Russ

Wunjo, Rose-Morris, etc have the enviable position of being on Denmark St. Everyone knows Denmark St, and it's a tourist attraction. Some of these shops can make their rent for the week by selling a guitar that Noel Gallagher once snotted on to some rich tourist, or anything with a tentative Beatles or Stones connection. It used to be the same with 48th St in New York City - Rudy's, Manny's, etc. Rudy's moved, and Manny's ended up becoming a Sam Ash, and has now closed, along with the rest of them.

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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

Richlite is basically made of paper - it's multiple layers of paper impregnated with phenolic resin and baked under high pressure. It's sturdy stuff that's somewhere in between a wood fingerboard an a pure phenolic one.

Dude… if you’re in Somerset, you’re two hours away. Make a day of it! Although I guess I’ve developed a bit of a different concept of travel time since I’ve lived in the US… Look online for a gig bag for a Flying V bass - they’re out there. That should be sufficiently long for that bass.

Martin was using the Schack electronics pretty much exclusively back then (the occasional Bart NTMB, but probably 90% Schack), but it was only a single PCB with three sets of DIP switches on. So I'm not sure what that additional board might have been - possibly something one of the previous owners put in there? You should see if you can arrange to go over and see Martin and bring the bass with you. He's always happy to see where his old instruments (especially some of the more notable ones, such as that one) end up. EDIT: Additional thought - does the bass have a piezo system? Maybe that could be it?

Shures. Can't remember the model number, but they were supposed to be good for bass. But it's like wearing earbuds. Nicer-than-average and quite expensive earbuds, but still. It's not the visceral experience you get from an amp.

IEMs are good for vocals. But I really can't abide the sound of either guitar or bass through them. It's thin and doesn't exactly encourage you to "feel" the music. It's even more discombobulating when you have live drums - a big drum sound coming from behind you, but this tinny, disconnected sound in your ears on top of it. So, unless your drummer is playing an e-kit, there's really no such thing as a silent stage.

SVT-7s are notoriously unreliable. The newer ones are better, but still have issues with the limiter circuit kicking in when it shouldn't. Less preamp gain, more master volume, maybe? And yep, like everyone else has said, make sure the air has room to circulate, and use a can of compressed air to clean the fan from time to time.

Yep. Gus uses a graphite wrap over a wood neck, rather than a full graphite neck, and that's what some of the Enfields had. I'm also curious as to the "state of the art" in composite instrument construction, and if it's moved on since the heyday of Status, Modulus, etc. I mentioned them earlier, but Aristides seem to be doing some interesting stuff with composites - not sure what their "Arium" material is (I suspect some kind of stabilised fibreglass), but it's apparently a lot more stable than wood, and they seem to be selling a lot of instruments...

Yes, definitely. They have the experience and obviously worked a lot with Status, but didn't Sims downsize his operation significantly a couple of years back, when he shuttered Enfield?

Hypothetically, if another company was to take over production of Status instruments, who should it be? Obviously they'd have to be British, or, at the very least, European, with some pedigree in high-end instruments and preferably some experience in working with composites. I can't actually think of anyone who'd meet all these criteria. Almost all guitar companies in the UK are small operations, and there aren't that many on the continent either. Maybe Warwick? Or, on the composites site, someone like Aristides from the Netherlands?

It's the end of an era. I'd love to see someone else take it on, but I'm kinda at a loss to think of who could do it justice. I also suspect Status prices on the used market are going to have a "Wal" moment, and go through the roof. I am curious about what the sales were like of their wooden-necked "relaunch"-era instruments from the past couple of years. Were they selling everything they could make, or was it a case of "no graphite neck, no Status" for some?

I was in Selsdon/Forestdale for years. I didn't buy an Ibanez bass off either of you back in 2015 or so, did I? I picked it up from someone in Sanderstead... they had a little PJB amp. I do despair that Croydon's once enviable music scene has basically completely died. No more Cartoon, no more Sheep, no more Scream Lounge, no more Scream Studios, for that matter. You get the occasional folky or jazzy band or acoustic singer/songwriter at the Oval, and that's pretty much it. I know Rockbottom still has its rehearsal studios (with all the same amps they had back in the early 90s!), and there's some new place out on the Purley Way near the big Sainsbury's, but that whole scene seems to have basically disappeared.

South Croydon has been affected too, for instance, last time I was home, all the good restaurants on South End have shut down, replaced by bad ones, or, in some cases, nothing at all. The rot seems to creep southwards - it used to be that Norbury and Thornton Heath (and isolated areas like New Addington) were the "bad" bits of town, then it was West Croydon, then it was East Croydon and Addiscombe, and it just keeps heading further south down the A23. Luckily, you've still got places like Shirley, Selsdon, Sanderstead and bits of Purley that are still quite nice.

We had considered Ireland too, but we're better connected in the UK, there's more work, and definitely more to do from a musical perspective. And if it means I have to put off a major bass purchase for a while, so be it - getting away from here is kinda the priority right now!

Pretty much, yeah. This is no place to bring up three kids. Not sure exactly where we’re going to end up, but it might end up being Croydon again. It’s got issues, but it’s close to everything and there’s nicer places nearby!

Could be a while - saving up to move back to the UK right now, hence not putting in the order yet. But they're coming, eventually.