Herbie Flowers, the veteran bassist who played with David Bowie, Lou Reed and Paul McCartney among many others, has died aged 86.
Flowers, who was thought to have contributed to more than 500 hit albums by the end of the 1970s (according to the BBC), passed away on September 5. His death was announced by the family on Facebook.
Flowers was born in Isleworth in 1938. He was conscripted into military service – which, he told Uncut, gave him ample preparation for a career as a musician. “It’s my working-class background and the nine years I spent in the RAF living in billets and sleeping in bunks, that I was quite well-geared to being on the factory floor.”
As a session musician, working for producers including Shel Tamly, Mickie Most and Gus Dudgeon, “My job was just to run in, never be late,” he told us. “They’d play us the song or the musical director would give you a bit of paper with little dots on it – that’s called ‘music’ – and you play it, you go home with £6 or £9 or £12 or £24 and that was the end of your involvement in it.
“It was scrambling in at midnight after doing a concert with Eartha Kitt at the Cambridge Theatre, getting up at 6 o’clock the next morning and leaving a note on the table saying ‘Can you take the kids to school? I’ve got to be at EMI.’
“So I might have done a session for David Bowie in the morning, and then rushed to Lime Grove to be in the Top Of The Pops orchestra to lay a backing track for Cilla Black or The Four Tops or whoever it was. And then the next day go off to South Korea and Japan and wherever to be in the Royal Philharmonic Pops orchestra doing a tour with Henry Mancini conducting it. I mean, what a wonderful life!
“The era that we all stumbled into the music profession there was a lot of naivety and too many people diving in like the A&R men and the record companies and the publishers. It was a bit too big, it was a funny-shaped balloon, and at the bottom of the pile were these wonderful beautiful messes, a lot of people who just wanted to do music.”
Flowers played on Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, staying within his orbit to play bass on Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” and with T.Rex for Dandy In The Underworld.
Of that time, Flowers remembered: “We worked fast, nothing took long to do – and also – when we did the recording, there might have only been David with his acoustic guitar, and a rough screwed-up piece of paper with rough lyrics on and a drummer and a bass player. We’d put down the rough track, and then go home. But David would go onto step two and get the right musical director to overscore strings or get Ronnie Ross the great baritone sax player, who was actually David’s saxophone teacher, to come in and play the saxophone solo at the end of ‘Walk On The Wild Side’.”
Flowers reconnected with Bowie and played on Diamond Dogs and the ensuring world tour. “When we did Madison Square Gardens in New York, Sly Stone got married in the afternoon. Doris Day was invited to play the organ and she sang ‘Que Sera, Sera’, because she had a hit with it and so did Sly And The Family Stone. Then, straight after the wedding, in rolled the Diamond Dogs lot, and it was kind of… completely, beautifully absurd. People of all nationalities, all styles. I felt very proud, very safe, just looking around thinking – ‘I can’t believe my luck.’”
Flowers also played on Bryan Ferry’s The Bride Stripped Bare, Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards To Broadstreet and Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across The Water, Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson and David Essex‘s Rock On.
Flowers also found success as member of Blue Mink in the late ‘60s and, in the late ‘70s, formed Sky with John Williams.
“It was a great privilege for me to be at that level in the music business,” he told us. “I knew all these people, without the hoohah. I remember, occasionally David would say – ‘We’re leaving at twelve o’clock tomorrow, and the crew have got a day off so they’re all staying in the hotel – do you want to travel with us?’ So half a dozen times we just sat in the back of the limo, hardly said two words, because singers on tour don’t want to talk all day – they want to rest. It was quite comfortable looking out of the window at… those cactus plants, the mountains, this that and the other.”