Barking Spiders

Ha ha not from this quarter you won't . I'm not a fan of any of these hyper, super advanced technical players whose musical output is largely limited to the stultifyingly boring fusion/jazz rock genre. Just my 10 cents worth. I really see little point in double thumbing. I can do it quite well but it doesn't groove.

Spot on. Seems to me many Brits think Europeans are UK fixated when in fact most of them don't give a flying feck and pay little attention to Brexit, the Royals, etc. In 14 years living in four different countries, whenever anyone asked me about Britain 99% of the time it was about the Premier League. So yes, the UK's poor showing in the Eurovision is more about the half ar$ed way the UK goes about it, mostly choosing unknown performers singing forgettable mush and with very little effort gone into production

guaranteeing another last place 😉.

In Twitterland there were all these comments that the UK's dismal showing was Brexit related. Wrong! the UK's been a pariah nation the whole of this century so far. 😁 As well as bottom place this year and 3rd last in 2018, the UK came last in 2003, 2008, and 2010. Other near last placings were in 2005 - 2007, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016.

Once, like TOTP in the 70s and 80s, there was a goodly amount of cheesy fun to laff at, you know, entries from the Netherlands or Luxembourg that went ' she went ning nang nong with a bang tiddle bong' . Now it's all sensitive young men with well groomed facial hair yearning earnestly into the camera or East European porno starlets howling at the top of their lungs in a Mariah Carey stylee. Our kids like this kind of tosh so I turned the TV off after 9 episodes of torture finishing with another dismal effort from the UK.

Played Talking Heads Fear of Music in the car this morn, paying more attention to the bass than usual. Tina Weymouth plays some lovely lines throughout, inventive and melodic and right on the money esp on Paper, Cities and Animals.

Then I must be the resident 80s throwback pariah round these here parts cos I still love slap. But, I may redeem myself when I say I now avoid these bedroom You Tube winkers thrapping away furiously on their fretboards. Can't stand all that thwacka thwacka thwacka machine gun stuff but when slap grooves it should be swinging and booty shaking. The best players to rip off are Marcus Miller, Larry Graham, Big Tony from Troublefunk and Louis Johnson. Fraid I'm not a fan of Vic Wooten's slap style and also stick only to the funk players and avoid all rock players who use slap. For me slap doesn't really work in rock.

taking a break from my recent bingeing on Slipknot, Lamb of God and Pantera and back to my more usual fare of groovy downtempo vibes especially Fila Brazillia of which I have several albums on rotation; Black Market Gardening, Luck Be A Weirdo Tonight, Jump Leads and a Touch of Cloth . Dunno if they're any other likers here?

One man's poison and all that jazz but IMO it's a cracker with tracks like Superhero, Separation Anxiety, Sunny Side Up, Black Friday and Mutha. The only Patton album I hardly ever play is TRT. That starts off with a strong 1,2,3,4 and then goes off the boil, the low point being War Pigs. Don't like the original either, if that's not sacrilege to admit.

Me neither 😕 Dunno owt about Shakespeare's Sister other than that the name vaguely rings a bell

Is Marcy Yaxley Lennon somehow related to odious, racist, fascist thug 'Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon?

Horace's playing on the debut is one of the elements that make it such a cracking album. Saw them a couple of times in their heyday and they were always top value. Not quite as good a live proposition as The Beat but then few bands I've seen have been as good as them.

I did catch some of the programme. They weren't bad and had some reasonable tunes but I never understood all the music media hype. Same goes for The Smiths. Like so many rock bands IMO they'd have been much better if they'd had decent singers. The musicians in each band were all good players though and I liked the grooves Mani and Reni laid down.

Aye it is indeed a huge shame. When I lived in London in the 90s I went there often. Always a cracking night out. Bloody landlords / property investors and their exorbitant rents are actually doing more to destroy both the High Street and the night time economy than other factors.

Ah lovely stuff. If those were mine they'd be going nowhere...fast!

My OP was mainly about the acts on the Pyramid, West Holts and Avalon stages not about the festival as a whole. For me there's quite a good lot of stuff going on around the fringes . If I were going, I'd spend most of my time at the Glade and Left Field. But for me it's just way too big an event. Download and Blue Dot are large enough.

Certainly much more difficult than giving exes the Spanish archer 😉 . At the start of this year I had 7 basses. Now I'm down to just 3. I did um and err, put them up for sale on EBay, only to take them down again. It was only the parlous state of my finances that made me take the plunge. A few months on and I don't regret it either. Three does me just fine.

Ah, I used to have one of those. my first ever proper bass. Viz FNM I'm not that keen on The Real Thing, a bit too normal compared to the schizoid fun they served up on the following albums which are all crackers especially the hugely underrated Album of The Year. Always liked the band as they're pretty dysfunctional and with an FU attitude. As I've said before on fora, IMO there is no better singer in rock and pop than Mike Patton.

My first criterion when buying a fretted bass is, is it great for funky slappage. Then, is it available in natural finish and finally does it look good. My #1 choice if I had the money would be the Stringray,. If it was good for Louis Johnson then that's enough for me. As I cant justify spending £2k+ I have to make do with a Sub Ray 4 , and a Cort GB74

Sure they've got a decent size fanbase but massive, I think not. In the UK they've got just four gold discs and a total of 4 x platinum in the US and haven't made a studio album in 10 years.

Note how in all their vids these YT plankspankers are sitting on their beds/armchairs and nary a clip of them actually playing live in a band 😧

I'm not saying the Cure are bad. I quite liked them in the 80s but they always were a cult act and never big enough to warrant headline status. The Killers? what, a couple of hits many moons ago and Stormzy? flavour of the month with one album. Kylie? a 50 year old woman still singing fluffy pop! And Janet Jackson hasn't had a UK top 20 hit since 2006 and her last US release in 2015 sold less than 250,000

I have an unbridled loathing of social media even though I have accounts with Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook though I hardly ever look at them. What gets me is this notion that if you're not social media savvy then you're some socially dysfunctional luddite. What's particularly insidious about YT is that it's brainwashed a generation of kids into thinking that being a You Tuber is a career. They've seen e.g. how young women giving make-up tips to teens has gained them millions of followers and the advertisers have honed in on this and made them stinking rich and celebrities to boot. When my youngest left year 6 her school published a hand-out which gave little bios on the leavers and what they plan to do with their lives. Of the 30 kids, just 3 or 4 had a proper job in mind. Of the rest, around 8 wanted to be You Tubers while many of the others saying they wanted to be celebrities of some sort/on the TV. None of them even wanted to be an astronaut FFS!

That seems to be the general view out there. If I'd bought tickets just after last year's festival I'd be well p1$$3d. I'd only bother with the Chemical Brothers, Sigrid and Jon Hopkins. The rest are plain mediocre at best. On the one hand there's loads of ageing acts high up the bill who are well past it and never that great to start with (Cure, Wu Tang Clan, Snow Patrol, Kylie, Janet Jackson, Liam Gallagher) . Then there are others who're are pretty run of the mill (Vampire Weekend, Christine & The Queens, Bastille, George Ezra, Janelle Monae, Years and Years). Anyone here going and are well chuffed or anyone bought tickets long ago and wish they'd never wasted the dosh?

Don't see a lot of love for Slipknot on BC but they're one of the main reasons I'll be at Download next month.