NancyJohnson

I don't like being in front of the camera at all. I always feel that I look bug-eyed and double-chinny, as a consequence a lot of our old band shots were more about me looking up and away. When we videoed stuff, I just asked the camera guy to keep away from me as I really wasn't interested.

Just skimmed through the Foo Fighters set on iPlayer. While I find Dave Grohl both charismatic and eminently likeable, I've never really connected with the band so much, just the singles and a few odd tracks. So. Even a minute or two in and it's pretty apparent that the chasm between The 1975 (sorry to keep picking on them) and the Foo Fighters is vast; we're not talking the top four versus Macclesfield vast, we're talking the top four versus Great Wakering Rovers (nope, me neither until a minute ago) vast. Yes, yes, I know Grohl & Co have been at it for decades, but would Healy & Co ever attain the level of the Foo Fighters in ten years? Twenty? No. Do they have a clutch of tunes that they could put up against Monkey Wrench, Everlong or Times Like These? Nah. Watching a band that I don't really like just knock it out of the park makes me wonder why I still bother; watching a band like The 1975 makes me just want to try harder.

Last night, over a late evening Indian takeaway, my wife asks whether I want to watch anything on TV. 'Nah, not really.' I reply. 'Reading Festival is on iPlayer,' she replies. I shrug and plough into my chicken tikka dhansak. TV goes on. Caught the end of the Royal Blood set. I'm familiar with the whole set up, it's well delivered, but man alive that drummer irritates the hell out of me. Drummers! Know your place and stay behind your kit, eh? Anyhow, moving along, The 1975. I couldn't do more than three songs before heading upstairs to peruse Basschat and Reverb until my wife came up to bed. Look, I listen to a lot of music across many genres (even more so now with a 3 hour roundtrip commute), experiencing a lot of both good and bad in my time, but how a band, with a combination of such limited musicianship and poorly written, arranged and executed material, could ascend to be the festival headliner at not one, but two nights, is beyond me. Surely the expression fooling some of the people, all of the time seems to apply here, or maybe The 1975 are just the best of a bad bunch. I honestly don't know. Maybe the musical landscape has shifted as well; yes, I have been known to bemoan the lack of investment these darn kids commit to compared to what we did pre-Spotify (other digital platforms are available), when music was delivered on tangible formats and choice was really an issue unless you worked in a record shop. Perhaps it's simply just too easy to just dial up The 1975 and put their highest played tracks into a playlist, put them on repeat and hope they play some of them at Reading. All I know is I found them distinctly unlistenable and a bit of me died. Ack, or maybe I'm just an old fart. Probably.

You know, until pretty recently I never really liked Yes at all. They were what I'd classify as my brothers music; he's about ten years older than me and while I was cutting my teeth on The Sweet, Sparks and Mott The Hoople singles and embracing punk, all I could hear from his room was ELP, Yes, Flash, Deep Purple, The Nice. While I wouldn't say I was a huge fan, I have listened to everything and the only album I go back to infrequently is Fragile and even then only the 2003 reissue with the ten minute cover of America on it. Incidentally, I'll throw in a bit of trivia here. Years ago - late 70s - someone I knew asked around to see whether anyone was interested in an ushering job at one of the Yes shows at Wembley. It was the one in the round, with the revolving stage. From memory, they did an early and late show (I saw both and the soundcheck in between). I had a horrific migraine and got horribly ill; we missed the last trains on account of having to ensure the venue was cleared and we managed to thumb a number of lifts to get home. I puked twice on the roadside en route. Happy days.

If you give a damn, Pete has just posted a new song. Just need a Chelsea win today and I'll afford myself a glass of wine this evening. http://petevuckovic.com/tracks?fbclid=IwAR3JO-f1wVl6cb9eRWWfszH9wHE_x_w9fZzzSUVGERwl293z8OPPRvGh1WI

I didn't like the first five or six albums at all, but I'd concur with a few posts that the early-middle period stuff (Out Of Time/Automatic For The People) was listenable. My dad died around the time Everybody Hurts came out and my mum took some comfort from that track, so I bought her Automatic For The People. Did a few long US road trips around the period these two came out and they were on the radio constantly, so you just bought them. Different times. I bought Monster and New Advertures In Hi-Fi but never listened to NAiHF all the way through, after this I left the party. I recently put together a Spotify playlist...my interest re-sparked for some reason or another. Never listened to it though.

There's a Banana.Boat.Song in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

On the subject of Jess Tinsley, wouldn't her phone have operated Google Maps without a signal? These phone thingies do have GPS circuitry under the cover...

Reading the OP, I think I was more staggered at the expectation for you to do a 90-120 minute set of original material! Christ on a bike, most of the venues I played only wanted a 40 minute set maximum. Concerning the arrangements, when I was doing the bulk of the writing (95%+), I was guilty of changing things around constantly until such a time as I was happy with how the material sounded, but this was only on new material, never what we were going to be rolling out live the following weekend. In the scheme of things, the singer has the least to worry about as he's not playing the actual music, drummer next. Sometimes a vocalist seems to think we can just read their mind and that it's easy to make changes and rememberthem. It isn't. Tell him that.

