Laurence Cottle – Bass

Something of a local hero for me, I believe Laurence Cottle comes from the Swansea area which was relatively near where I grew up. I used to see him occasionally at the Fours Bars Inn where he played a couple of times although, at this point, he was already one of the ‘first call’ guys in the smoke, alongside Welsh drummer Ian Thomas. I think I saw him a few times at the Brecon Jazz festival although I cannot remember who the band(s) were. I have never actually met him (they say never meet your heroes, don’t they?). In truth, I have always lacked the confidence to approach people as I generally make dick of myself if I do.

Cottle’s solo recordings have been mostly in jazz and jazz fusion. He was a member of the fusion quartet The Fents and appeared on their second album, The Other Side, released on the Passport Jazz label in 1987. He played with The Alan Parsons Project on Gaudi, their final album for Arista, and on Freudiana, Parsons’s final collaboration with Eric Woolfson.

Shortly after, he was hired by British heavy metal band Black Sabbath to play bass on the studio sessions that would become their 1989 album Headless Cross. Cottle wrote and played all the bass parts for the album and appeared on the music video for the song “Headless Cross” but didn’t perform live or tour with the band.

In the 1990s, he produced three albums for guitarist Jim Mullen and recorded with British jazz musicians Mornington Lockett, Tim Garland, Django Bates, Gerard Presencer, and John Graham. In 2000, Cottle appeared on the album Iommi from Tony Iommi. From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of Bill Bruford’s Earthworks. In 2009, he produced albums for Claire Martin, Gareth Williams, and Mark Nightingale. He leads his own Laurence Cottle Big Band playing a variety of standards and his own material. He does most of the arranging himself.

Cottle has also played on Eric Clapton’s 1986 album August as well as Van Morrison’s Keep Me Singing and Roll with the Punches. He also played in the band with Mike Oldfield at the Tubular Bells 2 live concert at Edinburgh Castle in 1992.

(biographical information from Wikipedia)

I came across this track as it appeared on YouTube in a Drumeo video featuring Porcupine Tree drummer, Gavin Harrison. I checked out the track on his ‘Cheating The Polygraph/Mother And Child Divided’ and thought, ‘I’ll ‘ave some of that’ so here we are. It’s a big band arrangement, done by Cottle himself, of the Porcupine Tree trach, I believe. Some monster playing (and monster arranging) from Laurence, as always.