Cato

Spent £80 on a couple of tickets to see Maximo Park at the Birmingham Academy early next year. 20 years ago tickets for the same venue were generally around £20. Suprisingly, according to the BofE inflation calculator that's roughly in line with inflation with £20 in 2005 being worth around £35 today. Booking fees, on the hand, would have been around £1.50-£2.00 a ticket in 2005 if memory serves, whereas for these particular tickets it works out at £7.50 a ticket, considerably higher than the same rate of inflation.

Be interested to hear how you get on with it after the set up. I watched an Anderton's vid on these at the weekend and the fretless version was absolutely singing in Lee's ( not 100% sure that's his name, damn fine bass player though) hands. Edit: thought I may as well post the clip.

He turned up on my instagram feed complaining about Davie 504 faking something or other. Calling out the transgressions of other influencers seems to have become his 'thing'.

I like that a lot. Takes me back to when the cool kids at school were playing Nephilim/Sisters stuff in the common room

Maybe he doesn't have the skills to write his own? In the same way I can learn a reasonably complex guitar solo note by note but I don't really have the chops to write an original guitar solo myself that's any more complex or interesting than a basic blues improv.

I think I'm creative. I definitely think describing myself as an 'artist' would be to raise people's expectations way too high though.

I quite like it, but then I like a lot of those odd looking Soviet Union era guitars and basses. This looks like it could be a Danelectro Longhorn copy made in Yugoslavia circa 1974.

I've recently finished 2 weeks of jury service in a different county. Slightly different because it was Crown Court, but suffice to say very little happened at the time and date it was orginally scheduled for during my stint.

I generally like the more avant-garde designs but I'm struggling a bit with that one.

The fact that it's at Magistrates rather than Crown Court suggests that , should he be found guilty, a serious prison sentence is probably not on the cards.

I'm not a huge fan but a while ago I read an interview with Alex Lifeson where he was talking about how him & Geddy still hang out as friends and play music together on a regular basis. If they still love playing and they have an audience that wants to see it then it makes perfect sense for them to tour again.

I was skeptical when Sire broke the £1k barrier with the V/P 10 range a few years back, but not only are they still in production, Sire have actually moved upwards in price bracket again with some of the new F series range. So it's apparently possible for a brand that was once perceived as budget (I think my series 1 V7 fretless was less than £400 brand new) to successfully move upmarket.

When Fender bought Jackson/Charvel one of the first things they did was discontinue the Surfcaster line because they considered it direct competition for their own Jaguars andJazzmasters Fender's other brands all cover different markets. Charvel for modern rock players, Jackson for the heavy stuff, Gretsch covers a lot of the same ground as Gibson , none of them are in direct competition with Fender. I think the problem G&L may have is that, L Series aside, a lot of G&L models are based directly on Fender models and have been marketed as upgrades on those original designs for a long time. I can't see Fender selling Fender clones (albeit upgraded ones) under a different brand.

At the very least I'd expect Fender to discontinue all the Fender clone models, which is a substantial chunk of the G&l skinny stringer range. Hopefully the L series basses will stay on account being substantially different from anything Fender are currently offering, but I wouldn't be totally suprised if Fender stopped continous production of all G&L models in favour of doing limited runs of specific Leo Fender designed models. As mentioned by @Jean-Luc Pickguard above, if the rumours are true, I suspect Fender probably see more value in the company's heritage and assets than they do in the actual brand. They may even just be motivated by the desire to stop another company buying G & L & acquiring their rights to use Leos name in conjunction with their products.

Their UK suppliers never seem to last long, every now and then someone like Andertons will get a few bits and pieces in but when those are gone that seems to be it. I was very interested in trying an ASAT bass a few years ago and couldn't find one, new or used, being advertised anywhere in the UK. I always assumed the US made stuff was fairy low production numbers so most of it stays in the States. It'll be a shame if they do go, a lot of their stuff, both bass and skinny strings, guitars are an interesting twist on Leo's original designs. I'd be sorry to see some of those designs go.