David Noel Redding (25 December 1945 – 11 May 2003) was an English rock musician, best known as the bass player and occasional lead singer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and guitarist/singer for Fat Mattress.
I took up violin because my best mate had taken it up, so I did likewise.
But people are now realising why I was playing bass with Hendrix.
I'd gone professional when I was about seventeen.
Keep on playing the Experience!
We had no sleep or days off or anything like that and then, when the band became big, Hendrix became a star and looked down at us lot.
Hendrix rehearsed different drummers, before we met Mitch Mitchell.
Everybody was starting to grow long hair and wear pink suits and purple glasses and stuff and then, I suppose, some people thought we were crazy, but we weren't really crazy because we're all still here!
I wouldn't know how I would have coped with The Beatles' sort of fame.
At the age of nine, playing the violin at school, and then onto the mandolin.
The first band I was in, I think was called The Strangers. I got the sack because I was too small!
My lady, Deborah McNaughton is doing a documentary on me.
I suppose the old natural stuff would be ok, the old mushroom, but I wouldn't advise anyone to do it.
On Ain't No Telling I came up with the bass solo.
I came to join the Experience by going for an audition for Eric Burdon who was just forming the New Animals at that point, after the original Animals had broken up.
Well, I'd had the Fat Mattress earlier as a writing outlet for songs and that.