Danny Thompson

Danny Thompson's death at the age of 88 was announced on Wednesday, a giant in the background of the English music scene from the early 60s onwards. An obituary I read somewhere yesterday said, musicians didn't get Danny Thompson to play bass on their records because they wanted some one who could follow the guitarist and hold down the root note- they got him in because they wanted Danny Thompson. His stand up double bass, born out of school music lessons where he picked up trumpet and guitar before settling on double bass, was as much a lead instrument as any other sound on the many records he played on. He played blues with Alexis Korner and then folk/ jazz with Pentangle and then on albums by Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, Davey Graham, The Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch and John Martyn and then albums by a slew of artists including Talk Talk, Everything But The Girl, Kate Bush, Alison Moyet and David Sylvian. 

Until I started looking at the list of records his bass playing adorns, I hadn't fully realised how many I own with his playing on them and his name on the sleeve. Danny's playing was melodic and inventive, basslines that told their own story, that worked for the song but very much existed in their own right too. Sympathetic but full of the man's character. 

Pentangle rewrote the folk rule book in the late 60s, updating folk music by fusing it with jazz and a modern sensibility. This of course outraged the purists. In this clip Pentangle play live in January 1971 doing Light Flight , a song I've been playing on and off for several years since Andy Bell covered it. 

In 1969 Danny played bass on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, an album I love (not least 'Cello Song which has taken on a whole new meaning for me since Isaac's death- I've written about it, before more than once, and probably will again). Time Has Told Me is the album's opening song and Danny's also there on River Man, Three Hours, 'Cello Song, Man In A Shed and Saturday Sun, his bass bubbling away behind Nick's guitar and voice and Joe Boyd's production. 

Time Has Told Me

Danny's connection with John Martyn was long and went beyond music. They were notorious drinking buddies and trouble causers. In 1973 he played on John Martyn's the fourth album Solid Air, a groundbreaking blend of folk, jazz, Echoplex guitar, blues space rock and after hours music. The title track was itself a tribute by Martyn to Nick Drake, John's guitar and Danny's bass dancing together and wrapping themselves around each other...

Solid Air

There's loads more I could post, potentially hundreds and hundreds of songs, all to some degree improved by Danny Thompson's bass playing, but these three will do for now. RIP Danny Thompson. 

Forty Minutes Of Folkishness

Today's Sunday mix is an inspired by or 'ish' mix, forty minutes of music that is folk adjacent or inspired- the melodies, the playing, a cover of a late 60s, English folk rock classic, an edit of a 60s folk song, some other songs that just feel like they're in the folk music vernacular. Most of the songs on the mix are from this year, the rest from fairly recently.  For want of a better phrase, they've all got a folk vibe. 

There's plenty more music sitting in my downloads and music folders that fall within the boundaries of this- Richard Norris and Dot Allison both come to mind so a part two may follow.

Forty Minutes Of Folkishness

• Luke Schneider: midafternoon classic
• Matt Deighton: Tannis Root
• Coyote: The Outsider
• Andy Bell: Pinball Wanderer
• Andy Bell: Light Flight
• Sydney Minski Sargeant: Long Roads
• Totem Edits 12: Feel
• Sewell And The Gong: Passing Oort Clouds
• Four Tet: Into Dust (Still Falling)

Luke Schneider is from Nashville, a pedal steel guitarist and part of the ambient Americana scene. midafternoon classic came out last year, a couple of minutes of ambient/ folk with nylon strings, pedal steel and harmonica. His latest four track release came out two days ago and can be found here. 

Matt Deighton's Villager is a 1995 folk gem, much overlooked at the time. Tannis Root is a few minutes of acoustic guitar and some woodwind, lovely modern instrumental folk inspired music that came out on Moonboot's Moments In Time compilation. 

Coyote's The Outsider was the closing song on their 2021 album The Mystery Light, an acoustic guitar sequence and the vice of mystic/ writer/ speaker/ philosopher Alan Watts. The Coyote duo were nodding their heads at Andrew Weatherall too, who wrote under the pseudonym The Outsider in the Boy's Own fanzine and who was exactly what Watts is talking about, 'you don't have to join, you don't have to play the game...'

