He replaced Roger Waters in Pink Floyd. Almost got Bill Wyman's old job in the Stones. Now bass player Guy Pratt has turned his muso's anecdotes into a hilarious stand-up routine. He talks to Brian Boyd

BASS players don't have it easy. They get only four strings instead of six. They don't get to do the big widdly-widdly solos and very few of them are famous (how many can you name?). On a single-handed mission to reclaim some pride and dignity for the bass player, Guy Pratt (his real name) has packed away his instrument and taken to the stand-up circuit to convince us that while bass players may not get the spotlights, they do have the best stories.

A cursory flick through his CV shows that he has played bass with, at one time or another, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, Madonna, Tina Turner, Roxy Music and Michael Jackson. He is currently the full-time bass player with Pink Floyd. He knows his stuff.

To consider just how good he is, remember that when Bill Wyman left the Rolling Stones, Pratt was very high up on the shortlist to replace him. He heard, through the musical grapevine, however, that he was ruled out at the last moment, due to the fact that he had a "personality" and what The Stones was really wanted was someone anonymous who would stand near the back of the stage.

How good are his stories? Try this one. In his brilliantly amusing stand-up show My Bass And Other Animalshe talks about how when he was asked to work with Madonna, he was given the luxury of selecting his own drummer. He called up an old friend from Sheffield, who duly let him down the day before they were supposed to fly to Los Angeles for the recording session. Madonna wasn't happy with this turn of events, and he lost the gig. Through her management, he pleaded to be given a chance - mainly because he had told everyone that he was off to play with Madonna. At 3am he got a phone call from Madonna who screeched down the phone: "I hear you're funny. Make me laugh." A few hours later he was at Heathrow Airport with his bags packed.

"The thing about Madonna is that at least her demands were in English and were in some way achievable," he says. "When I played with Tina Turner she brought me into the control room and said I might be missing "the emotional point of the song". She suggested I make my bass sound 'purple'. I told her that of course I would - but I still don't know how to make a bass sound purple. The bigger the name, the worse it can get sometimes. When I worked with Michael Jackson, he would pretend he wasn't in the room. He would hide under the mixing desk. From there, he would whisper instructions to me through an intermediary . . . "

Pratt's show is coming down with stories such as this. Originally he had intended to take a break from his session-musician work to write a book about his musical adventures. "I just couldn't make it funny," he says. "So I decided to do a few stand-up gigs instead to see if that would help me with the book. I took the show to the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 and it went really well for me, and since then I've been touring it non-stop. It's only now that I've written the book, so this all happened in reverse."

Pratt began as a bass player during the punk wars and says the only reason he ever got hired was because his name sounded like a jokey punk rock name. He's very good on how the role of the bass guitar has changed over the years. "With punk, it was a just a one-note backing instrument and the only reason people wanted to become bass players was the band they wanted to join hadn't got one yet," he says. "In the 1980s, though, with disco, the bass became a much sexier instrument. There was a direct correlation between how high up you wore your bass and how funky you were supposed to be."

He has been playing with Pink Floyd for the best part of 20 years (except for the Live 8 show when Roger Waters returned). "In the early days there was a lot of resentment among hardcore Floyd fans that I had replaced Roger. In the first few rows of any gig they would just stare at my left hand when we were playing Money, making sure I played it the exact same way it was on the album. I used to keep my back turned sometimes just to annoy them. I think they've softened to me over the years, though," he says.

Bizarrely, since he has stopped doing session work and concentrated on his stand-up show, he now finds himself more in demand than ever with famous musicians. Aren't a lot of them put off by the fact that how they operate might now end up in your stage show?

"I have probably broken a lot of the unwritten rules already about the things that you aren't meant to talk about," he says. "I was never asked to sign any sort of confidentially clause when working with these people . . . but that might change now that they've all heard of the show."

Guy Pratt plays at the Bud Light Revue tomorrow at 9pm