NancyJohnson

I especially love the version with the smoothie maker accompaniment.

Years ago, the original Nancy Johnson played a gig to a soundguy and a lone barman. We were asked to step in because illness had caused a band to pull out. This was about 24 hours beforehand. Turn up on the day, the headliners had now pulled out as well. The promoter had found an acoustic/cajon duo (bit of a mismatch TBH) and assured us tickets had been ore-sold. The duo played to us four and departed citing a long journey (Bracknell to Basingstoke, sigh) and work next day, so the place was empty. We didn't get a Grauniad review, happily.

The point I was trying to get over wasn't so much about the switching, more about if I'm gigging/recording, then I'd prefer to do the whole session on just the one stringset, be it a four or five. I've played a six string once, in a shop in Landaan. Played a seven string Conklin when I was demonstrating for EBS at a trade show 20+ years ago. I just found that the high register extended range was unnecessary for me; I mean, Steve Lawson does very well off it, but in a three piece punk band, well, it's way too many strings.

I've got both and have previously switched between 4s and 5s. While I don't necessarily experience issues switching between the two, live or session, I do prefer just sticking to the one. I don't know that I could step up to a 6...that high C string. Just too unbasslike.

I've seen plenty of stuff about bass players using guitar-configured heads and cabinets, but is it really a myth that we should only be using bass-configured gear? Not purely from a tone perspective, but also from a frequency-centric perspective? I mean by this, if I stuck my bass into a (for instance) Fender Twin Reverb and played at volume, honestly, would it fry or damage it? Back in my formulative years, I just remember being steered towards the dusty back end of the shop by a guy in our local music store, who regaled me and my dad with the rhetorical quote, 'Oh no, those are guitar amps, you need a bass amp.' This comment has stuck with me for 35+ years. I should hasten to add here that I've never run my basses through anything that's not built or sold for purpose.

Levy's polypropylene extra long, 2" width on every guitar. Tried the extra wide Levys ones, but they looked ridiculous.

Irrespective of the manufacturer or the country it came from, if you go back to many recordings from the 60s/70s - when the gear was fundamentally new - the bass sounds terrible. Consequently, there's little to endear me to vintage/old gear ir the price old stuff sells for.

As a kid, we all knew someone who had easy access to 5th generation copied porno on VHS cassettes. A mate of mine was very keen to show me a recording of something he thought I'd find hilarious but for all the wrong reasons; popping the tape in, there were trailers for forthcoming porno films. The trailer in particular featured a blonde woman on a boat with two guys. There was an America-accented dialogue with references to a 'double-banger sequence you'll never forget' and the accompanying music? The theme from the Nicholas Parson's vehicle, Sale Of The Century. It obviously etched itself onto our addled teenage minds. I was out with him last night and 30+ years later it still gets a mention, one us us apeing the narrative while the other hums the theme tune.

I've been looking for a decent first run Hamer Cruisebass for longer than I can remember. There's a couple up on eBay at the moment, one is in shocking condition and the other is being sold by multiple sellers in Japan (suspect!).

That's really nice. More pics please!

Like Volkswagens?

I'm enjoying this. Vocals a little screamy, but all good.

London undoubtedly could be a cleaner place and let's face it, it is cleaner now compared to how it was when my mum was a girl; she described it to me once as, 'every house having a coal fire and every chimney belching smoke coming out of it, smogs so thick in Shepherds Bush that you could barely see a few feet in front of you. it made breathing difficult. In wintertime sooty residue on everything.' Thing is though, we don't live under a dome, we live on a sphere with weather systems circulating whatever is in the atmosphere. Their pollution and toxicity becomes our pollution and toxicity, and to a way lesser extent vice-versa. If we cut our pollutants today to zero and India/China just carried on regardless, things wouldn't change a jot. Concerning ethics, how do you approach that then? Do you take the viewpoint that it's OK to for undeveloped(?) countries to continue throwing sh*t into the atmosphere but to cease, or restrain, them from doing so is ethically wrong? We're not talking about Britain and the Industrial Revolution here, we're talking about single cities with a population of double or triple the entire population of the UK at the height of the Industrial Revolution, not a scattered population with a couple of hundred foundries. India and China are manufacturing on a massive scale, seemingly with little care for what it's doing to the environment globally.

