The singer, songwriter and guitarist had presented BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk from 1983 to 2010.
Folk musician and former BBC Scotland presenter Archie Fisher has died at the age of 86.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist had presented BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk from 1983 to 2010.
Born in Glasgow into a singing family, he released a number of albums over the years and was among the earliest steel-string players in British folk music.
In 2006, he was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours for services to traditional Scottish music.
In posts on social media, Scottish singing star Barbara Dickson described him as “the great Archie Fisher”.
She said: “My musical mentor and huge cultural icon here in Scotland. Rest in Peace, Archie. Bx”.
Scottish BBC radio and TV presenter Vic Galloway said: “I’m very sad to hear the news about the passing of Archie Fisher.
“I met him many times at the BBC over the years & he was always a real gentleman, as well as being a great broadcaster. Obviously he was a legend of Scottish folk & traditional music as well… Archie RIP.”
Scottish folk singer Iona Fyfe said: “So sad to hear of the passing of Archie Fisher. A true folk music hero and inspiration. Rest easy Archie. Thoughts with the family and all who loved Archie and his music.”
Fisher, who died on Saturday, moved to Edinburgh in 1960 and lived in the south of Scotland in his final years.
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.
Pentangle – Hunting Song (in concert, 1971)
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.”
John Martyn ft Danny Thompson – I don’t want to know about evil (Transatlantic sessions, 1996)
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.
David Thomas, anarchic Pere Ubu bandleader, dies aged 71
David Thomas, who fronted the wild and free-thinking American rock band Pere Ubu, has died aged 71.
A statement on Pere Ubu’s Facebook page said that he died “in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio.” The statement continues: “He will ultimately be returned to his [family] home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn’ … We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can: ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock and roll band in the world.’”
That band were indeed a force to be reckoned with, channelling the raucous, raw energy of garage rock into adventurous songwriting decked out with saxophones, funky bass and Thomas’s spirited exclamations. With a post-punk spirit even before punk had properly got going, Pere Ubu were a big influence on the alt-rock that emerged in the 1980s including bands such as Pixies.
Born in Miami and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Thomas formed his first band Rocket From the Tombs in 1974, who, despite some notoriously energised live shows couldn’t find a record deal and never put out studio material. Thomas later said he was dismayed by the band’s desire to play cover versions, and “knew that Rocket From the Tombs was dead”.
Thomas then formed Pere Ubu, taking their name from a character in a play by absurdist French writer Alfred Jarry. “It was a name that wouldn’t mean anything to 95% of an audience,” he later said. “I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.”
Debut single 30 Seconds Over Tokyo was released in 1975, and the band impressed an A&R at Mercury Records, which created a whole new imprint for their 1978 debut album The Modern Dance. Described as “harsh and wilfully ugly” in Rolling Stone, it contained superb vocal performances from Thomas, such as the exhilarating rant of Life Stinks, and while it wasn’t a commercial success it chimed with a growing post-punk movement.
The band broke up briefly in 1979, then for a longer period after fifth album Song of the Bailing Man. Thomas put out a series of records away from the group, with backing bands such as the Pedestrians and the Wooden Birds, before Pere Ubu reformed in 1987. This was the beginning of the band’s most commercially successful phase, with a major label behind them, prompting minor MTV hits such as Waiting For Mary, and appearances on British TV.
They released 14 albums in the following years, with Thomas the sole founder member leading a changing lineup of more than 20 musicians. “If I called up 20 of the 21 tomorrow they’d come back. They love to work with me,” Thomas told the Guardian in 2022.
Thomas also had intriguing side projects, such as an appearance in Rogue’s Gallery, a star-studded concert series performing pirate songs (he also performed What Will We Do With a Drunken Sailor on a 2006 album that also featured Sting, Lou Reed and Nick Cave) and a 2002 West End production of “junk opera” Shockheaded Peter. A five-star Guardian review hailed his “gravitas” and said: “Thomas adds immeasurably to the freakshow appeal.”
He later lived with kidney disease. The Facebook post announcing his death stated Thomas had been recording an album that “he knew was to be his last”. The album will be completed after his death, along with an autobiography and an archival project of live concerts.
Higson worked on a number of renowned Scottish productions including Gregory’s Girl.
Veteran film producer Paddy Higson has died at the age of 83 following a battle with cancer.
She was known for her work with the director Bill Forsyth, with whom she made films including the 1981 cult classic Gregory’s Girl.
In a post on social media, her family said she had been surrounded “by so much love” before her death.
Actor David Hayman described her as “the mother of the Scottish film industry”.
Higson began her career with the BBC in the 1970s as a production secretary.
She later moved on to work with Forsyth and Peter Mullan, making films including The Magdalene Sister and Orphans.
On the smaller screen, she also produced episodes of Taggart, Monarch of the Glen and Cardiac Arrest.
Despite retiring, she continued to work on the children’s television show Katie Morag and headed up the filmmaking charity GMAC.
She also created several schemes helping other young people into the industry.
In 2018, Hayman presented her with a Scottish Bafta for for her outstanding contribution to the Scottish film industry.
Posting on social media, her children said her funeral would be arranged in due course.
They wrote: “Not only have the three of us lost our amazing and extraordinary mother, we as a wider community have lost a kind and generous, supportive and selfless pioneer.
“We are heartbroken but find comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering.”
