borntohang

My old man has been going as a steward for the last 15 years or so - albeit staying in a camper rather than a tent now he's the wrong side of 70. He just wanders around to catch random stages if not given guidance so I usually send him a few things to check out. Sent him off to Heilung this year and got a "what the hell was all that?" message back. I thought they were a weird lineup pick at first, but actually I've realised they're perfect - you want to wander round a stage you've never seen before, slightly wobbly on cider, and find a tribe of Scandinavians leathering drums with human bones over a drone backing. Glasto moment. He set off at 10PM last night and got back to Yorkshire at 5AM this morning, which isn't bad. Last time I went with him the flooding meant we spent 5 hours queuing to even get out of the car park.

Brian knows Nash quite well (he seems to know half of the industry, because that guy is a crazy gearhead) and Gaslight use a bunch of his kit. I briefly met up with them on the last UK tour and Ian mentioned that Brian had commissioned Nash to build two 335s for them after the Horrible Crowes album - apparently the only two he's ever built. Ian got a red one and Brian got a white one that ended up getting smashed up somehow.

I've been on Tidal since Neil Young took his back catalogue off Spotify (I realise he's on again now) and it's been good. Migration of playlists was as simple as using an app to transfer it over and the catalogue access has been 1:1 so far. I don't use the FLAC stuff for streaming so can't comment. Also don't know if my 0.00005p or whatever Tidal pays over Spotify per stream makes much of a difference to anyone, but every little helps. My main complaint is that I can't contribute to the communal playlist in the band van any more, so I just make myself inconvenient and get somebody else to add songs for me. 🙂

FC will be good. I assume they couldn't peel Lydon away from LA to do a couple of low key benefit shows? He lost his wife in 2023 so perhaps he just has different priorities now. Bush Hall is a great venue anyway. We played there in 2022 and it's an absolutely stunning room - would be a real loss if it went under.

That's called "being a pocket player" when you're putting it on your CV. As long as you hit the chord on time you can have an entire career in rock music not venturing out of the root-fifth-octave box. Never a bad idea to want to learn more, but nobody was born instantly knowing this stuff - they had to put the hard work in exactly the same as you.

I met a guy in the car park of a festival to buy a bass. We turned up same time as him, I asked him if it worked and was he really, really, sure and then we walked into the festival and onstage with it. Took it on live TV next morning too as we were playing Soccer AM. I don't think I actually had another bass for backup as all our rental guitars had just gone back after a tour and it was a travel date so wasn't gonna be home. Luckily it was great and became my main touring bass!

I had a keyboardist who insisted on wearing bright orange chunky trainers with his formal trousers. Luckily we weren't at function gigs and trended towards the bohemian look anyway, but it did spoil the mood a bit. We started stacking him further and further behind the horn section until eventually he was playing in the wings, but I don't think he even noticed as long as he got enough solo airtime.

I've been in a Devo tribute for seven years now - our outfits are as reasonably close as budget allows and our singer luckily has an uncanny resemblance to Mark. I happen to shave my head which matches my counterpart, but it wasn't intentional. Beyond that we just play the songs as we would want to hear them played with plenty of attitude and has always gone down well. We've done rearrangements of some of the synth-heavy stuff for more guitars and don't use any track or clicks. We have one singer instead of three and the 'wrong' musicians play synth so sometimes we have a real bass instead of a synth, or some other combination. I think our general attitude has been to recreate the energy and attitude of the early live shows rather than the recorded versions - I had three bootlegs I considered 'source material' and we worked from those. We don't do any banter at all because when we did people actually complained, so now we just play through with either transitions or jumping immediately into the next song. I can get 60 minutes into a 90 minute set before we pause long enough to need to say anything... I sometimes get compliments about the accuracy of my synth sounds which is funny because they're all pretty basic pads and basses; if the situation arose then I could actually live patch most of it on a vintage MiniMoog for authenticity, but we just use a little digital Novation instead. Very bare bones.

