"Victoria"
Danny Thompson's initial experience of bass playing was with a skiffle group, with whom he played a tea chest bass (a bass he built himself out of a tea chest, which folded up so he could carry it). In the early 1960s he bought a second-hand double bass from an old man in Battersea who let him have the instrument for £5 (despite the fact that it was worth much more than that), on the basis of his keenness to play it. He christened the instrument "Victoria" and it has remained his instrument of choice ever since. The bass was built by Gand, a French luthier, in 1865.
Victoria has been Thompson's sole instrument for the majority of his career, aside from three tours playing bass guitar for Roy Orbison in 1963. In response to increasingly stringent airline luggage regulations, Danny acquired a Czech-Ease travel bass in early 2007. Victoria is now used for all his work in the UK, with the new bass, named "Alfie", used for all international engagements.
In the early part of the 1980s he worked closely with documentary film-maker, Roy Deverell and composed music for two of his award-winning films, Echo of the Wild and A Passion to Protect. The films are about John Aspinall's pioneering work with endangered mammals.
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Famous quotes containing the word victoria:
“Sometimes my wife complains that she’s overwhelmed with work and just can’t take one of the kids, for example, to a piano lesson. I’ll offer to do it for her, and then she’ll say, “No, I’ll do it.” We have to negotiate how much I trespass into that mother role—it’s not given up easily.”
—Anonymous Father. As quoted in Women and Their Fathers, by Victoria Secunda, ch. 3 (1992)