Stylon Pilson

You're wrong though. If you go to https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/ and pick a random week from the 1960s then the majority of songs there will be no better than the average standard of what's in the charts today. Most will be either (a) obscure songs by obscure bands that no-one under 50 has heard of, or (b) filler singles by famous bands. S.P.

Chart music today is mostly lowest-common denominator, soulless manufactured pap, targeted at teenagers, often nauseating in its repetitiveness, and most of it will be forgotten within 6 months. The same is also true of chart music from any period since you were born. S.P.

Yeah, I wouldn't be too thrilled by that either. The first issue (getting home late and having to work early next day) would be okay as an occasional thing, but not regularly. £30 sounds a bit poor as well - what sort of band are you in? I've sometimes done the sort of gig where I've felt like we're an imposition - the audience would rather be watching the sports, and we're getting in the way of that. It can be disheartening. I like to view those gigs as a challenge though - see if you can be so charming and entertaining that they can't help but turn and look at you. S.P.

I still love that little recess for the Smoothhound at the back. Being able to not only go wireless, but making the wirelessness "invisible", is the sort of detail that really gets my underpants thrumming. S.P.

I put in my ear plugs before the drummer starts setting up, and don't take them out until the keyboardist has turned off his amp. Your advice to "pop them out every few songs for a listen" sounds like a great way to get tinitus. S.P.

Just for clarity, the only bit I was joking about was the bit where they told me to keep the cab. The rest is all entirely true. S.P.

I was just joking that having announced that you've never had a gear-related failure at a gig, sod's law dictates that something will now go wrong at your next one. S.P.

A large, heavy cuboid from Bass Direct showed up on my doorstep this morning. I haven't ordered anything lately, but it's my birthday coming up quite soon, so I signed for it under the assumption that I was getting an inadvertent sneak peek at my present. I lugged it inside, turned it the right way up, and couldn't help noticing "212 MNT" scrawled on the ghetto cardboard packaging. "Oooh, " I thought to myself, "my mum's bought me a Vanderkley 212 MNT for my birthday. That's generous of her. I mean, it's twice as heavy as my current cab, so I can't see myself ever taking it to a gig, but maybe I can sell it on basschat." I checked with my partner, who then contacted my mum, who knew nothing about it. Straaaange. I called Bass Direct to find out the name of the person who had ordered it so that I could thank them profusely. After a couple of minutes on hold, they revealed that they have another Stylon Pilson on their customer database, and they'd sent it to the wrong one. I asked if they wanted to collect it, and they said "nah, you can keep that one, it would cost us more to ship it back than it's worth." Only kidding. S.P.

Boy am I looking forward to your next submission to the "How was your gig last night" thread. S.P.

Haha, exactly the same for me, right down to the brands in question! S.P.

It's not really on the same level though? This brick is more akin to the hairnet worn by a lady who worked at a crisp factory that made a bag of ready salted that Jaco once ate. S.P.

I was once in Waitrose trying to find the harisa paste. I went looking for a store assistant to help me, got talking to them, they said they played piano. I said "oh, my son plays piano too, maybe you'd like to jam sometime." He said "no, not really, I'm Elton John." And he was! S.P.

Don't take my original post too seriously. It was intended as a light-hearted poke at both sides, from the perspective of someone who has seen both sides. I was hoping that I'd represented both angles reasonably well. S.P.

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't mean 6 hours driving each way. I mean I leave the house sometime around 6:30pm (plus or minus half an hour) and get home at about 1am (plus or minus half an hour). S.P.

FAO people in originals bands: you should be aware that, for people who are in covers bands, a "gig" generally involves an evening consisting of about 6-7 hours door to door, of which the majority is travelling and lugging heavy equipment. On the plus side, you generally get paid, and the crowd, if sufficiently lubricated, will dance and sing along. FAO people in covers bands: you should be aware that, for people who are in originals bands, a "gig" generally consists of playing for 45 minutes on a bill with 2 or 3 other bands. You don't have to worry about any PA or lighting equipment - that's all handled by the PA Fairy, so you can often do the unload from your car in one or two trips. You get paid in "exposure" instead of real currency, and the audience is usually either ignoring you or staring at you blankly. S.P.

My main bass is a Lakland 55-01 and I use a Yamaha BB235 as a backup. To be honest I don't think you're going to find many 5 string basses within your budget, so you might have to compromise on some of your requirements, but hey, it's only there as a backup. S.P.