Could I make a little suggestion? If the numbers aren't so great this year, could we all just congregate in the main hall rather than the little side room and the one where me and Gary did the shoot out last year? Might just keep it a bit more tighter? Also on the next gear update, can someone just amend my entry...the Aguilars were sold a few months back. Thanks muchly. 07. @NancyJohnson Lull JAXT4 & Lull JAX/NRT5, Darkglass A/O Head, Barefaced Big One (the #000)

You'd think, eh? This is the UK mindset. Businesses know that prospective buyers are prepared to shell out more once the carrot has been dangled. If it's more than £1,800 they can kiss my dimpled arssssse and I'll put the swag towards a holiday.

That switch engages the anti-hornet circuit.

Didn't you see the hornet stuck in Rudy's barnet?

I think I'd like to see what I'm buying rather than photos. Andertons will have them soon enough. Possibly.

Just to recap my position, while I'd said previously that they'd peaked with Drums and Wires, it's certainly one of several peaks. After hours and hours and hours of immersion, I think it would be easier to quote the stuff that I don't like ('My Weapon') rather than what is great. It's all pretty good. On the subject of TC&I, EP aside, there's a live album coming out in about ten days too, the content was drawn from a handful of dates in Swindon last year. Incidentally, I did have some contact with Colin Moulding recently, I was trying very hard to get him to attend the SE Bass Bash last year and had made contact through Mark Fisher, the guy behind the XTC/Limelight fanzine (and the Bumper Book of Fun collection). As TC&I were in the middle of rehearsals for Swindon, he politely declined. I tried again for this year and while the invitation is still technically open, I think it's become pretty clear that making small talk with a bunch of guys he'll never see again and then sitting in front of 30 people playing along to The Mayor of Simpleton isn't really his bag, so I doubt we'll see him in Addlestone and time soon. He seems a very private guy, someone who actively shies away from public interest.

XTC. I put together a 30-odd track playlist to accompany the book Complicated Game; it just cherrypicks tracks from White Music through Wasp Star.

I actually listened through all of them about a year ago...the stuff I remember and believed had achieved gold-star status in Chez-NJ really didn't seem to hold up. The early material suffers from very poor production values, they sound thin and nasty. Things do get better around the time of Moving Pictures, but a couple of albums on from this, I'd moved on. The beauty of Rush is reinvention; the stream of live albums and DVD/BluRay, to my ears at least, make the live releases eminently listenable, plus, they always come across as very likeable guys. So best album? In my opinion, there isn't one, largely because their better material is peppered over many albums, but more collectively on the live sets. All The World's A Stage holds high, it's my first exposure. Of the rest? R30. Belter. Images And Words was great as well.

To be honest, me neither!

I did think the bridge looked quite forward, but didnt make the connection with the geometry, especially as the spec gives a 34" scale.

I've been thinking about getting a Spector for a long time now and in the absence of availability of a Forte 4X (or a series one Hamer Cruisebass), a Sweetwater video of the Rudy Sarzo Signature model dropped into my YT feed yesterday and it seems to be the one. The SIMS pickups and switching, along with the Tonepump, seems to make for a fantastic level of on board configuration. No UK stockists yet.

Just to weigh in here, I'd always assumed that when defective finishes went back to paint, it was always for a solid colour over a sunburst (which is why there's a few older <insert colour here>-over-sunburst guitars about), I've never heard of a sunburst over a solid colour. I'm going to go with @bartelby here. Reckon the lighter colour is either the undercoating to either fix the paint to the wood or to hide defects in the wood. Is the sunburst transparent? Can you see the woodgrain through it?

Concerning the Spectors, I've only ever played Gary's and the lone Cruisebass I played and fell in love with years ago (from memory) was more Precision chunky than Jazzy skinny. Neither really matters, I have hands the size if shovels!

I'm very happy with my lot, but I still carry out a daily search (generally while I'm taking a dump) for Hamer Cruisebasses and Spector Forte 4X basses, either of which I'd pull the trigger on if available.

Well this was interesting. Jonestown got at airing on New Music Saturday last week. The guys who do the show post all their content up...if you're quick, the bit we're on on will be towards the top (if it's a few weeks after this post, you'll need to scroll down the pop-up). Locate the showpiece that reads 'Interview with Cut Throat Francis' and scroll along an to hour and 22 minutes. To be honest, these guys have been very supportive in the past and their response after it finishes was laugh out loud priceless. https://www.newmusicsaturday.com/?fbclid=IwAR2W3atJmRjgEXuibVoTry0bDC7Hs1KgU_njw4tu3mzE2t-gKRgFwVq45w8