Thirty Seconds of Applause
The phrase is "session musician" and it does most of its work by sounding like a career.
Vic Enright played bass on somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred and twenty records between 1968 and 1989. He does not know the number. Nobody does; the paperwork of the era was not designed to let anyone find out, and in several cases was designed to prevent it.
He was paid a flat fee. Nine pounds a session in 1968, rising to about sixty by the mid-eighties. No royalties, no credit, no residuals. This was the deal, and every player took it, and the ones who tried not to did not get called.
He is on four records you would know without being told. He is on one that has been played, by a conservative estimate, more than a billion times.
He gets nothing from it and never has, and this is not a scandal — it is simply the contract he signed in 1974 in a room in Denmark Street, aged twenty-three, and which he understood perfectly at the time, and which he would sign again because the alternative was not signing it.
He is seventy-nine. He lives in Margate. He taught bass until 2016.
On bitterness
He gets asked about this and it annoys him more than the money ever did.
The assumption is that he must be eaten up. That there must be a version of the story where he sits in a flat listening to a song on the radio and clenching his fists.
There isn't. He played the part. He knows he played it well. He was in the room when a thing was made that outlived everyone in the room, and about four hundred times he did something that took him twenty minutes and has been in people's heads ever since.
What he says, when asked, is: "I was there."
What he does not say, because it sounds ungrateful, is that he would quite like someone to have written it down.
The tapes
In 2019 a studio in west London was cleared for redevelopment and a man from an archive turned up because that is what those people do, and in a cupboard there were one hundred and forty reels that had been listed on no inventory since 1981.
They were multitracks. The separated parts.
This matters enormously and takes some explaining. A finished record is a mix; you cannot hear who did what. A multitrack is every instrument on its own channel, and on the box of a multitrack, written in pencil by a bored engineer in about 1976, is very often a list of who was in the room.
Twenty-three of the reels had Vic's name on the box.
What happened next
The archive, which is small and has four staff, did the work over three years.
They cross-referenced the boxes against the union session sheets, which survive in fragments, and against the memories of eleven surviving players, and they built a database of who played on what, and in 2023 they published it.
It is not a legal document. It changes nobody's royalties. The contracts are the contracts.
What it is, is a list.
The Barbican, in May
There was a concert. Not for Vic; for the archive, to fund the next phase. Nine surviving players from that era, most of them in their seventies and eighties, playing four songs each with a young band who had learned the parts note for note off the multitracks.
Vic did not want to do it and was talked into it by his daughter, who used the phrase "you're doing it," which ended the discussion.
He played the bassline. The famous one. Eight bars that took him about twenty minutes to invent in 1976 and that he has never once been asked to play in public.
He got to the end of it and the noise from the hall did not stop.
He stood there. Then he looked at the floor, which is what he does, and then he looked up again because it still had not stopped.
Thirty seconds, near enough. His daughter timed it afterwards from a phone video, because she is her father's daughter and wanted the number.
Thirty seconds, for eight bars, forty-nine years late.
He said afterwards that it was very loud and that the young lad on drums was excellent and that they'd had to move the monitor because he couldn't hear the kick.
He has not watched the video.
His daughter has watched it two hundred times.