Barking Spiders

Why not hide the offending article behind a stash of jazz mags under a bed or in a cupboard? This acts as a good distraction which might be more easily explained away than shelling out £1 - 2k on a lump of wood with strings 😊

Yep, I was expecting to see pics of Tal Wilkenfield wearing not much other than a bass guitar. When I saw a list of solo bassists I decided to look at some pictures of sunbathing meerkats instead

😱 and I thought my original collection of 6 basses and 4 guitars was a bit much!, now down to 3 and 2 respectively

The nub of the thread is not so much who failed to crack it but WHY. Bands like Madness, Blur and The Jam are very English sounding, perhaps too much so while Brit bands who don't sound typically English are maybe be more successful. Then again a lot of Brit bands haven't been prepared to put in the hard slog of touring small town USA so people dont get to hear of them

My reply isn't exactly serious either 😀

A reference to Cliff got me briefly wondering for a few secs why he never cracked the US. With his Christian wholesomeness I'd have thought he'd have gone down a storm south of the Mason Dixon line. There of course have been scores of others who've been a big deal in Blighty but who couldn't sell out a venue the size of your average public toilet in the US. Has it been down to laziness, singing funny like, sounding too English (never stopped the Beatles), what I wonder?

I might have to argue there . What about proto sk8ter boy classic 'Wired for Sound'?

Sex appeal and a rock n' roll type dangerousness😉. Not usually relevant for a folk trio but you can't help being what you're blessed with

I was thinking the very same viz US black music but you beat me to it. I'm not a fan but you can add jazz to that. As for Britpop, definitely a low in UK music, which the rest of the world was never bothered about. For me where the US also beats the UK hands down is in metal. Oddly enough for me I've a soft spot for Pantera, Lamb of God, Machine Head, Fear Factory, Five Finger Death Punch, Dillinger Escape Plan and Killswitch Engage. That's just about the only rock I have in my mostly electronica CD collection and yet I dislike all other metal and hard rock.

Electronica is my main bag so it's easily the UK though some good stuff has come out of the US. It would be a much closer call if it was UK v Germany!

Last night I was feeling a bit masochistic and normally against my better judgement watched Rock of Ages on one of the Freeview channels. I didn't have great expectations and yet RoA managed to still fall below these. Oddly enough it gets 43% on Rotten Tomatoes which IMO is incredibly generous. 5 -10% is more like it. I mean Tom Cruise plays some cliched hair metal character called Stacee Jaxx ( any wordplay on the Blur song Tracey Jacks?). Russell Brand adopts a laughably bad Brummie accent who develops manlove for Alec Baldwin's character who looks more at home drinking white spirit from a bottle in a brown paper bag than managing a music venue. Then there is the usual cliche about small town boy/girl trying to make it in the big city, yada blah. As for the soundtrack oh my! It's pretty much a watery karaoke take on some of the blandest American rock of the 80s. Even the one song that has some balls -Paradise City - is turned to thin mush by Cruise. The rest of the songs are woeful. The lead female is called Julianne Hough (who? and where she now?) has the kind of thin nasal way of 'singing' so prevalent in current pop. She's as fit as f**k mind you! The only thing that resonated with me is when the Paul Giametti character says 'rock is dead' when trying to get his new protege join a boy band. On this basis it darn well should be. So, anyone else seen this and what do you reckon of this and other rock movies in general?

I see no problem with Scott charging for his services if SBL is his primary source of income. If you don't want to pay for something, don't buy it and look for free or cheap alternative! I don't subscribe to any sites as the only lessons I'm interested in are slap and between Scott, Talking Bass and other good tutors there's enough on YT for me . I don't make any money from bass playing so I see no point paying for lessons if I can find good quality free stuff.

I've been in too many cr@ppy bands either a bass player or as a drummer where some egomaniacs just want a bunch of mugs around to help play their sh1tty songs and if you dare come up with some contributions you get short shrift. I've now no interest in being in a band ever again being as I'm hugely opinionated and not that good at buttoning it

This and The Hunter are the only two Mastodon albums I like. Cracking tune this one. I just far prefer these two albums - often derided by hardcore fans - to their more acclaimed ones. Then again the only Metallica I like are the black album and Load/Reload.

I've graduated from the bedroom to the garden shed. Next year I might've made it to the living room settee

Ah ha, see...the track's called Watcher Of the Skies and Nad's got out his antique telescope to erm, look at the skies! Nice touch! And then he starts signing....oops. And I thought Gabriel's and Collins' vocals in Genesis were hard enough to take. The blonde geezer the camera shot at 4.43 had the right idea. Yikes some people must be really tone deaf judging by some of the 👍 in the YT comments 🤔😕

On the one hand you've got your Phil Lynotts, Stings, Mark Kings, Steve Harri (the plural of Harris fact fans) etc blokes who are the creative forces and /or frontmen as well as the bassmen. On 't other there's Wossisface, Doobry Wotsit, That Other Bloke in xx, The One On The Guitar With Only 4 Strings etc. Which are you? 😊

I googled this Nad Sylvan bloke. he looks like Bette Midler after a night on the lash. Very disturbing

During their relatively short time as a decent but fun rock band in the 70s Status Quo put out Live! My older brother had this and all the studio albums from that heyday period but Live kicked the collective @rse of those right into touch with much tougher, dirtier extended versions of Backwater/Just Take Me, Forty Five Hundred Times and Roll Over Lay Down. IMO it's all the Quo the casual fan needs

Coming back to work I was playing Elo Kiddies off Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan (2 CD version) ..loud. How much better are versions of tunage here than on the studio albums which IMO are generally a bit well..meh. Come to think of it there are a few other bands whose live albums p*$$ all over owt they've done in the studio like AC/DC's If You Want Blood, and The Tubes What Do You Want From Live,. I know some peeps will say some live classics might have had a bit of tweaking - e.g. Lizzy's Live & Dangerous - but studio tarting up nor not what gets else gets the nod...

And a-bluddy-men to that. Seems to me hyper technique is the holy grail for these bedroom bass thrappers never mind knowing how to put together memorable tunes. The opening bass notes of Ball of Confusion has more impact than 10 minutes of 180bpm cross- handed slap tap-athons from some berk on his £5k Pedulla. They need reminding of the fact other than other similarly minded plankspankers, no one else cares!

Passe and indeed not very intelligent. But you're right, I hear a lot of younger people sneering at pioneering technology, film, music etc from the past or comparing with some current equivalent. The other day we were watching summat with Ray Harryhausen effects and my 14 year old daughter was being quite sneery about it so I reminded her it was done around 50 years ago using stop motion techniques, long before 3D CGI became the norm.

Yes, but PM wrote his lines while I'm guessing the others, mostly sessioners, played what the composers wanted. I agree there are players with better command of advanced techniques but I've seen a lot of bass virtuosity and generally I'm left thinking, 'so what'. I'm generally not interested in bass players but in bass lines so that's where I'm coming from

except these were just bassists and not composers and singers of many of the most enduring songs of all time

Too bluddy right. The fixation on technique seems mainly to be a thing for teenage boys who thrap away on their guitars/basses in their bedrooms. At that age it's understandable.