DANNY THOMPSON

1939 - 2025 The fabled upright acoustic bassist leaves us with a thousand tales of misadventure and an extraordinary body of music that weaves through the rock 'n' roll era

- Henry Yates

First, a disclaimer: any attempt to exhaustively chronicle the life and times of the late Danny Thompson is a fool's errand.

The talismanic British upright bassist - who died last month at the age of 86 - filled his years with music and misadventure on the grandest scale, lending the fluid thrub of his instrument (a great brown barge nicknamed 'Victoria') to a head-spinning thicket of projects and collaborators.

It speaks to Thompson's versatility that fans have long debated not only the main event of his six-decade career, but even the genre he operated within. Should the headline be his provocative late-60s work with prog-folk iconoclasts Pentangle? The seminal Five Leaves Left (1969) and Solid Air (1973) albums recorded respectively with the ethereal Nick Drake and Thompson's fellow carouser, John Martyn?

Some will point to the belated solo jazz albums or late-period partnership with Richard Thompson (no relation). Still others - while claiming ignorance of Thompson himself - can't have missed the decade-straddling A-list sessions fairydusted by his lyrical low-end, from Rod Stewart's Maggie May (1971) and Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love (1985), to Amplified Heart (1994) by Everything But The Girl and Graham Coxon's The Spinning Top (2009). “Danny brought greatness,” said the Blur guitarist, “to everything he played.”

Thompson himself had to laugh during a 2012 interview with Prog magazine, as he thumbed through a back catalogue spanning from Cliff Richard’s Congratulations to the Thunderbirds theme. “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 there.”