I’m more luvvie than rock star, says Pink Floyd bassist Guy Pratt

As a bass player he’s worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna and Pink Floyd and still plays gigs with David Gilmour, Andy McKay and Bryan Ferry. 

His father was actor and composer Mike Pratt and Guy spent his childhood visiting Elstree Studios where his father appeared in TV dramas, including starring as Jeff Randall in Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased). 

His impeccable show-business pedigree and ebullient puppy-like personality mean audiences at Pratt’s Edinburgh Fringe show about his life – Inglourious Basstard – are in for 55 minutes of a very good time. In 30 years of talking to celebrities, Pratt is the singularly most entertaining man I’ve spoken to.

It must have been difficult for him to stand on stage behind a rock god and merge into the background, although he insists that as a studio session and onstage player he’s only there to serve. “My job is to do something for other people to make your song right,” he says.

“When I write music myself, I often forget to put the bass part in as that’s something I normally do for other artists; you turn up at their session and you’re making their day and maybe making something they’ve never heard before. 

“But I’ve always been more show-business luvvie than rock star, and sometimes you do think ‘Where’s my share? Where’s Leo Bloom’s share?’,” he laughs, referring to the shyster Broadway agent in The Producers. 

Coming out from behind the bass happened when Pratt published his drily hilarious memoir My Bass And Other Animals a decade ago. He took his one-man show about being shouted at by Madonna (“TIME IS MONEY, AND THE MONEY IS MINE!” she yelled in the studio), supporting David Bowie, not touring with The Smiths and having to pretend Michael Jackson wasn’t in the studio whilst playing on Earth Song, then he went back on the road where he’s happily been ever since. 

He’s a complete natural and the super-stylish 1960s figures he grew up with have obviously influenced him; he talks about his parents with love and enthusiasm. 

“When my mum met my dad she was typing scripts; she was also working in the wardrobe department at the Mermaid Theatre. One of my earliest memories was poking around in there when Mike d’Abo was starring in Gulliver’s Travels. 

“I think my parents met when they used to go to parties in Soho. Dad use to live in this weird, surreal, squat in Waterloo called The Yellow Door.

“It was the last house standing as everything else had been bombed. He lived there with Lionel Bart and they hooked up with Tommy Steele and wrote the first British rock ’n’ roll song (Rock With The Caveman). Everyone was at that house – Colin Wilson, Joan Littlewood, Jeffrey Bernard.” 

Guy often went to Elstree to see his father on the set of one of Lew Grade’s ITV series.

“He was in all those classic series and doing all of them at the same time. He did a really good Russian accent, so he’d be the KGB guy and Bert Kwouk was his Chinese counterpart. They were good mates. The only thing that ever got to Dad about these shows was a scene where he had to fight Roger Moore in the sea. Dad looked awful but the make-up artist kept coming up to make sure Roger didn’t have a hair out of place. 

“I think Dad was in The Saint about 10 times and he usually died. I remember thinking ‘Doesn’t anybody recognise him? This is the third time Roger has killed him this season’. I loved The Saint and my parents took me to Elstree to meet Roger Moore. He sat at our table and my mum said, ‘Do you know who this is?’ I replied ‘No!’, because he’d killed my Dad the previous week.”

Guy has also been an actor, appearing in the TV series Linda Green and the film Still Crazy, written by his friends Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais, which was about a rock band of a certain age getting back together. 

“I was the bass player in the band, wrote music for it and had to show Jimmy Nail how to play bass. I was the Nail wrangler on that!” Guy was married to Gala, the daughter of Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright, and LaFrenais told Guy that a wedding scene in Still Crazy was based on Guy and Gala’s very rock and roll wedding: “All the first wives in hats and the new ones in Prada, with a baby,” observed LaFrenais, slyly but correctly. 

Pratt’s show-business stories are endlessly entertaining but he’s aware that they come from a bygone age, even his own ones about playing with big stars. “I was thinking of knocking the live shows on the head as I realised that they were a historical thing about a world that’s gone. There is no music industry, it’s just a wing of show-business now. 

“Last time I did the show, I apologised and said I’d just come back from a year’s tour with David Gilmour and nothing funny happens when you’re that age. The highlight is that you go, ‘Ooh, the hotel’s got a spa and it does a lovely buffet breakfast’. Then I found out I’d done 20 minutes of talking about how nothing happened but the stories of rock and roll – the Champneys and towelling dressing gown years – were still funny.” 

After the Edinburgh show, on which he’s been working with his friend Kate Robbins (“Cut us and we both bleed show-business”), Pratt’s going to be working on his novel, his TV project about Soho in the 1950s, and his screenplay about a middle-aged bass player doing masterclasses in Italy, accompanied by a keen young rep from his amplifier company, based on real life and in which he hopes to star. “We’ve got everything in place apart from the money!” he laughs. 

If it’s as entertaining as an hour with Mr Pratt, investors would be foolish not to shower him with cash. 

The show is at Frankenstein’s, Edinburgh, from August 14 – 27 at 5pm. Tickets: edfringe. com/whats-on/inglourious-basstard