THE FISHER KING

Bass players with dazzling technique and a tone that leaps from the stage—or, as is more likely, from your laptop speakers—are commonplace these days, fortunately for us. We at BPlove a thuddy Motown bass part as much as the next James Jamerson fan, but it has to be to everybody’s benefit that the bass is no longer hidden in the mix in most genres of popular music. We have an audible voice these days, and one of the bass pioneers who enabled this fortunate transition was Chris Squire of Yes, whose tones were completely new and disruptive in the late Sixties to a degree that we can barely comprehend today.

It’s important to grasp this, though—so important, in fact, that Squire deserves the cover of this magazine many times over. As many of the musicians who have spoken to BPfor this month’s feature and for many previous Squire celebrations will tell you, no-one sounded like him when he first entered the limelight around 1970—apart from one other bassist: Squire’s own hero John Entwistle of The Who. Even The Ox, who predeceased Squire by only three years, relied more on overdrive and volume than his lifelong admirer, whose tones were born from a different necessity, as we’ll see.

The bare bones of the Squire saga are reasonably well known. Born in