“They asked me to play the E string of a Chapman Stick with a bow for six minutes. Somebody else got that gig”: Why Nick Beggs passed on his audition for Blue Man Group – and what he learned from Frank Zappa

Nick Beggs.

Some bassists play pop music, and others play progressive rock, but Nick Beggs – lest we forget, the founder member of 1980s pop band Kajagoogoo – is one of the few that plays them both. Uniquely, the session player extraordinaire also brought the low-end with Steve Hackett, the ex-Genesis guitarist, whose fearsomely complex prog-rock would make lesser players run for their lives.

This wide-angle approach is nothing less than a matter of philosophy for Beggs, as he told Bass Player in the run-up to Kajagoogoo’s reformation in 2011.