Russ

Having a good "density" of companies in a particular area is important for the games business - for smaller studios, a single game is often make-or-break for them, and, if the game tanks, that's the end of the company. You need to know that there's other companies in the same area, otherwise you get people who won't get involved at all if it means they're having to move to a different city, and often a different country, every few years, or take their skills to a different industry. Being a games developer requires a deep love of the medium. It's not the best paid job you can have as a coder or artist and usually requires ridiculous amounts of overtime and less-than-optimal working conditions. The UK has a solid games development industry - there's quite a few long-established companies who have been continuously at it since the 1980s, and it's pretty much the European hub for game development. There's other places (thinking Sweden, Estonia, Romania and Finland) but the UK still has more going on than all of them put together. The Grand Theft Auto games were largely developed in Leeds and Edinburgh, and Rockstar North has a lineage that goes back to the late 1980s, as part of Psygnosis (they, as DMA Design, developed the original Lemmings on the Amiga). The original Tomb Raider was developed by Core Design in Derby (by former Gremlin Graphics and Codemasters people).

I worked in the video games business back in the 90s. A couple of people I used to work with ended up in Canada - one at EA in Vancouver and another at Bioware in Edmonton. They're both still out there - my friend who went to Bioware is still there, my other friend who went to Vancouver has been in and out of a dozen companies. They have a lot of companies there. Vancouver and Montreal are the hotspots. There's actually not all that many in the US by comparison - there's a few big names, obviously, but most actual game development is done in other places (Eastern Europe is another big hotspot). The big companies have head offices, marketing departments, etc in the US but not all that much more than that. I've often thought about returning to the video games industry, but, a) it's about the most insecure industry out there in terms of job security, and b) nobody's going to employ a 52-year-old who's had 25 years out of the industry and isn't management.

If it won't work on the Stomp, will it work on the Helix LT? I believe that has a cut-down signal path compared to the full-fat Helix too.

No they can't, they just guess! Here in New Jersey, the sales tax is 6.625% - nobody's calculating that off the top of their heads. You never know what something is going to cost until you go to the checkout - the sales tax isn't included in the shelf price and is added on at the till.

Helix/Kemper/Headrush/whatever into a small 1x12" FRFR cab. The Headrush FRFR cabs are well liked, and Barefaced just brought out an active cab for precisely this sort of scenario. I'm not a silent stage fan. I like loud amps and there's nothing to replace that visceral feeling of a big amp shaking the stage and making your trousers flap. But I've been on the same bill as other bands who have gone this route, and they've made it work for them. There's one band we've played with on several occasions who do original metal, but they have a sideline as a cover band that basically pays for their original stuff. They're all about modellers, IEMs and electronic drums, but this enables them to basically play in peoples' houses at loud stereo volume and do birthday parties for rich peoples' kids in their own houses!

We really should be moving towards implementing the Nordic Model. Not only are the Nordic countries regularly voted the happiest countries on Earth, stuff just works there. Ironically, there's a lot more public services being provided by the private sector there than in the UK, but it's all very heavily regulated and efficient. I've always been of the opinion that nobody likes paying tax, but, if we've got to pay it, I want to see good value for what I pay. Taxes in the Nordics are quite high, but you do get a hell of a lot for what you pay (healthcare, free university and adult eduction, heavily subsidised childcare, etc, etc). They are also transparent - everyone's tax records are a matter of public record, so corruption is almost unheard of.

Book a trip over to Germany to pick it up. Make an event out of it - it's probably cheaper than the import duty! They're just outside Aachen, or about an hour from Dusseldorf or Cologne, depending on where you want to fly to. Adrian or one of the other Public Peace guys will probably even pick you up from the airport if you arrange it in advance! It's a relatively feasible road trip if you wanted to do it that way too - get the ferry to Hook of Holland, and it's about a 3 hour drive via Tilburg and Eindhoven.

Plus, that "thwop" of wood on rubber is not a pleasant sound!

Guitar Center in the US has been going through this. Basically, they're in the middle of repositioning themselves - they've realised that people can buy cheap guitars, accessories, strings, consumables, etc online, so they're refocusing on stocking higher-end stuff, the sort of stuff that people want to try before they buy. It's the high-end and specialist places that seem to have longevity in this business - for instance, The Gallery has been a fixture in Camden for 30-odd years at this point, and they sell almost exclusively high-end and custom gear, and only for bass. The market for musical instruments has also changed a fair bit - overall sales are lower than they were 10 years ago, but the demographics have significantly widened. A lot more girls are picking up the guitar these days, for a start. A lot of people who were drawn to electronic instruments in some of the more dance-oriented genres are also picking up guitars too, especially acoustics. The amp market seems to have fallen off more than the guitar market, and that's largely because of the rise of modellers (Helix/Axe-FX/Kemper/Headrush, etc), IEMs and silent stages. Incidentally, there's no such thing as a silent stage if your drummer is playing an acoustic kit!

I read earlier that they're closed for refurbishment, and that the Brighton Argus story is rubbish. I hope so. Spent many an hour in there over the years. They always had a very good bass section!

Wallflower (the band I was in back between '94 and '98, video above) got to support Reef and the Crazy Gods Of Endless Noise back in the day. I think it was at the Harlow Square, back when it still existed! The bass player from TCGOEN was a monster, if I remember right. Played a fretless Wal.

I know this wasn't directed at me, but, since November, I've become a bit more active in the local progressive organisations, made some campaign contributions and worked a bit with our local school board to ensure that certain initiatives are not swept under the table. I'm in New Jesery, which is a blue state, but I live in quite a red corner of it. We have schools here who are implementing book bans, removing protections for LGBTQ students and which are facing budget cuts, so, as a parent with kids in the local schools, I'm being proactive in advocating for the progressive agenda. The principals, most of the teachers, and a little more than half the local school board are on the progressive side of things, but they're facing down the local representative, who's a Republican and is advocating for all this Tr**pian stuff, and, of course, the locals have no interest in paying additional property taxes to subsidise improvements at the school. Which is all good. For now. But in the medium term, we're leaving. This is no place to bring up kids. Only this morning I got an email from the school saying that they had a "shelter in place" drill. If it's not one of those, it's an active shooter drill. There's a security guard at the school's front door carrying a gun. That's just wrong.

There's Tool-ish bits. We all went to see the infamous Tool show at the London Astoria in '97 (the one where a blue-painted Maynard judo-threw a stage invader and sat on top of him for a whole song) and were suitably inspired. The poetic, almost spoken-word delivery is very un-Tool though, and there was a lot of 1990s post-rock influence in there (Tortoise, dEUS, Slint, etc).

Signal is a service that offers self-destructing messages, so there's no digital "paper trail". This is illegal - all US federal communications are supposed to happen through approved secure systems, on secured devices, and everything has to be logged. It's almost certain that this is the reason it was being used, so there's no official records of the conversations. It's end-to-end encrypted, but it's not difficult to compromise any of the messaging "endpoints", ie, the devices used to send and receive the messages, so it's hackable and readable by anyone who can do this (hello Russia, China, North Korea, etc).

I don't have any audio recordings online of my first serious band, Wallflower, but there's a video that was recorded of us at our final gig at the King's Head in Fulham in 1998. We were a bit arty-farty and perhaps a little pretentious (our singer was an art student who now curates a gallery in Copenhagen), but I've yet to hear another band that soundeed anything like us. And I got to do some fun stuff on bass.