The bassist, who has died aged 86, was an extraordinary and wildly versatile presence in British music, bringing his personality into everything he played
By Michael Hann
Who was Danny Thompson? Was he the man who brought jazz to British folk as a founder of Pentangle, as a collaborator with John Martyn, with Nick Drake, with June Tabor, the Incredible String Band and more? Was he the bringer of class to the mainstream, recording with Cliff Richard, Johnny Hates Jazz, Rod Stewart, T-Rex and others? Was he the elder adding gravitas to the recordings of younger pop experimentalists and formalists: ABC, Everything But the Girl, Graham Coxon, the The, David Sylvian, Kate Bush and Talk Talk?
Danny Thompson was all of those things because he was always Danny Thompson. Artists worked with him not so they could have someone hold down a root note in 4/4 on an electric bass; they hired him to be Danny Thompson. And Danny Thompson was extraordinary: a man who played the upright double bass as if it were a lead instrument, who may have been an accompanist but who was never a sideman. Whoever he played with and whatever he was playing, he sounded like himself.
Thompson, who has died at the age of 86, was a bass player from the beginning. He made his first bass from a tea chest when he was 13, using stolen piano wire for strings and fitting a hinged neck so he could fold it to catch the bus. By 16 he was playing in Soho clubs, and after his two years’ national service he went on tour playing electric bass for Roy Orbison – the only time he ever played electric bass.
Although his first recording was with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, on the album Red Hot from Alex in 1964, unlike so many young musicians of the British blues boom he was no purist: playing was his job. He loved both jazz and folk, and Soho in the mid-60s gave him an ideal chance to straddle the two scenes. His freewheeling, melodic, propulsive style was an accident: he simply didn’t have an ear for root notes, so his fingers went where his ears led him.
With Pentangle, which he founded with Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Terry Cox, he helped revolutionise British folk music. If Folk, Blues & Beyond, the 1965 album by Davy Graham on which Thompson played, had shown that folk’s limits could be pushed, Pentangle exploded them: a group of virtuosos fascinated by the traditional repertoire but with no care for blind respect of tradition.
Folk purists condemned Pentangle – and their contemporaries Fairport Convention – for what they perceived as a bastardisation of the songs preserved by Cecil Sharp, Francis Child and the other folk song collectors of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But what Pentangle and Fairport did with folk songs was revolutionary: they returned them to their original state of being ever-evolving. And by crossing folk with jazz and with psychedelia and with blues, Pentangle provided a version for their own times, and one that still sounds remarkable today.
During the Pentangle years, Thompson became known as what he would later call “a bit of a raver”. It didn’t stop him becoming a hugely productive and in-demand session player, especially with John Martyn, though the fact of his closeness with Martyn reflected the raving. The two of them formed what the writer Mark Cooper called “a notorious double act as they slurred their way between sentimental tenderness and barely camouflaged rage”.
By 1976, Thompson was telling Karl Dallas in Melody Maker that the phone wasn’t ringing as much as it used to. “I’m thought of as a wild animal at the moment, but that’s my nature, innit? So they wanted to calm me down and become an introvert, which would have fazed everybody, I think, if they’d seen me walking around like an introvert.”
The following year, he confronted his alcoholism, but it took until the 80s for the phone to start ringing again – it was Donovan who called first, but then the new generation started getting him in for sessions. He played on The Dreaming and Hounds of Love for Kate Bush. But they didn’t have to be high-end jobs: he played on Shelleyan Orphan’s debut album, Helleborine, because he was so tickled by the love for Nick Drake shown by the band.
It wasn’t until 1987 that he released his first album under his own name: Whatever. In it you could hear the threads of Thompson’s musical life pulled together to his own design – melody lines from English folk played as if by a man from New Orleans. And while he played plenty of sessions, he was by now a name in his own right and his name started appearing alongside others on album covers – Richard Thompson, Eric Bibb.
It was entirely fitting that the last record with his name on it was so true to character. First, it was plainly a job. Second, it reunited him with Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee. Third, it was not at all what one might have expected, even if it was completely true to his interests: Song of Joy for Christmas – An Album of Christmas Carols.
