NancyJohnson

Sitting listening to the BBC's Stereo Underground. 'No Time to be 21' by The Adverts comes on. Wife goes, 'Is this Weezer?'. Inside I'm laughing, but at the same time I'm thinking, feck, Weezer sound just like this.

I remember when Lidl opened in our village, my original feeling was dismay; we'd lost a really nice '50s garage with some nice vintage cars on the forecourt, which was replaced by a featureless supermarket, which I vowed never to use. First Lidl experience was actually in Cyprus, well after our local one opened. Pretty suprised at quality/cleanliness/prices. Visited our one shortly thereafter, much the same. End of the day, milk is milk. Why go to Tesco/Sainsbury? Never been someone swayed by advertising (I don't watch much terrestrial/commercial TV); I'm strong enough in the head to make my own decisions and don't need Mr Bubbles to tell me Asda sausage rolls are the ones to buy.

No such thing as being done. Nope. There's always going to be something. Always. You'll see something that will be a slow burner, maybe it'll be something as simple as the Jazz you have looking better in a solid black and then one will come up for sale, you might have a few hundred £££ in the bank and you start doing the maths. That, my friend, is how it works. That's how I've ended up with a room full of kit. That's how nearly everyone on Basschat has a room full of kit. Nope, you're not done. You're just getting started. 😄

I bought two bits of kit this year, a second Darkglass 1x12 and a black Spector Euro-X. Nothing went out. All credit to my mate Gary, AKA @cetera of this parish, for coordinating the Spector builds; 'tis a thing of beauty. *Wee edit. I completely forgot that I sold on my Spector Euro LT to partially fund the Euro-X. So yes, there was an out.

Are people actually shallow enough nowadays to go to <insert supermarket chain here> because <insert celebrity name here> is fronting their Christmas advertising campaign? Call me Mr Grumpypants, but while I love the element of warm and fuzzy that this time of year brings, I can pick up everything we need from Lidl, which is about 500m from the bed where I'm typing this. Don't worry about how much coin changed hands to acquire the services of Bublé either; Asda are bankrolled by Walmart and a couple of billionaires from Lancashire. They're probably not short of a few quid and metaphorically had Bubbles fee down the back of the sofa. If we have any US members reading, what's the celeb-fronted advertising like for Walmart, Albertsons or Target like at this time of year?

I watched three of these this evening; Les Claypool, Melissa Auf der Maur and Krist Novoselic. They're barely 22 minutes each, so an easy enough watch; while I understand the format is more about what these people are doing away from music rather than the playing element, it was an entertaining enough hour or so, given the bass-centric subject matter. I'd say the Les Claypool one was by far the best of the three that I watched. Of the other two, you wouldn't have known Krist Novoselic was in one of the biggest bands in the last 30 years and of Melissa Auf der Maur - who hadn't played in ten years or so - I did ask myself why they actually chose her (she could just have easily have been any another middle-aged women with an interest in her local arts/music scene). Geddy seems to be everywhere at the moment. As I've posted elsewhere, he seems a nice, agreeable bloke with some interesting pursuits (music, wine, collecting etc.) and he an Alex seem to be involved with some interesting stuff, but this show falls well short of what it could actually have been. Rather than 20 minutes, I could happily have sat through 45-60 minutes of Les Claypool. If there is a positive, at least the makers didn't go to the standard fallback position of hitting up Flea.

I'd say most of our day to day Spotify listening is off a huge 115 hour(!) playlist, although this will move to our 'Christmas Crooners' list (29 hours) shortly. There's dozens and dozens of playlists that I've set up for individual artistes, but there's always going to be stuff I have that's not on Spotify (viz. the full XTC or Jellyfish catalogue), so the NAS is utilised there.

As covered elsewhere, dumped regular hifi many moons ago and went the Sonos route; audio is being delivered from Spotify and FLAC files on a NAS. I have no issue spaffing £10+ a month on a premium subscription considering I'd spend £100+ a month on CDs in the past. (Honestly getting tired of the rhetoric about Spotify revenue to artistes, the real money has come from touring and merchandise for decades now. I don't expect to be paid in perpetuity for contract work I did 20 years ago, so why should music be any different?)

Insofar as predjudices go, surely this is just another way of saying that you just have preferences for what actually appeals to you personally? I prefer a black bass, although I own two non-black ones. Don't particularly like the look of a maple fingerboard. I'm drawn to Thunderbird and NR Thunderbird shapes/designs and in general I prefer twin pickup basses. Unfussed about hardware colour thereon (anything works with black). Headstockwise, I'm not a fan of the Fender shapes, my Lulls have reverse headstocks, the Hamers have the machines at the top. I think the Spector paddle-headstock would work with anything, which is why I'm probably so in love (still) with the Euro-X.

