Sad news about Nic Potter who played sessions and live with everyone from Jeff Beck, The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Paul Kossoff and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason and was a member of The Misunderstood, Van Der Graaf Generator and Rare Bird. RIP Nic.

[ultimateclassicrock.com]




Nic Potter, former bassist for progressive rock band Van Der Graaf Generator, has died after suffering complications from pneumonia. He was 61.

Band leader Peter Hammill made the official announcement via his website this morning (Jan. 18), saying “I’m so sorry to have to announce that the great Nic Mozart passed away last night. Deeply, deeply missed.” Potter had reportedly been ill for some time.

Potter joined the band in the fall of 1969, as they began work on their second album, ‘The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other.’ Though only 18 years old at the time, Potter’s bass work added the perfect anchor for the group’s fluidly brilliant and experimental rock and roll. Potter had previously played with psychedelic band the Misunderstood, and was brought into Van Der Graaf by drummer Guy Evans.

He only stayed a short time, leaving the band in the summer of 1970 during the recording of their next album, ‘H to He, Who Am The Only One.’ “We did a lot of jamming, and it worked very well,” Potter states in the liner notes to the VDGG box set, going on to say they were “a very powerful unit, close to the edge even, and I was developing some different bass sounds then.”

After leaving the group, he joined Rare Bird, with whom he recorded a pair of LPs. Though no longer a member of Van Der Graaf, he continued to play on Hammill’s solo recordings and eventually returned to the band in 1977 to play on two more LPs. During the ’80s and ’90s he released a handful of solo albums and continued session work with Hammill and others, including Jeff Beck, Paul Kossoff and Chuck Berry.

“He was a natural talent driven by instinct and capable of working out instant bass lines out of material that the other players had already been rehearsing over and over” VDGG sax player David Jackson told Mju:zik magazine in 1998. In 2009, Potter began working on new solo material at Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason‘s studio with Mason engineering.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-01-25 13:11 by Silver Dagger.

Here's another obituary, written by his sister Sally Potter, in The Guardian (UK).

[www.guardian.co.uk]


My younger brother, the musician and composer Nic Potter, who has died of pneumonia aged 61, was best known as a member of the rock group Van der Graaf Generator. As a bass guitarist, he provided inventive harmonies and rhythms, created swiftly and instinctively, for the frontline musicians he worked with, such as Peter Hammill and Duncan Browne. A generous collaborator, he offered up his exquisite riffs with a quiet passion.

Nic was born in a former army hut in the grounds of the Beltane school, Wiltshire, where our father, Norman Potter, was teaching carpentry. He was a boy of great sensitivity. At the age of two, he saw a chicken being killed and said he would never eat meat in his life. He never did. His awareness of the suffering of others was always apparent.

He was a self-taught musician who played by ear. One of my enduring memories of Nic is the image of him in his bedroom playing his unamplified bass for hour upon hour, conjuring a world of music around him that was inaudible to anyone else.

His early years as a rock musician – at 16 playing with the Misunderstood, at 18 supporting Chuck Berry in concert at the Royal Albert Hall – were exhilarating, packed with adventure as he toured the world, the start of a lifelong love of travel. With Van der Graaf Generator he recorded two albums, The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other and H to He, Who Am the Only One (both released in 1970), and toured the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, the US and South America.

After joining the Tigers and touring the US, he worked as a session musician with the Beach Boys and Jeff Beck before concentrating on his own compositions. His label, Zomart, produced 11 albums, including The Blue Zone, New Europe and The Long Hello: Volume 2, Nic often collaborating with his great friend Guy Evans, the drummer with Van der Graaf Generator.

Nic painted beautiful miniatures, including limited-edition handpainted covers for his CDs.

Two years ago, Nic was diagnosed with Pick's disease but, despite his increasing disability, he blossomed and his gentle, ironic wit, affection for his friends and appreciation of his family and of every aspect of being alive made him a joy to be with. During the last year we visited two of his favourite islands with Charlotte, our younger sister, and my husband, Christopher. Nic loved camping in a small tent in howling wind on St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly and strolling by the quayside in Hydra, Greece.

He is survived by me and Charlotte, and his uncle Nicholas.

RIP Nic

Never knew Nic Potter played in The Misunderstood. I picked up a Misunderstood CD in a local indie record shop recently, The Lost Acetates 1965-1966. At that time, they were called the "American Yardbirds" and their music was steeped in R&B, but they were also turning on to the psychedelic sound and style by 1966. So Nic Potter must have played on this track from 1969--really distinctive, expressive bass lines in this song....