Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Innes

The faint praise here is doing a lot of work. “Really solid” is the kind of compliment you offer when you’re trying to keep the peace: respectful, unflashy, hard to argue with. It frames Dennis not as a visionary or a personality, but as a function - the crucial component that keeps the machine running. Coming from Neil Innes, a man whose whole career lived in the space between musical craft and comic sabotage, that phrasing lands with a quietly barbed precision: the bassist isn’t romanticized, he’s validated. Innes is signaling that reliability can be the rarest talent in a band built on chaos.

Then he sharpens the point: “we really needed somebody who could play bass like him.” Not “a bassist,” but someone who plays like Dennis, implying a signature style that’s difficult to replace even if it’s not headline-grabbing. The subtext is a miniature manifesto about how bands actually work. Frontmen get myths; bassists get logistics. Innes pushes back against that hierarchy without turning it into sentimentality. He’s saying the groove isn’t decorative - it’s structural.

Contextually, it reads like a defensive clarification, the kind offered in interviews when a lineup shift, a dismissal, or a misunderstanding still hovers in the air. By anchoring Dennis’s worth in musicianship, Innes sidesteps drama while quietly rebuking anyone who treated the role as interchangeable. It’s a pragmatic compliment, and that pragmatism is the tell.