Herbie Flowers, bassist who played with Lou Reed and David Bowie and wrote Grandad for Clive Dunn
Herbie Flowers, who has died aged 86, was one of the unsung heroes of the music world; a session musician by temperament as much as profession, he played bass, electric bass and tuba on more than 500 hits by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie and Paul McCartney.
He also composed the novelty hit Grandad (1970) for Clive Dunn, set John Betjeman’s poetry to music with the drummer Peter Boita for the album Poetry in Motion, and performed the famous four-string riff for Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed’s only Top 20 single in the US from his album Transformer. By playing double bass and then electric bass on top, Flowers was able to pick up a double fee.
Flowers never had the ego to be a pop star, however, insisting that session players are “workmen, in the same way that bus drivers and teachers are”. He claimed not to be a great musician. “If something I’m playing on comes on the radio, I’ll turn it off ’cos I know what’s coming,” he told Saga magazine. He also said that only 1 per cent of his music held any value, adding: “The rest makes my toes curl.”
The evidence suggests otherwise, and during the 1970s Flowers was one of the most in-demand session players in the country. He features on John’s recordings of Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water, Bowie’s Space Oddity and Diamond Dogs, and McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street. Meanwhile, the moody bass thump to David Essex’s Rock On owes its existence to Flowers being delayed on his way to the recording studio and the line being needed on the spot.
Elsewhere, he collaborated with Bryan Ferry, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. He also worked with the heavy-rock band Rumplestiltskin, the recording group CCS and the final line-up of T-Rex, playing bass with Marc Bolan on a version of Ride a White Swan for his children’s TV show, Marc.
Bowie once told him he should work with children, advice he took many years later with a 2009 recording of the singer-songwriter’s Changes with a group of five to 10-year-olds from Lewes New School. Instead, he went the other direction with Grandad. Depending on which version of the story he was telling, it came about after he found himself next to Dunn at a party given by the broadcaster David Frost. Or they got talking after a chance meeting at a London fish-and-chip shop.
Learning that Flowers was a songwriter, the Dad’s Army star challenged him to produce an original number. At first Flowers struggled, but a “ding-dong” ring on the doorbell from his songwriting partner Kenny Pickett provided the inspiration for the number’s jaunty theme.
The result was a ballad of such sugary sentimentality that it was studiously ignored for six weeks. Eventually, however, Ed “Stewpot” Stewart picked Grandad up for BBC Radio’s Junior Choice and the song immediately rocketed to No 1, leading to Dunn’s misty-eyed and frail-voiced Grandad revue that toured the country culminating in a twice-daily spot at the London Palladium.
Trying to capitalise on that success, Flowers wrote a follow-up for Dunn called Senior Citizen. It was never released because, as he told the music journalist Will Hodgkinson for his recent book In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain, it was “a bit too obvious”. Instead, Flowers returned to his session work.
Despite countless prestigious concerts, energising recording sessions and the odd novelty number, he maintained that he was simply a jobbing musician and not a star. “Playing the bass is the happiest job,” he said. “If you play guitar or piano, people ask you to give ’em a tune at parties. And that becomes a lumber. Whoever heard of anyone saying at a party ‘Give us a tune on your bass guitar’?”
Brian Keith Flowers was born at Isleworth in Middlesex on May 19 1938, the son of John Flowers and Elsie, née Clarke. He adopted the name Herbie because “a Brian Flowers wouldn’t have ever made it in the music business”.
He spent two years during the war as an evacuee in Halesowen in the West Midlands, but his school days in London were not happy ones. He took refuge in cycling down to East Sussex with his elder brother John on their “clapped-out old bikes” on Friday evenings. They stayed with their Uncle Ben and Auntie Kath at Leawood Farm, in Chailey, and would “kip in the long cottage, which was really a barn”.
At school Flowers learnt the tuba, because “the only way to get out of playing rugby and cross-country runs was to join the school band”. Called up for National Service in 1956, he joined the Central Band of the Royal Air Force, spending nine years in uniform. To get his corporal’s stripes he needed a second instrument, and chose the double bass.
After demobilisation he played on board the liner Queen Elizabeth II, moonlighting in recording studios on both sides of the Atlantic while on shore leave. His first electric bass, a Lake Placid Blue 1960 Fender Jazz Bass, came from Manny’s Music in Manhattan, for $79. “The natural thing for a double bass player is to double again on electric bass,” he said.
In 1969 he was a founding member with Roger Coulam, Madeline Bell and Roger Cook of the cabaret-soul band Blue Mink, claiming that it only came into being “by accident [because] the studio was free”. He can be heard on their debut single Melting Pot (1969), which reached No 3 in the UK charts by extolling the virtues of the world becoming a “great big melting pot”.
At the time its lyrics, which refer to “Latin kinkies”, “coffee-coloured people” and a “Red Indian boy” were considered “silly and light-hearted”: many years later he was bewildered when mainstream radio stations avoided playing the song. “Far worse things are played regularly on Radio One these days, songs full of obscenities and violence,” he complained.
In 1979 Flowers took part in A Song for Europe, performing Mr Moonlight with another of his groups, the Daisies, but Mary Ann, performed by Black Lace, was selected for that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Shortly afterwards, he founded the Anglo-Australian classical-rock band Sky with the classical guitarist John Williams and the electric guitarist Kevin Peek, producing a handful of self-titled albums that included rock arrangements, or the “meaty bits”, as he put it, of everything from Bach to Wagner.
Flowers lived in a small 17th-century cottage at Ditchling, East Sussex, where Dame Vera Lynn was a neighbour until her death in 2020. He had a fish pond in the garden, while at the back was his bothy, a roomy rehearsal space that doubled as a bedroom for visiting grandchildren. “The milkman leaves a bottle on my doorstep every day. That’s enough,” he said, adding that he had no need for tax exile or a villa in Spain. His record collection consisted of “mostly Miles Davis and a bit of Mahler”.
Flowers had close links with the local community, teaching in schools, working in prisons and taking part in a monthly jazz breakfast at the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham. His advice to younger musicians was: “Don’t do drugs, don’t play too many notes… That’s about it.”
In 1959 Herbie Flowers married Ann Sanderson, who looked after his diary. They had a daughter, Janice, and a son Nick, who is a drummer and sound engineer.
Herbie Flowers, born May 19 1938, died September 5 2024