Dunlops on everything. Everything. Message ends.

A mate of mine has an Integra, with the paddle headstock. It's a lovely thing. I've got a 45 year old Primary/Precision which is a wonderful thing.

Getting back on track... When I think of my musical journey, much in the same way that Eddie Van Halen outshone DLR, there are the same handful of bass players in my book that are/were arguably bigger than the frontman of the band they're actually playing in. Nikki Sixx, Mick Karn, Geddy Lee, Steve Priest, (perhaps to a lesser extent) Gene Simmons, Overend Watts, Pete Way.

I bought a Boss BR600 about 12 years ago. Like anything, you needed to read the manual. My old, old band tracked about 20 full songs on it. Great fun, perfectly adequate for what we wanted to do, also a fairly decent field recorder.

Last night Kiss played their last ever show. That said, I will draw your attention to the final paragraph of my post from 18 months ago. If only I was a betting man.

Vintage kit or kit with provenance is a weird area for me (and possibly a lot of people), this bass being point of fact. Perhaps it's about bragging rights, but at £27K, it's not going to make you play any better and tonally (subjective) I'd say with some confidence that a Harley Benton that came off the production line yesterday wouldn't sound that much different, either. It's probably OK if you're Sting or something, where you have people to watch your gear 24/7, but can you imagine the loss risk of taking it out for a gig at the Rose & Crown on a Friday night?

Well, it's that time of year again. Not unsurprisingly my top artist is Momma (again), I bloody love them. In #2 it's New Zealand poppunk band The Beths and at #3 it's The Alkaline Trio. The ones I am surprised about are #4 and #5. As evidenced by my entries on the What are you listening to now? thread, it's Supertramp and 10cc. Blimus!

I just looked on the Gordon Poole agency. £20K+ buys you Greg Davies and Rob Beckett. That's each, mind. Saw them on the same comedy bill in Wokingham about 20 years ago. How times change.

You haven't said how the audience would be made up. Interested punters or business lunchers on a work jolly? With sportspeople (and by sportspeople, I mean the retired, well known, Question Of Sport contender type of sportspeople), these are well known to most people and have transcended the sport they once competed in and have become celebrity; they're known by pretty much everyone (unless they've lived under a rock for the last 40 years). The problem with musicians is that there's very little transcendence; few non-working/retired musicians become celebrity (Noddy Holder, maybe), they just disappear disgruntled or come out of retirement to appear on Buzzcocks once in a while. Your paying audience may cover a broad age range and musical interest spectrum; from the interested punter perspective, I'm sure there's a lot of people that would pay for a lunch and Q&A chat with Debbie Harry/Toyah, but if you're being dragged along to the lunch and the speaker is Dizzy Rascal, you're not really going to appeal to the whole audience.

My mother-in- law is 87 and she does her shopping lists in Excel. My mother did the same until she died. 87 as well. It's really not crap. There's this loose rule that doing anything for 10,000 hours will make you a virtuoso; I could sit pretty much anyone in front of a computer and teach them Excel fundamentals in under an hour. If you know how to type (you replied here, so yes), if you know how to use a mouse, it's easy as making a cup of tea.

Excel is going to be as easy and intuitive to use as anything; I'm not entirely certain what a 'proper app/program' (your words) is or what it's supposed to deliver. The basic fundamentals of any program are going to be dragging/copying/cutting/pasting, if you can't handle these, then the way forward is going to be paper and a Sharpie.

I was in love with The Sweet; I found myself drawn to Steve Priest's little bass breaks in some of the b-sides/album tracks. I think the breaking point was the inner cover of Desolation Boulevard, the band looking normal. I had no idea what a Rickenbacker 4001 was at that point, but deep in my conscience I needed a bit of that.

I haven't had any need to take my NXT out as of yet (but feel that time might be coming). I saw a suggestion elsewhere about buying a 'deluxe fishing rod bag'. Intrigued, I found this on Amazon: + Honestly wondering whether this would be up to light use (I'd probably need to wrap the bass in something).

I did about 20 songs for a project slightly before the pandemic. Subject matter? Russian nukes Surveillance Telephone surveillance Living in an iron lung The Spookwaffe (a group of black escort fighters during Ww2) A heavily edited version of the Kings 'we are at war' speech The third shock army snipers Oppenheimer Drowning in a submarine Being in the belly of a tank Borodino Sleeper agents Drinking vodka from the sandals of heathens The Heavens Gate cult The Jonestown suicide event American marine peacekeepers in Afghanistan Cheery, eh? We had a few more things in process before the project folded and moved on to something else. We just used to get a little obsessed with old photographs; for instance one of the group of people that assassinated Lincoln and how one guy had the looks of a current day male model. We did a rough demo of a track called Behind Confederate Eyes on that one.