By the Eighties he had designed and commissioned his instantly recognisable ‘Buzzard’ basses, firstly from Status and then from Warwick, playing them with a fully bizarre ‘typewriter’ tapping/plucking style that was entirely his own.īy the '90s Entwistle was taking a step off the gas a little, semi-retiring to his country manor and coming out to record solo albums and tour with The Who. Entwistle was just getting started, though, and spent the next few years honing an unbelievably fast, accurate playing style that was way ahead of its time. Still a tricky exercise four decades later, the solo opened the eyes of bassists and producers to the possibility of the ol’ four-string actually being playable above the seventh fret. He was that rare musician – a bassist whose status as a pioneer matched his technical ability – and first made bass history at 21 when he added a solo to his band’s 1965 single ‘My Generation’.

The Ox, as the stoic John Entwistle was labelled by his more extrovert bandmates in The Who, was a man whose influence on the bass world is difficult to exaggerate.

Bass hunter song list