The first ever 'tour' I did as a teenager was with a wet indie band with a tendency towards 6 or 7 minute atmospheric songs. All very heartful but complete mood-killers. We were playing Whistlebinkies in Edinburgh on the Friday night and turned up for soundcheck to find a topless guy on the dance floor with the soundman pouring a bottle of vodka over his head - the evening went downhill from there. Eventually we played to three English rugby teams who, while totally uninterested in experiencing our wet but heartful indie ballads, had the courtesy to not physically remove us from the stage; I'm pretty sure the bar staff turned the jukebox back on before we could finish playing. There's a VHS of it somewhere which I've never dared to watch.

Seye is a cool guy and that's a really interesting design. I had a Map bass for a while and dug it, so would like to try one of these. Unfortunately with the Eastwood strategy I think they'll all be pre-orders and a single run so not likely to hit shops.

The VTDI is the same circuit just with a Blend, and also you can turn the Bite setting off (sub filter as I understand it). There's not much extra that you won't get out of the Deluxe but I do understand your dislike of the presets thing - I tend to use the DI as a single set and forget amp sound, but having the loop would be cool.

I'm the one entering the Richard O'Brien contest. Tattoos is Ray Loverock (hence the knuckles) who we also worked with when I was sessioning on guitar - nice guy and great player.

I felt he was putting himself in a precarious position regarding me not dobbing him in to his wife to be honest, but he knew how to play the game. One of the last old-school road monsters: two shirts is a costume change, that'll be an extra £50 thanks! Three disco cans on a stick is a light show, that'll be another £100 please. Sometimes when I'm chained to my desk answering pointless emails I look back on those quiet 3AM moments travelling back from some show at Dogcock Conservative Club, Nowhereshire. Three of us sitting in the back on a pile of beer bottles covered in carpet, watching the M1 fly by through the holes in the van floorboards while a pissed BL gently weaves between lanes, and I think "what a bloody stupid way that was to barely earn some change"...

Maestro are Gibson, yes. They have Steinberger, Wurlitzer, and Dobro under the brand too. Kramer just have the one bass , the D-1. We played the Kramer UK launch in what was the Gibson venue before it became the Garage, so you can see me playing it while pulling a stupid face at 00:47 of the below video. It was fine but nothing I'd ever use - weird setup where each coil of the humbucker had a volume control and I didn't get a lot out of it to be honest. We were supposed to be getting some gear as part of the deal but the little sod from the support band legged it with the one bass they had on hand after the show, so I didn't even get a freebie! We did get two of the guitars which were nice though.

I must admit that my final straw with those guys wasn't musical but entirely selfish. The few high points of the dep calendar were the shows during summer or Christmas when the students would come back from uni and be persuaded to come down the WMC with their parents. For a start this meant our audience would be 300% more engaged and likely to dance, but as an added bonus being the only man under 30 in the building almost but not quite made up for my many and various shortcomings. This show was one of those and I had been chatting to a lovely young student throughout the breaks. After the set the beer goggles had kicked in properly and she invited me back to hers for a game of dominos and a cup of tea. Of course I jumped at the chance: "Lads, if I stow my gear away can you do me a solid and just chuck it into the room for me to pick up tomorrow? I've only got my bass and board so won't take you thirty seconds" BL: "Not a chance, we'll be down hands on lugging the PA in. You've got five minutes to get in the van." As he was my lift home and also had the taking for the evening I didn't have much recourse so regretfully declined her invitation and got back into the van for a sullen drive home. As we're about to set off the driver's door opens and the guitarist jumps in instead of the BL. "Oh right, yeah. BL has pulled some owd lass so is stopping the night up here and we're on PA duties. He says chuck it all in the room and he'll see us next weekend, also that we need to park the van round the corner because his wife thinks we broke down." Arse 🙃