On Saturday night we returned to a venue that we last played at in September. We had fairly low expectations for the night - when we played there before the turnout was medium in size but low in energy, and our drummer plays there with his other band and generally finds that that's as good as it gets. So we showed up with the plan to basically play, get paid, and go home. I'm first to arrive, and as I'm unloading I notice "Happy Engagement" balloons on the tables and a finger buffet in the corner. "This looks promising," I thought to myself. So we set up, sound check, play the first set. One woman actually dances during the first set! While this is not the first time that this has ever happened, we usually find that the audience doesn't tend to loosen up until a couple of pints later in the night. At the interval, a few people come up to us and pay us compliments, encouraging us to partake of the finger buffet, and I think that one woman was trying to seduce our drummer with the promise of a roast dinner. We begin the second set and the response is fantastic. No-one's dancing in the space directly in front of us, but that's fair enough because it is rather small. However we can see people dancing further back in the room. There's a fairly drunk guy sat at the front centre table and with every song we start he's yelling in delight - you can tell that our choice of songs is right up his street. We get to the end of the night and the roaring for an encore is so loud that I worry that this is about to degenerate into a riot. We play two more songs and they're still yelling for more, even louder. But our drummer's got to work at 6am so he scrabbles for the ipod to put the playlist back on, the universal symbol of "nope, there's not going to be any more." As we try to make our way to the patio doors to cool down, we are intercepted by almost every person on the way who wants to shake our hands and thank us. When we finally make it out into the dark midnight air, the three of us just look at each other in silence for a few seconds. "Well, " remarks our guitarist measuredly, "it's the nights like that that make it worth it, isn't it?" S.P.

I don't consider myself to be a grammar/punctuation pedant, but that was hard to read. S.P.

I suspect that the reason why the general public don't go out to see local originals bands any more is that the overall quality is lower than it used to be. With the democratisation of music over the last few decades, you have a lot more weekend warriors going out and churning out the same cliched stuff over and over again. Whereas with a covers band you at least know that the songs they'll be playing will tend to be fairly good ones which have stood the test of time. S.P.

I am increasingly of the opinion that you can support music, or you can support the music industry, but to claim to support both is a contradiction. S.P.

Nah, I disagree. Loading the car is a 10 minute job, I have a system that I always stick to, so I know it's going to fit. We generally gig locally, so the drive to the gig is never more than 45 minutes each way. Setup and teardown at the gig takes a bit longer, but I take the mentality that 80% of my fee for the night is doing that, and only 20% is the actual performance. There's very rarely any standing around as my guitarist is generally late to arrive, and this then results in us being late on. I kinda agree with you about the audience often being cold for the first 3/4 of the night and then suddenly demanding an encore at the end, when I'm knackered and already thinking about my bed, but I'd still take that over them not asking for an encore at all. I'm usually home and in bed within 90 minutes of finishing the last song. S.P.

Hate to be the bear of bad news (roar), but your situation is not a promising one. If the existing protocol within the band is to be very laid back and disorganised, then they won't take kindly to you trying to whip them into shape. The best that you can do is to offer to take on the responsibility of managing set lists yourself. This will go one of two ways - either the singer will refuse, because they want to stay in control, or they'll gladly accept, because they're willing to be told what to do if it means someone else is doing the hard thinking for them. S.P.

Great gig last night. A slight fly in the ointment a few minutes before we were due to go on, as I couldn't find my car keys. The rational part of my brain is saying "you do know that there's a 95% chance you've just done something stupid and they'll show up when you're packing away" but there's always a little part of you that starts to panic and worry about the worst case scenario. Managed to find them before we went on, which was nice because it would have distracted me otherwise. Fantastic gig, energetic audience. It was fairly warm so a lot of them were listening to us from outdoors, which is always a bit suboptimal, but I could see through the door from where I was and could definitely see them there, dancing and singing along. I think their demand for an encore was possibly the loudest and most prolonged that I've ever experienced - there's no way we could refuse to indulge them. S.P.

Assigning unique identifiers to your batteries is such an Arnold Rimmer move, in the positive way. S.P.

Yep, I use Eneloops, I have a little pack of 4 in a plastic case, and ostensibly I'd use a different one for each gig and then after every 4th gig charge up the lot of them. What happened on this occasion was I just mixed them up and accidentally put in one that had already been used for at least one gig. Once bitten, twice shy, won't make that mistake again. S.P.