According to reports, the show on this year’s fringe most blessed with celebrity visitations isn’t by a television stand-up comedian or a big-name two-hander at the Assembly. It involves a middle-aged man alone on a stage explaining how he took up the bass guitar. Not, you note, the electric guitar, which at least retains the tiniest vestige of glamour, but the bass guitar, that four-string provider of musical bottom.
At its previews My Bass and Other Animals has been attended by Ewan McGregor, Jimmy Nail, Joseph Fiennes, a host of 1980s’ pop stars and three-quarters of Pink Floyd, the latter contingent less surprising since the show’s author, Guy Pratt, constituted Floyd’s remaining quarter.
In a two-decade career as bespoke sideman to the stars, Pratt has also worked with Madonna, Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin and an HMV-rack of other names.
He claims to be the only man to have written a hit single in his sleep after he woke up humming the riff that took Nail to number one for five weeks with Ain’t No Doubt. When he worked with Jackson, the superstar relayed his instructions via bodyguards while hiding under the mixing desk. Madonna could communicate only by screaming at the top of her voice.
Altogether, My Bass and Other Animals is like being seated on a train journey next to the most interesting man you ever met, a gossipy glimpse behind the curtain bristling with the absurd and grandiose fixes that the famous get themselves.
On one of Pratt’s first tours, the singer Robert Palmer gave the young bassist a dressing down when he questioned the sobriety of the singer from Crosby, Stills and Nash, a warning that was withdrawn the next morning when Crosby arrived for breakfast crawling on all fours in his underpants.
“For the stars it’s a life that can teeter on the brink of absurdity because they have such a one-way conversation with reality,” says Pratt “If you’re Madonna or Michael Jackson you’re coming very close to that Elizabeth Taylor barking celeb thing all the time. Every thought or whim you have is echoed by the people you’ve employed to agree with you.
“You can end up like, say, Tina Turner when they ask you to play a song in a more ‘purple’ sort of way. One half of you wants to say, Tina, I can’t actually translate purple into a musical note. The other half knows that if you did you wouldn’t be invited back.”
There was music in Pratt’s background, though of a markedly different kind. His father, Mike, was the lyricist for Lionel Bart and wrote Tommy Steele’s 1958 hit Little White Bull; he also played Randall in the 1960s’ TV series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). But he steadfastly refused to buy his son the electric guitar he coveted in his teenage years. A bass guitar was the compromise. “It was electric, you plugged it into an amp and that was the important thing, ” says Pratt. “Also, everyone I knew had an electric guitar, so being a bassist meant you were invited to join more bands.”
It was the era of punk and heavy rock, when the bass provided little more than plodding, one-note backings. Then came disco and the bass player suddenly became king. “You’d go into guitar shops and they were full of guys playing Chic songs with girls hanging on everything they did. The 1980s were a great time to be a bass player. The drawback was the correlation between how high up you wore the bass and how funky you were supposed to be, but otherwise it was the only instrument that mattered.”
His first band were the obscure Australian combo Icehouse, whose sole hit was Hey Little Girl (“Everybody still assumes it’s a Roxy Music record”), after which Pratt commenced a long association with Palmer. He was, very briefly, a member of the Smiths, moved to Los Angeles, married the daughter of Pink Floyd’s keyboard player Rick Wright then joined the band when it reactivated after its split with original bassist Roger Waters.
“When I started playing with the big bands,” he remembers, “I got lots of calls from old schoolfriends asking how to get into the music business. I told them I had no idea, it all happened so randomly for me. Move to Ladbroke Grove and live in a squat, that was all I could suggest.”
Pratt, 43, was invited to play with Floyd at the recent Live 8 reunion but was glad a previous engagement with Roxy Music in Berlin prevented him. “It really should have been just the four original members,” he says. “Half the fans like me, I think, but the other half will never forgive me for replacing Roger. There’s no band with such a heavy, obsessed fan base as the Floyd, they’re incredibly anoraky. At concerts the first three rows are entirely guys watching your left hand to see how you’re playing something. They get agitated if you don’t do Money exactly, exactly right. I like to keep my back turned, just to annoy them.”
Even so, one of the true thrills of My Bass and Other Animals is witnessing him demonstrate extracts from One of These Days inches from your face at terrifying volume. It’s worth the price of admission.
In the show, Floyd’s current leader David Gilmour is among the cast of demanding and all-powerful misfits who have employed Pratt over the years, a brooding, schoolmasterly perfectionist. On the whole, however, the stars appear in My Bass and Other Animals as cartoon exaggerations of themselves, says Pratt. “Madonna doesn’t actually scream all the time, she just has one of those New York accents that penetrates your brain at a certain frequency. Jimmy Page doesn’t actually talk like Rik Mayall in The Young Ones. Gilmour isn’t really a tyrant. When you play something wrong he just gives you this little half smile, which is actually far scarier.”
The Edinburgh show started out as a memoir of Pratt’s career but a life on stage has accustomed him to immediate response. Playing in front of 60,000 fans is something he can do blind, but appearing before a handful at the Smirnoff Underbelly has him terrified nightly. “That’s one of the reasons I’m doing the show,” he says, “it reminds me how I felt when I first started out.”
After Edinburgh he plans to tour My Bass and Other Animals in an expanded form, highlights of which, he promises, will be a colourful tale involving Sir Paul McCartney and slides depicting a flight with Page from which Pratt had to be removed in a wheelchair. But, in one form or another, the road always stretches out before him.
“Looking back,” he says, “you realise that the official sport of touring in a rock band is moaning. You moan about everything: the hotels, the money, the sound checks. At least now I play in bands that appreciate a nice hotel. Touring is a young man’s game. As you get older you learn to respect your amenities.”
My Bass and Other Animals, Smirnoff Underbelly, until August 28
