Simon House obituary: violinist who brought the instrument into rock
When Simon House put aside his classical training to play rock'n'roll, he never imagined that his violin could have a part to play in a world dominated by electric guitars. So convinced was he that the instrument he had spent his youth mastering had no place that by the time he joined his first band he had switched to bass guitar.
The band was High Tide and when the group's singer and guitarist, Tony Hill, learnt of House's classical background, he was intrigued by the possibility of expanding beyond rock music's basic formula of guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. 'He said, 'I used to play violin, you know',' Hill remembered. 'So I said, 'Get it!''
House did so and High Tide became one of the first rock bands prominently to use a violin as a lead instrument, creating an exhilarating interplay with Hill's guitar. 'Showing that rock violin needn't be a marginal adornment, House whips up an aggressive edge that rivals the guitar,' an AllMusic retrospective review of High Tide's 1969 debut album Sea Shanties noted.
In the fashion of the times 'to get it together in the country', House and his fellow band mates moved to a farmhouse in Dorset but after one further album High Tide broke up, disappointed by a lack of commercial success. Nevertheless, in the group's brief existence House had helped to establish the violin in the rock firmament. Other British bands such as Curved Air and Fairport Convention followed suit and incorporated an amplified fiddle into their sound.
He went on to play with Hawkwind, adding Mellotron and synthesiser to his violin-playing. Melody Maker called him the band's 'new boy wonder' when he joined the line-up in 1974. Four years later he left to join David Bowie's touring band and went on to play on his 1979 album Lodger. House had met Bowie in the late 1960s when High Tide had played gigs and festivals with the then little-known singer but the call came as a surprise. 'He phoned up one night and asked if I wanted to do a tour. I just couldn't believe it and jumped at it,' House recalled.
After two weeks of rehearsals with Bowie he went straight into the American tour, playing violin on a wide range of songs drawn from such albums as Ziggy Stardust and Heroes, and heard on the 1978 live album Stage. Once the tour had finished, he decamped with Bowie and the producer Brian Eno to Montreux, Switzerland, to record Lodger. House ended up playing violin on four tracks, including the hit single Boys Keep Swinging and Yassassin.
In the late 1980s he rejoined Hawkwind and played violin on the group's 1990 album Space Bandits. However, he was forced to drop out from touring to support the album when his daughter Holly had leukaemia diagnosed. 'So I stayed home and did my own stuff and my own albums after that,' he recalled. Holly recovered and survives him, along with his son, Thor House, a musician and producer who plays with his wife, Sascha, in the Cornish band the Disappointments.
Simon House was born in Nottingham in 1948, the son of enthusiastic amateur musicians. Keen for him to share their passion, they enrolled him for violin lessons at an early age and he was soon playing alongside his father in the Mansfield and District Light Orchestra.
His musical future appeared to lie in the classical realm until the release of the Beatles' first No 1 when he was 14. As the 1960s counterculture gathered pace, he became increasingly caught up in its heady aroma, dropping out of university and gravitating to the community of hippies, heads and freaks living in squats and crash pads in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, west London, from which emerged not only High Tide but bands such as Hawkwind, Quintessence and the Pink Fairies.
After High Tide broke up he briefly joined the Third Ear Band, a quasi-classical hippie collective with whom he recorded the soundtrack for Roman Polanski's 1971 film adaptation of Macbeth, but was forced to take a day job away from music until Hawkwind came calling.
He joined the band on the eve of an American tour, which meant there was no time to get a work visa but he gigged with them anyway. Yet it was not the immigration authorities but the Internal Revenue Service who raided a concert in Indiana and impounded his violin along with the rest of the band's equipment. It was only returned once a sizeable tax bill on Hawkwind's US earnings had been settled.
After his time with Bowie, he toured with Mike Oldfield, playing violin, keyboards and mandolin on Tubular Bells, and appeared on albums by Japan, David Sylvian and further Hawkwind projects and offshoots.
In later years he claimed to listen to very little rock'n'roll and to have returned to his first love of classical music. It would have given him considerable satisfaction that his passing was recorded not only by the NME but also by The Strad.
Simon House, musician, was born on August 29, 1948. He died on May 25, 2025, aged 76
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