Keanu Reeves’ favourite bass player of all time: “Romantically epic”
You’d think that being an actor leaves little time for anything else, what with the amount of hours one has to dedicate to filming, attending events, and doing press, but many stars find room for other endeavours, too. Look at Keanu Reeves, who can be found playing bass in the band Dogstar when he’s not portraying action heroes or hitmen.
The actor rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s with roles in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Point Break, and My Own Private Idaho, eventually becoming an established action star with movies such as Speed and The Matrix. However, he’d never been able to shake an interest in becoming a musician, finding time to squeeze in garage jams with friends when he wasn’t working.
Reeves initially met drummer Robert Mailhouse in a supermarket and they became friends, eventually forming a band with several other mates that would take them from playing together for a bit of fun to performing at festivals like Glastonbury and opening for icons like David Bowie.
The band released two albums, Our Little Visionary and Happy Ending, before breaking up in 2002, only to reunite for the album Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees in 2023. Allowing Reeves to find a musical outlet away from Hollywood, the band saw him travel the world to perform to fans in places as far as Japan.
You might have expected Reeves to be the frontman, considering his star status, but he felt more at home picking up the bass and standing away from the middle of the stage. The actor once revealed to Rolling Stone that he “wanted to learn to play bass,” because he “liked the sound of the bass – I found my ear following it in music.” So, in 1987, before he became a world-famous Hollywood actor, he bought himself a bass and started practising.
There was one bassist that stuck out to Reeves during his early days of learning the bass, inspiring him in his approach. Rather unsurprisingly, the actor cited Joy Division’s Peter Hook as his major influence, describing his style as “kind of a bass line but a melody line. And kind of romantically epic, in a gothic kind of way.”
Joy Division were one of the most prominent post-punk bands to emerge from England in the late 1970s, with the band releasing just one studio album, Unknown Pleasures, before lead singer Ian Curtis’ suicide, resulting in the release of their second album, Closer, a few months after his death. Known for their dark and often brooding sound, the band’s music was hugely influential despite their short tenure, and they remain one of the most impactful bands of all time.
Hook’s bass lines are instantly recognisable all these decades later, and Reeves has certainly found inspiration from them. He cites the haunting ‘Atmosphere’, the bittersweet ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Ceremony’ – later re-recorded by the band as New Order – as his favourite Hook moments. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, the actor even picked ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ when asked to pick just one song to listen to for the rest of his life. Clearly, he’s a big, big fan.
