) I saved up my pay and tips and bought a bright yellow Fender Mustang bass from a friend. It even came with a hard case. The day I bought that guitar I knew right away that this was somehow the anchor, the foundation for the rest of my life. The future was not yet written then, but I never looked back.

So here I am living in a future that I never imagined. Yes, they promised us jet packs, but…

I recently posted to Facebook a few YouTube tracks from the band I formed with Barry Andrews and Carl Marsh after I left Gang Of Four — Shriekback. The response was interesting. Two songs in particular received the most comments; My Spine Is The Bass-line and Accretions, two favorites of mine. They are energetic tracks that live quietly online until a browser gathers up the required ones and zeros and reissues them, as it were, in all their spiky glory.

As I do a lot these days, I began to wonder. I wondered about the distant future, not exactly as far out as the 10,000 year Clock Of The Long Now, say a decade. Is it good that everything we do online is archived, stored and packaged, left to reside in the Cloud? Maciej Ceglowski doesn’t think this is a good thing. I have my doubts too, and yet the Cloud allowed me to track down music and live performances by some of the bass players and bands that influenced my own bass-playing style, music that I can share with you here. In this context that retrieval ability is a true wonder.

So let me pull back the curtain on just who inspired a 14 year old, music-mad youth from a small town in the north of England, to be the best he could possibly be at playing the bass guitar. And how improbably, he went on to write and record two seminal albums (so we’re told) with his band mates in Gang of Four — Entertainment! and Solid Gold. To provide context, here’s live footage of us on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test playing To Hell With Poverty. And here’s Capital (It fails us now), a song I’m particularly proud of. It might be one of our best; Andy’s trademark guitar shards threatening your hearing. Hugo’s almost impossibly intricate, muscular drumming. Jon and Andy intoning and chanting “One day old and living on credit…” and my own, three overlapping bass lines weaving around Hugo and Andy’s rhythms. The studio was called The Stone room for a reason. To add to the clatter we brought in sheets of corrugated steel. You get the picture.

Ok, where to begin with the influential bass players? Actually that’s easy — George Porter Jr., of The Meters.

As a teen, I listened to the Meters for hours on end. A saxophone-playing friend had introduced me to them, and we would jam along to their albums long into the night. This track, Hey Pocky A-Way was of special interest to me. I still recall the opening bass lines as being so sublime they hurt. The space that Porter left in his bass lines would be filled at times with horn stabs, the rhythm guitar marked constant, seamless, percussive-time alongside the drums, and the vocals fought to be heard above the bass line! That was the eye, or ear-opener for me. Around the middle of the song there’s a drop out to drums, percussion and vocal, where in rock music there would be a guitar solo. These drop outs were something we often used to great advantage in our own songs. For example, Natural’s Not In It. In an early press interview I called these drops the anti-solo.

I used to go get my haircut with my father. This was no ordinary barber shop. It was someone’s house. It was Ian Lamb’s house, a man about a half-decade younger than my father who moonlighted on weekends, cutting hair. He was a bass player who owned a very large collection of vinyl records, and he played albums as you got your hair cut. He was a jazz fan and he turned me on to some amazing music.

Through Ian I discovered Jaco Pastorious, who may seem an odd choice as an influence on a fledgling post-punk bass player. Pastorious was most famous as the bass player for the jazz-funk-fusion band, Weather Report. I was riveted by his playing. He played with such ease that it was as if his bass guitar was an extra limb. He was a complicated player. By that I mean he could be accused of playing ‘too many notes,’ but in context he found the pocket. His life came to a terrible end aged 35 after a short and sad decline. You can hear his fluid playing as a member of Joni Mitchell’s band in this live concert video. Who knows what he would have achieved had he lived longer.

Sometime around 1975, when I discovered that Bootsy Collins was only four years older than me, I was shocked. How could this be? Here was a guy who had played with James Brown in the early 1970s, and later with Parliament-Funkadelic! Unbelievable. Take a listen to We Got The Funk by Parliament -Funkadelic and just try and stay in your seat while listening. I’d like to point out here the thread that runs through all of these bass player’s work — the bass guitar is featured high in the mix, it’s not set back into the rhythm section as is often the way in recording. The bass is featured as a lead instrument. This had an effect on my own playing.

In the earlier part of our career, Gang of Four used to open some of our shows by blasting One Nation Under A Groove by Funkadelic through the P.A. system. One famous instance is when members of the Mekons, and Delta 5 danced the conga onstage with us and the late Tony Wilson before a concert in York, England. The crowd was, shall we say, rather mystified. Tony Wilson, who was instrumental in building the Manchester scene, especially Factory Records, and who we more than happy to have introduce Gang of Four at Coachella in 2005, was another brilliant man who died too soon.

Bootsy Collins had the greatest influence in creating my own style of playing, although he ran neck and neck with Boris Gardiner.

At sometime in the mid 70's, that unmatched radio DJ, John Peel, had exposed me to dub reggae. If I was a religious youth I would have considered this a revelation. I had been aware of reggae of course, but I’d never before heard of ‘dub.’ At its heart, dub reggae emphasizes the drums and bass of tracks that often, but not always, have the vocals removed. In over-simplistic terms, add tape loops and tape echo to the mix, along with some creative mixing board tricks, and there you have it.

Although Winston Rodney, better known as Burning Spear, released some amazing dub recordings, for me the king of dub has to be Lee “Scratch” Perry. He recorded and released many dub albums but his album with The Upsetters, Super Ape, has to be a contender for one of the best of all time. Underground Root, a track from Super Ape, shows off his skills. Take a listen here. That amazing bass work is by Boris Gardiner. I learned to play along to every track on the album.

I still own Super Ape and The Return Of The Super Ape on vinyl. I treasure them. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t also turn you on to Lee “Scratch” Perry’s masterpiece of production, Heart Of The Congos.) For fans of Gang of Four it may not be obvious at first just how dub reggae influenced our music, but if you remember how I mentioned The Meters above, and how their bass player George Porter Jr. dropped in and out of the mix, you’ll get the idea.

It was with Shriekback that these influences came more to the fore. Here’s an example: Evaporation.

As I get to the end here, I don’t want to leave out a band that I’ve always admired; The Band. This was an outfit that at times felt off-kilter, like an idea that never panned out, and yet they created some of the best music of their time. With The Band it was the mysterious, southern gothic mood and the bible-inflected lyrics that got to me, along with the plainitive vocal styles of each of the singers. This was a band that the members of Gang of Four could all agree (a rare event!) had something although we didn’t necessarily know exactly what.

My favorite track from them is The Weight. This clip is a take from The Last Waltz and features the Staples Singers. Definitely worth your time.

In closing I’d like to say that what appears “new” to us in many creative arenas so often is not. What appears “new” is often built on the foundations of the past. And so, when my bass playing style has been referred to as new and unique, you now know the existing cornerstones that it was built upon.

• Footnote: You’ll note that all of the bass players mentioned above are male. That isn’t me being non-inclusive of female bass players, of which today there are now many. It’s just a sign of the times back then; female bass players were not in abundance. In my teen years I had not come across female bass players. I think now it can be said that the punk rock revolution, having knocked down many of the barriers in music, brought us one of its long-lasting legacies—the acceptance of female musicians being on a par with their male counterparts. So a quick shout out to those female bass players that worked in the same era as me: Tessa Pollitt of The Slits, Bethan Peters and Roz Allen of Delta 5, Jane Munro of Au Pairs and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads to name just a few.