Leo Lyons

The Ten Years After bassist survived Hamburg's Star-Club, sparked the blues boom, achieved immortality at Woodstock – and is still going strong at 82. “Music,” he says, “it’s a drug...”

- Words Jamie Dickson & Henry Yates Photography Phil Barker

Is there a more unassuming rock star than Leo Lyons? In an industry often filled with braggarts and blowhards, the soft-spoken 82-year-old bassist lets his lifetime achievements do the talking. And what achievements they are. Having partnered guitarist Alvin Lee – aka ‘Captain Speed Fingers’, for self-evident reasons – at the dawn of the 1960s, Lyons shipped British blues across the water with Ten Years After, before igniting Woodstock with the warp-speed rendition of I’m Going Home that stands among the festival’s most electrifying moments.

Reputationally, Lyons was set for life that day in August 1969. But in truth, Woodstock is just one chapter in the folklore of a man whose serendipity has often seen him dubbed ‘the rock ’n’ roll Forrest Gump’. Today, the bassist fills our dictaphone with his war stories, leading us from Hamburg’s Star-Club to the studio control rooms where he produced history’s biggest bands. But it all starts with a kid spinning vinyl records in the Nottinghamshire market town of Mansfield.

When did you sense you might become a musician?

“[Laughs] At nine years old? In a band, it’s 98 per cent rejection. But you have to keep going. And as long as you’re prepared to give up everything – girlfriend, car, place to sleep, shortage of food, et cetera – then that dream sustains you. It got to the stage where everybody else in the band left and it got down to just Alvin and I.

“There were a few moments where I veered a bit. I started playing sessions. And everyone thought I was mad to stick with the band because you could do two or three sessions in London – or go all the way up to South Wales with the band to play on the end of the pier for much less money. But I stuck with it. And nine years later, we started to make a living, rather than an existence.”

How did the bass become your instrument?