Bradford bass guitarist and YouTube star Danny Sapko is pulling in millions of views

So it’s a surprise to him as much as anyone that he’s now the recognisable face of online video content which pulls in millions of viewers from around the world.

“I've never been into all these lead guitarists that stand at the front with the long solos,” he says. “It's the low end that interested me a bit more.”

Having previously played guitar, Danny picked up a bass at about 17, has performed with a number of bands locally and went on to study music at York St John University.

“For years I was talking about trying to get my YouTube going and not really getting anywhere with it. It took me eight years to get 10,000 subscribers on YouTube,” he says.

In 2020, Danny won the Bass Player magazine and affiliated Guitar World’s 2020 Bassist of the Year after sending in a video of himself playing his own funk composition, which impressed judges Doug Wimbish, Tracy Wormworth and Scott Reeder as well as the voting public.

Danny thought it would be the break he needed to be a professional performing musician, and that “offers would just come flying in,” he says.

“But it was in lockdown. There wasn’t very much going on and people were trying to save money.”

Danny, who attended St Cuthbert’s primary and later St Bede’s schools in Bradford, got a job at instrument website Gear4music as a video content creator.

He says: "I was traveling to York every morning and thought, I can't keep doing this. I'll just try to give these YouTube Shorts a go. And I did one. I don’t remember what it was, but it just went huge, like 200,000 views. And I was like, right, I’ll do another one. And that went well as well, and I took a bit of a risk, quit my job, and went for it – and it’s worked out quite well.”

Danny, now 31, posts videos on his own YouTube channel – which has 259,000 subscribers – and other social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram.

His partner Keira Mellon, 29, also quit her job at Bradford Magistrates’ Court to go self-employed alongside Danny, helping him to run the administrative side of the business as well as selling merchandise, and the couple live in Bingley.

Much of Danny’s content has a lighthearted or comic dimension – ‘How easy is it to smash a bass?!’, for example – but there are also videos exploring the history of bass guitar, the best riffs, top players and plenty more. As well as his usual routine of daily shorts and one longer video a week, there is also members-only content, which shows ‘behind the scenes’.

Despite their popularity around the world, Danny’s clips are made in his boyhood bedroom at his parents’ house in Bradford, now adapted for video creation with a big cover of paint on the wall serving as his green screen. “A couple of cheap lights from Amazon. There's nothing flashy. One camera. I feel like I've got a bit of a punk rock attitude in my studio and my videos,” he smiles.

He has a good selection of bass guitars to choose from but his favourite to play is a 1975 Rickenbacker 4001.

Meanwhile, his presenting style has evolved over the years. "When I won my award, I still never talked on camera up until that point,” says Danny. “All my videos were just playing the bass, head down, not even looking up at the camera.

“I thought no one would understand my accent, all my sense of humour and everything, I thought it’s never going to translate, because it's largely an American audience, still is now. But I just thought, I'll give it a go. I started talking in my own accent, I started using my own Yorkshireisms and my own sense of humour. I just thought, if they don’t get it then fine, I’ll just appeal to other Yorkshire musicians.

“But it's weird because I've got all these Americans emailing me, saying, ‘What does nowt mean?’

“We adapt to their American humour. I was like, they can adapt to us for a change.”

That’s how the channel’s catchphrase – ‘BEHS’ - came about. Danny, the son of postman Andrew and school secretary Anna, says: “With my Yorkshire accent saying the word ‘bass’, everyone just started commenting with those letters saying ‘behs’. So I adopted that slogan.”

While he enjoys going into more depth with longer videos, it’s the shorts that are the most popular in terms of views.

“My biggest video, it's actually where I'm playing bass to cows,” says Danny. “That's my first viral video. I saw a video of a guy playing an accordion, and it was in a field, and all these cows rushed over to listen, and I went into a field of cows, and I thought I'd play a bit of bass, and instead, they all ran away. So I called it ‘Typical audience reaction to a bass song’. It was annoying for me because I spent a long time making all these long videos, and this was 15 seconds, filmed on a camera phone, and that's the one that (they like most).”

That now has more than 700,000 views, but it is not unusual for Danny’s officially labelled shorts – the videos of less than a minute – to reach millions of views.

He is getting noticed closer to home, too, although his mates won’t let him get too ahead of himself. “It really annoys them,” he says. "We went out a couple of months ago to the golf driving range, went on a bit of a beer crawl around these pubs, and we got stopped seven times for pictures. My mates got so fed up because we had to stop and do selfies with everyone, every minute. But no, they see me for definitely what I am – as a very regular, down-to-earth guy.”

www.youtube.com/@DannySapko