A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
Born February 7, 1946 actor Pete Postlethwaite was best known perhaps for his Oscar-nominated role in the 1993 film In The Name of the Father. He died January 2, 2001 after a long battle with cancer. He was 64.
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.
The Observer film critic on his hero, who died last week aged 87, a man dedicated to telling stories his way and who had a wicked sense of humour
By Mark Kermode
In his excellent 1990 biography, Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, writer Nat Segaloff quotes the Oscar-winning film-maker as wryly observing: “You know what it’s going to say on my tombstone? It’s going to say ‘The Man Who Directed The Exorcist.’” As someone who has spent a lifetime declaring The Exorcist (1973) to be the greatest movie ever made, I understand how it might perhaps have overshadowed a career that was as long as it was varied.
Yet Friedkin, whom I first met back in the 1990s when I was a starstruck fan (which I remained), did so much more than helm the movie that changed my life – and the lives of many others. He proved himself one of the most fearless and inventive directors of his generation, working in a string of genres – from musical comedy to serious psychodrama; political satire to police thriller; stage play adaptations to tales of supernatural terror – with equal ease and enthusiasm.
My initial encounter with Friedkin – whom everyone called Billy – was on the phone, in 1990, when I interviewed him about his bonkers psycho-nanny/killer-tree movie (yes, really), The Guardian. The reviews had not been good, but Friedkin was typically unfazed. Back in 1977, the reviews for his Wages of Fear remake Sorcerer had also been excoriating and the film had been a major box-office flop. Yet Sorcerer is now widely acknowledged to be one of Friedkin’s finest films – a gruellingly nihilistic exercise in nail-biting suspense; a hellish journey into the heart of darkness. Crucially, Friedkin understood that not every film finds its audience first time around, and so he was equally upbeat when the erotic thriller Jade took a similar drubbing in 1995, defiantly telling me at the time that it was “probably my favourite movie”. (He later said he’d been joking, but I think in the moment he meant it.)
I met Friedkin in person for the first time in 1991, when I went to LA to interview him for the Channel 4 documentary Fear in the Dark. I expected him to be a dark and brooding presence but he was quite the opposite – casually dressed, hugely relaxed and positively playful in his demeanour. On camera he was charming and funny, talking enthusiastically about his love of Psycho (“It wrestles you to the ground”), asking me if liked opera (I knew nothing about the subject), and hilariously declaring on camera that he “couldn’t give a flying fuck into a rolling doughnut” that The Exorcist didn’t win best picture in 1974 because it was “clearly the best picture of the year”. Ha!
Our paths crossed again in 1997 after he picked up a copy of my BFI modern classics volume on The Exorcist in an LA bookstore. The phone rang, and when I heard the words “I have Billy Friedkin on the line for you”, I went weak at the knees, convinced he was calling to demand who the hell I thought I was, writing a book about his movie. To my relief, he told me he thought the book was “great” and he’d bought all the copies in the store! Relieved, I immediately proposed a documentary to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the film. The result was The Fear of God (1998, currently on BBC iPlayer) in which he and the film’s writer and producer, William Peter Blatty, looked back on their differing visions of The Exorcist, while cast and crew remembered the enormous (and often alarming) challenges of making that electrifying movie.
Throughout his career, Friedkin never shied away from a challenge, insisting that if a film had a good story – whatever the genre – then he was game. His earliest works include the 1962 documentary The People v Paul Crump, which was partly credited with the commutation of its subject’s death sentence. Decades later, I had the privilege of collaborating with Friedkin on the narration for his demonic-possession documentary The Devil and Father Amorth (2017), although despite my co-writer credit, the voice of that film remains solely and unmistakably Friedkin’s. (I remember standing on one leg in the corner of a car park in Cornwall, trying to get a phone signal to Friedkin in LA, and shouting “It’s not about faith, it’s about doubt” to the bemusement of the seagulls.)
Having directed one of the last episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965 (“Did Hitchcock give you any advice?”; “Yes, he said ‘Our directors usually wear ties’”), Friedkin made his feature film debut with the Sonny and Cher vehicle Good Times (1967), which he presciently described as a cautionary tale about “selling your soul to the devil”. He brought Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band to the screen in 1968 and 1970 respectively, and directed Bert Lahr in his final role in the nostalgic burlesque romp The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), alongside Britt Ekland, Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom. Yes, really.
But it was with the best picture Oscar winner The French Connection (1971) that Friedkin really made his mark, adapting the true story of a record-breaking drugs bust into an edge-of-your-seat thriller that took stylistic inspiration from Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), and looked more like a documentary than a drama. It was that sense of verité grit and realism that convinced Blatty that Friedkin was the only director who could bring his supernatural bestseller The Exorcist to the screen, making audiences believe that what they were watching was real.