If I can just interject here, all this is being done to cut down on congestion (via charging/penalising) and/or trying to get the city air we breathe cleaner (also via charging). First, let's look at some numbers; the metropolitan area of London is around 1,600 km² (and for the benefit of perspective, the surface of the earth is, more or less, 510million km², of which landmass makes up 149million km²), so percentage-wise London is around 0.01% of the total landmass of the planet. Back in 2015, London was only ranked 40th biggest city in the world by metropolitan landmass and 32nd by population. In the scheme of things, London is pretty small compared to Jakarta or Karachi or a handful of places you've never heard of (Tianjin? Chengdu?). Moving forward, and yes, I do appreciate what London is trying to do to decrease congestion and to get the air cleaner, but in the scheme of things London's efforts are a metaphorical p*ss in the ocean. Sorry if that hurts. We are too small and insignificant to keep crusading for what we believe is right when the likes of India, Pakistan and China spew countless tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere every day. You can also throw in Bangladesh and Iran in as well. Taking money off people via a stealthy taxation based on it being for the good of the world, will not clear the air; the only correlation is that it will just make people think twice about jumping in the car and drivers are an easy target to squeeze money out of and at the end of the day the money London takes just goes into the corporeal pot. It's just greed. We seem to have taken the greed model, bettered it and made it our own. It doesn't matter which political party you are, it's all about the £££s. Can I think of anything better? Yes, but it'll upset the snowflakes. Boycott Chinese and Indian steel for starters, boycott products made in these countries until such a time as they effectively clean up their act, because out little bit of effort will make no difference whatsoever. Thinking small (London) is frankly pointless. The problem isn't here, it's 6,000 miles away.

Exempt here. Five year old Honda CRV. The congestion charge is only up to 6.00pm weekdays and there's no fee at weekends. Any time I've had to gig up in the centre it's always been the case that we've timed things to drop into the zone after that. Concerning the ULEZ thing, it does seem a shame that the time periods don't match. It always appears that we're always trying to avoid being caught out one way or another. Give it a few years, when everyone is in EVs and exempt from petrol/diesel penalties, and they'll just conjour up another charge for the motorist to stump up.

Bored now.

I wasn't replying in respect of the neatness. You chipped in a response to a comment I made to a wholly different post and I replied to that. And moving along: Sneering and patronising? Good grief, I'm not even warmed up yet. I'm tired of all the snowflakery that exists nowadays; 'Oh, he doesn't like my wedges. He said I wouldn't be able tell the difference between those and an old playing card.' This isn't about being peremptory, it's an opinion borne from several experiences. Why do we have to do this merry little dance to skirt around things for fear of constantly upsetting someone? Man alive. For the love of god, it's a shim. Have some perspective, eh? And of course, my apologies; I actually had my clairvoyance tuned down earlier this evening, otherwise I'd clearly have known the wedgie transaction hadn't involved the exchange of money.

I love Scott Bradlee. Sadly a full diary means I'm going to miss his show at The Hexagon, Reading at the end of November.

I would guarantee to you that if I removed the shims you probably paid good money for and replaced them with an old business card or something cut out of a cornflake box, you would be none the wiser. Wedges? Pffft. If you believe that filling a tiny triangular void under the neck heel is somehow going to affect playability or tone or whatever drove you to buy a set, then you've been duped.

The English Garden album is a tremendous thing. Matthew Seligman on bass too. Win win. I still have my B Woolley Minded badge somewhere too.

Irrespective of the bass and it's provenance, why anyone would pay $10 for something that you can make for free out of a playing card or a bit of sandpaper is beyond me. I have some bottles of snake oil in my garage if you need to buy any.

I've had to shim a couple of necks in the past. It is amazing how a tiny sliver of veneer or sandpaper can have such an effect on overall playability.

I enjoyed the first three showing on Spotify (one of them isn't up yet). The first live one ('On Tour') isn't up either, but I was intrigued when I read a post somewhere saying it had the same energy as Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous.