Guy Pratt is hosting a one-hour show on the function and meaning of the bass guitar at the Edinburgh Fringe.

"When I started out," he says, "bands recruited a roadie and a lawyer before a bass player". Yes, and there was always a good reason for that.

Under any other circumstances, a show about the bass guitar would have you running for the hills. But this is different. First, the very anonymous Pratt is, if you know your bass players, quite a big noise in the musical world. Who else do you know that has played with both The Smiths and Pink Floyd? Second, Pratt is pretty bloody hilarious.

He begins by telling us that he began playing the bass during the punk wars. He always got work with bands because people at the time thought his name (which is his own) was a hilarious punk invention. As a bass player for hire, he has worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Robert Palmer and even Mohamed Al Fayed. He is currently Pink Floyd's bassist. His show, My Bass and Other Animals, has stories featuring all the above, not necessarily gossipy little snippets but fantastically observed vignettes from the anonymous session player.

A show about the electric guitar would be a simple thing, but the four-stringed instrument that provides the musical bottom is a different proposition. What Pratt skilfully does is show how the role and import of the bass is entirely dependent on the type of music being played. It meant next to nothing in his punk and heavy rock days - it was just a one-note backing instrument. Come disco in the 1980s, and Pratt and his bass were elevated to higher ground.

"You'd go into guitar shops and they were full of guys playing Chic songs," he says. "The 1980s were great for us. The only drawback was the correlation between how high up you wore the bass and how funky you were supposed to be."

His first real band was Icehouse. They had one hit with Hey Little Girl, which, Pratt notes, everyone still thinks is a Roxy Music song. He then went on to a long musical association with Robert Palmer. (Plenty of good stories here, including touring with Crosby, Stills and Nash: gas hobs and caravans, that sort of stuff.)

His one week with The Smiths is interesting, as his story of how he wrote Ain't No Doubt for Jimmy Nail. In his dealings with Michael Jackson and Madonna, Pratt notes the former would only communicate with him through mad whispers to a flunkie, while the latter would scream at him like a fishwife - on all occasions.

He has a good take on psycho celebs: "You can end up like Tina Turner," he notes. "She might ask you to play a song in a more 'purple' sort of way. One half of you wants to say 'Tina, I can't actually translate purple into a musical note'. The other half knows that if you did you wouldn't be invited back."

Bang up to date and Pratt talks about how he felt when Roger Waters took his place for the Pink Floyd Live 8 show. He did play at Live 8, with Roxy Music in Berlin. He is superb on anorak Floyd fans, about how they hate him for replacing "Roger" and how the first few rows of any Floyd gig just stare at his left hand when he's playing Money, making sure he does it just as it is on the record. "Sometimes I keep my back turned just to annoy them."

A huge hit at this year's Fringe, My Bass and Other Animals is not just a treatise on a musical instrument but a stretch-limo view of rock star absurdities. As Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour notes in the programme: "Bass players are 10 a penny but a good wit is hard to find, so we hired him."

As this show continues to tour, Pratt promises to add in two stories he held back from the Edinburgh run: one of them is a very, very, very strange story about Paul McCartney. The other features slides he has of a fight he had with Jimmy Page (yes, he also played with Led Zeppelin). One of the slides depicts him being removed in a wheelchair.

Would somebody out there please bring this show to Dublin? Hell, we might even get The Ticket to sponsor it.