It’s summer 1986. You decide to learn bass guitar. You’re skint (you’re 11 years old). You notice a bass advertised in the Essex Chronicle for £70. So you get a cash advance on your Christmas present and make up the remainder with what you’ve saved from your school-dinner allowance. You buy the bass. It’s barely playable. First problem solved. Second problem: how do you play it? Nobody seems to know anything about playing bass, so you listen to the rumbly bit in the background of various bits of music and try to work out how that relates to the so-called instrument in your hands. Remember at this point that instantaneous access to the entirety of recorded music is 25 years in the future, as is access to online tutorials, so you’re obliged to sift the musical rubble of radio, jumble sales and the record collection of your mate’s big brother (your actual mates are more into trainers) in the hope of finding music where the rumbly bit gets interesting.



This is some of the music I discovered doing just that.

Chic – Good Times

I originally heard this song on a hip-hop compilation when I was nine, chopped up in The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel. To me it was as if Flash had somehow rearranged bits from Another One Bites the Dust into a song that I liked. As soon as I heard Chic’s original it became clear where Queen had (not quite) got the idea from. Years later, I used to play manic variations on this to make my mates laugh while we were getting high (on life).

Led Zeppelin – The Lemon Song

Led Zeppelin II is the first record that I learned to play bass from. I wanted to listen to this cassette from my dad’s tape stash because the name of the band intrigued me, but once I heard it, my attention switched to the bass – the whole record seemed to revolve around it. I had to work out how it was done. This was just after I bought my first bass so I didn’t really know how to play at the time, but I sat there working out what notes in the bassline corresponded to which frets on the guitar till I could play along.

Japan – My New Career

One of my strongest early musical memories was seeing Japan perform Ghosts on Top of the Pops. It really haunted me – in my little head I thought they were kind of like Duran Duran, but in a permanently bad mood. Years later I came to see that their enduring appeal was partly to do with Mick Karn’s unique bass playing – one of the few fretless players not sucked in by the Jaco Pastorius tractor beam. He plays wonderful atonal passages in among disjointed melodies, which tend to play across rather than with the rest of the band.

Metallica – Orion

As a young metaller I imagined Metallica’s bassist Cliff Burton had a similar outlook to me – more into the noise and weirdness of heavy metal than the stupid macho crap about death and bombs. The moments when Burton comes to the fore are the most interesting bits of their early records (he was killed in a tour bus crash in 1986). He played outer space effects on Call of Ktulu and crazy lead bass on Anaesthesia, but the solo in the middle of this piece is simple and sublime – and a massive influence on my early attempts to play bass in a more melodic way.

Yes – Heart of the Sunrise

After school one day a guy starting talking to me about the bass in my hand. It turned out that he was in a band and they needed a bassist. It also turned out that there was a band member who was a Jehovah’s Witness who wasn’t allowed to do gigs (all of the time I was in the band I never actually met him), but who would nonetheless speak his opinions through two of the other members. It was a prog rock band so it was supposed to be confusing I guess, but nonetheless they introduced me to some very weird and wonderful music including this incredible song featuring monolithic bass from Chris Squire. As for the school prog band, the rest of the group also became Jehovah’s Witnesses and they had to disband.

The Who – My Generation

I liked the Who because it seemed that sonically the bass player was more important than the guitarist, but also because they smashed up guitars, which was only topped by Hendrix setting them on fire. Destroying instruments seemed to me even better than playing them, especially as smashing a guitar up does itself make quite a special one-use-only sound. I smashed up my acoustic guitar when I was 13. Why would anyone want to be a creative when you can be a destructive instead.

Jaco Pastorius – Come On, Come Over

There was a kid at my school who was suspected of being something of a bullshitter, so when he said, “My little brother has a bass guitar like Mark King’s”, I wasn’t inclined to believe him. Until he brought it into school. He also brought in a copy of Jaco Pastorius’s first album, which turned out to be the more significant of the two items. Like him or not, Jaco totally reinvented the instrument and although I hate the school of bass playing that essentially parrots his ideas, you can’t blame him for that. Or can you?

The Jam – Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

When I was a teenager, I had a genre in my head called “London Music”. It signified everything that shunned the mediocrity and rightwing reactionary bullshit of the suburbs. I had been to London a few times, but this “London” was mainly a figment of my imagination, and I imagined that the Jam were more “London” than anybody. It was so much fun playing along to their records, jumping about in my bedroom imagining I was doing some sweaty gig with loads of “London” stuff happening, whatever that was.

Senseless Things – Easy to Smile

I remember seeing this song on Top of the Pops and the next day I went out and bought it. I wasn’t really into indie music as a teenager, but this sounded like they had swapped staring at their shoes for downing a bottle of White Lightning cider, doing a load of speed and running around the local adventure playground at 500mph. The bass player on this tune is absolutely having it large all the way through – another song that had me jumping around my bedroom while hammering the life out of my bass.

Herbie Hancock – Watermelon Man

I used to love playing along to the whole Headhunters album … but what can you say about Herbie? The man is so talented he is beyond description, yet it’s the bass on this tune that speaks to me. Paul Jackson is the ultimate Fender Precision player and in this song there’s a veritable abundance of Paul’s well-irrigated slabs of stony P-bass soil for Herbie to grow his electric piano sunflowers in.

Shobaleader One, Squarepusher’s full live band, make their world premiere at the Troxy, London on 24 October, where they will play tracks from classic Squarepusher records released between 1995 and 1999. Squarepusher will also play a solo set of his recent album, Damogen Furies, in its entirety. Details here.

