Les Claypool has been talking to the Guardian about Primus, his unusual career and the new record he’s made with Sean Lennon, which he’s given the typically head-scratching title The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg Of Empathy.
Primus have been a going concern since 1984, but a couple of years later, after Cliff Burton’s passing, Claypool auditioned for the bass-playing vacancy in Metallica. “I didn’t know how popular they were,” he says and clearly wasn’t up to speed with what the thrash metallers required. “We played a song or two and I said, ‘Hey, you guys want to jam on some Isley Brothers?’ Nobody laughed.”