Andy Bell's Pinball Wanderer came out at the start of this year. The title track is lit up by a late 60s folk rock guitar melody, some shuffly acoustic guitars and a sense that Fairport Convention and The Stone Roses in 1989 got in a room together. On his 2022 covers EP Untitled Film Stills, Andy covered songs by Yoko Ono, The Kinks, Arthur Russell and Pentangle. Light Flight was from Pentangle's 1969 folk- rock album Basket Of Light, an album that pushed them into the charts. Light Flight was also the theme tune to BBC 1's Take Three Girls, a late 60s/ early 70s drama about three young women sharing a flat in London. 

I wrote about Sydney Minski Sargeant's forthcoming solo album Lunga last week. The single Long Roads is folk indebted, echoes of Nick Drake and Syd Barrett in the playing and singing. Lunga promises to be one of autumn's highlights. 

Totem Edit is Leo Elstob and Justin Deighton. On Feel they take Gordon Lightfoot's 1967 song The Way I Feel and turn it into a 2025 folk/ Balearic groove. I've played this out and it always gets a response. 

Sewell And The Gong's recent album Patron Saint Of Elsewhere is one of late summer 2025's best, a lovely fusion of folk, drones, pastoral melodies, motorik drums and samples. Previously, in 2023, Sewell released a four track EP called Tonight We Fly and Passing Oort Clouds is a beautiful, folk inspired instrumental, looped melodies, acoustic guitars and a gently prodding rhythm. Oort clouds are (possibly) a giant spherical shell surrounding the sun, the stars and the Kuiper Belt, a bubble made of icy comet like objects. 

Four Tet's Into Dust (Still Falling) came out earlier this summer and has been getting regular plays round here ever since, the Mazzy Star sample and vocal sinking into Four Tet's folky melodies and skippy drum track, Hope Sandoval's melancholy playing off against Keiran Hebden's propulsion.

Bagging Area Book Club Chapter Three- Solstice Edition

Today is the summer solstice, midsummer, the longest day and shortest night, a celebration of the sun that has been observed since the Neolithic era. To mark this event I thought I'd add to my recent Bagging Area Book Club posts with some solstice adjacent reading material. In May 2019 the first edition of Weird Walk was published, specifically timed to coincide with May Day (Beltane in Gaelic). Since then there have been a further six editions, with the Number Seven in 2023 the most recent although as the photo above shows I only have issues one, three and seven so far. Weird Walk was started by three friends 'walking and engaging with the British landscape and its lore'. Forty pages printed on good quality card, well designed with quality photographs and illustrations and packed with interesting articles, Weird Walk is a treasure trove to be dipped in and out of. The first page of the first issue quotes Julian Cope in The Modern Antiquarian- 'people don't go anywhere unless there's a signpost'- and from that point has included articles on Medieval graffiti, dolmen, Dungeon Synth, flat roof pubs, a walk around Avebury, a feature on the life of 'seminal Tudor loon' William Kempe, an interview with writer Ben Edge, the folklore of booze and of cheese, explorations of portals in Wiltshire, acid folk, author Benjamin Myers writing abut Lindisfarne, and the pastoral ambient cassette sounds of the label Verdant Wisdom. 

Acid folk? Here's some Pentangle from 1969...

House Carpenter

Weird Walk is well worth looking out for and can be bought online from their website, each edition available for £5.50. 

I thought I'd throw in some more sounds for the solstice, some acid house rather than acid folk, recent releases to soundtrack tonight and beyond. First up is Temples remixed by Jono from Jagwar Ma, originally released in 2014 for Record Shop Day and recently made available at Temples' Bandcamp page. Shelter Song (Jagwar Ma Jono's Wrong Mix) takes Temples psyche rock and gives it an electronic thump and pulse, the synthline twisting its way round and round. 

Richard Sen, who compiled one of the best compilations of last year and a superb remix EP to accompany it (Dream The Dream) and who appeared on our Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album with the speaker shaking sounds of Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug, is set to release a debut solo album later this year, an album called India Man. To lead into it he's released a single, Hills Of Kashmir, a cosmic disco/ acid house thumper that goes on with little let up in intensity and is very good indeed. 

Richard also turns up today at the latest release by teenage wonderkid OBOST who's debut album Er... Hello? I wrote about a month ago. Sen has remixed Don't Want To Be Alone, a star sailing, bleepy, dynamic version of the song with Bobby's vocal on top. The EP is out today at Bandcamp. Richard's remix is worth the price of admission alone but you also get OBOST's own Jittery remix of the song and a new track, Take The Message. Happy solstice. 