My first paying gig was a once-monthly dep for a guy I knew from a local venue and it was like a checklist of club band horror stories. It was all old-school WMC venues so you were going out to play set one to a room full of stony-faced pensioners waiting for the meat raffle during the intermission, and then them all immediately clearing out so you played set two to nobody. My main gripe was that I would often turn up to find out the keyboard-playing band leader was the only regular member and the entire lineup was deps. Everyone got a song list (usually the same one too) but if somebody didn't know enough to fill time he'd pull the old "let's do X/Y, everybody knows that!". Turns out that while many people know how to start Sweet Home Alabama, significantly fewer know how to stop playing it. The band had a house uniform with a costume change (black shirts with white tie set one, white shirts with black tie set two) because that meant you could charge more on the agency. I was warned about this and bought the correct shirts, but told I could borrow the bassist's waistcoat to match the others. Unfortunately he had two feet and six stone on me so I had to belt all the excess fabric in behind my strap. Between all the deps we often looked like a band of kids dressed in their dad's clothes. I didn't have a completely awful time and getting paid to play as a teenager was a game-changer, but it was a rough education. I saw the BL around town a couple years back and we got to reminiscing about the old days - he was keeping very quiet but about halfway through the conversation suddenly went "wait, you didn't play with us did you??". Turns out he was totally pissed for most of the two years we worked together and had very little memory of any of it.

Unfortunately that can be prone to backfiring depending on the establishment. Some years ago when my friend's band were younger and much less wise they got stiffed on a fee like OP, so their driver/manager produces a cricket bat from the van and they go back in to renegotiate. Piling into the landlord's office all full of vinegar they insist, nay demand their £100! Landlord took one look at them and their well-curated skinny jeans, pulled a shotgun out of his top drawer, and planted it on his desktop in a manner that wasn't directly threatening but very firmly suggestive: "You can have £30 just for trying lads, but leave it to the professionals next time yeah?" They took the £30 and their kneecaps home in the end and called it square. Them were the days, you could leave your door unlocked, etc etc.

edit: accidental double post!

Kitty, Daisy, and Lewis. We played with those guys too - their mum wasn't still out with them on that point but they were nice and veteran tourers at the ripe age of 25 or so. Played about 15 instruments between them.

Met plenty of already well-known musicians, but in terms of unexpected trajectory we played with Idles in a tiny little Sheffield basement in 2016. Well Done had just been playlisted but there were as many people onstage as paying customers so we played to them, and then they played to us. They were pretty much fully-formed already and the atmosphere felt genuinely dangerous, like there was about to be a fight onstage and they weren't too fussed if it was between the band or the audience. We did an EP swap after the show and theirs is now heading for triple figures on the second hand market - ours of course is still worthless. They kindly invited us to support at the significantly bigger (and sold out) Plug down the road when Brutalism hit and made enough of an impression that we pretty much broke up after that second show: we were getting tired of trying to push forward in aggro music and Idles were doing it so much more effectively that it solidified our need to do other things. I went into pop music and the singer went the other way into extremely hardcore electronic noise. Didn't play with them again after that, but I still deal with them occasionally through Hiwatt work and took a bass amp down to the Ally Pally shows in 2019 - went from 10 people to 10K in three years and have only really got bigger since then. You could see they were going to do well, but I absolutely didn't have them pegged as arena headliners. In fairness I also didn't peg Snow Patrol, Kasabian, or Bring Me The Horizon when they played the 100 cap venue I worked at over the years, so perhaps I'm just not that well tuned!

We got "not pish at all" last weekend, which was quietly gratifying. My friend is fond of "you looked like you were really enjoying yourselves up there" when she can't find anything nice to say.

I gigged the wheels off my Jag SS and it took a really battering. Had to replace a tuner, the bridge, pickups, and all sorts. Great little basses. I actually took mine on a session and the other bassist there liked it so much he ended up buying one to replace a vintage Musicmaster which he didn't want to risk gigging any more. I've gone back to 34 scale now but would definitely look at another one if I needed a shorty for a project.

Delano are well respected builders and there's nothing too mysterious about winding P pickups - the Fender ones will be fairly basic winds compared. If you can't get there by adjusting the pickup height plus whatever control you can get from your active EQ then I'd be surprised.

For a while I used a Squier Jaguar SS tuned ADGC using the lowest three strings off a standard set and then either a G or B from a Bass VI set which I think was a 030 or something. We did a lot of tunes in G so I tended to drop the A a tone to get the low G. Worked nicely for clangy post-punk stuff but not something I'd choose for a band that I wasn't specifically writing in that tuning. I tried it in piccolo for a bit using a mix of the rest of the VI strings, but that didn't last long.