The Sky Without You

The opening track on Andy Bell's solo album Flicker is a three minute piece of sound, backwards guitars, washes of backwards vocals and some phased drones, that weird, looped weightlessness that comes when you reverse the tapes and run them backwards (Andy's inspiration was at least in part The Stone Roses who had a tendency to do this in 1988/ 89 with songs like Full Fathom Five and Guernica, a rush of pure sound that the band compared to driving out to Manchester airport and lying on the bonnet of the car at the end of the runway as jets took off overhead. While stoned). 

The Sky Without You

This song and several others have been remixed for a new EP along with two other new EPs, all out in November on vinyl and digitally. The Sky Without You has been remixed by David Holmes, a man who has played a big part in this blog virtually and in real life recently. Holmes' Radical Mycology Remix takes the original's backwards psychedelia and expands it outwards and inwards: outwards by doubling the length and layering more sounds, waves and rhythms, a snare drum and then at one minute twenty five soaring off with ripples and pulses, full on psych flight; inwards in that this is psychedelia as exploration within, head music. The video is a hallucinogenic feast too.  

The remixes come thick and fast after that, versions of songs from Flicker from Richard Norris, Claude Cooper, A Place To Bury Strangers, Maps and bdrmm. The vinyl's all gone but you can get the digital release here. 

As well as the remix EP there's a four track 10"/ digital EP of cover versions, the three already released covers of The Kinks, Pentangle and Arthur Russell (the latter two of which have been songs I've gone to often this year, songs to find solace inside) with a new one- Yoko Ono's Listen, the Snow Is Falling. The EP, Untitled Film Stills, is here.  The third EP of the set is acoustic versions of five of the songs from Flicker, The Grounding Process, and can be got here. 

The Pentangle cover is Light Flight, from their 1970 album Basket Of Light. To call this jazz/ folk seems to undersell it. Unique otherworldly, celtic jazz folk might be better and is still just a list of genres. In this clip Pentangle play live on a BBC special some in June 1970, when I was one month old. 

As C commented when I posted Andy's cover earlier this year the song was the theme tune to Take Three Girls, a BBC drama which ran from 1969 to 1971 following the lives of three young women flat sharing in London during the Swinging Sixties, the first BBC drama to be broadcast in colour. 

Light Flight

Andy Bell has a new single out to further promote his solo album Flicker, much played round these parts since it came out earlier this year. The B-side to Lifeline is a cover of Light Flight by Pentangle. 

Light Flight has some lovely cascading guitar riffs and a sweetly sung lyric about getting away from it all, getting your head together in the countryside, 'Let's get away... find a better place/Miles and miles away from the city's race'. Andy throws in a superb little backwards guitar part in the middle before the pace picks up again in the second half, the jazzy time signatures and acid- folk pastoralism collapsing the timespan of the half century between Pentangle's original recording and Andy's cover. Along with his recent cover of Arthur Russell's Our Last Night Together Andy is putting some superb and unexpected cover versions out into the world. 

I'm not an expert on late 60s folk rock by any means and find some of it an acquired taste I've not fully acquired- I've got Nick Drake's LPs, a smattering of Bert Jansch albums, a Sandy Denny compilation, Vashti Bunyan's Another Diamond Day, some Fairport Convention and a Bob Stanley compiled CD called Gather In The Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968- 1974. That album has this Pentangle song on it...

Lyke Wake Dirge

An eerie, traditional English folk song, choral voices and a picked acoustic guitar. A dirge is a funeral song and a wake, obviously, is a ceremony for the dead. The song describes a soul's journey from earth to purgatory and the hazards faced making that trip. It features lots of Christian references but some think it pre- dates Christianity. Pentangle were a five piece, fusing folk, jazz and folk rock- Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson, Jacqui McShee and Terry Cox. Jansch and Renbourn shared a house and were the rising stars of British folk rock, their guitar parts interlocking and complex. I have to be in the right mood for this and maybe I appreciate it more than I enjoy it. 

It reminds me though that I did and do really enjoy this record, also out earlier this year- Richard Norris' superb Lore Of The Land album, recorded by the Lewes, West Sussex based acid- folk trio he formed called The Order Of The 12. This is the title track...