Leonard Smalls

Turn to Redwood - Killing Joak

Sweet Child O' Pine - Guns and Roses

Only Yew - The Fabulous Platters

Robert De Niro's Waiting - Banarama

I'm learning our set - not on bass as a) I wrote most of 'em and b) I know them backwards - but on guitar; I'm not doing them like our previous guitarists, but writing new parts which may or may not fit better...

Indeed.. It's a Bryston! I used to work with a chap whose hobby was collecting old caps and resistors (!) - he had a room full of 'em. He was offered a surprising amount of money (£hundreds) for a few 50s oil/paper capacitors by a high end "hifi" valve amp manufacturer. He turned it down; he just wanted his preciousss!

They're big fellas, two are about the size of a beer can! I suspect they'll be alright for a bit, the ones at BBC Maida Vale are still going and they're older and more heavily used than mine...

I remember back in the 80s a M8 of mine had an Amstrad Tower System that he proudly told me was 500W... It even said it on the box. But that was the only quoted figure, and it said in tiny letters, PMPO. So things haven't changed! By contrast, my hifi power amplifier comes with an individual test certificate for that particular amp, signed by the tester, which quoted a whole raft of figures for outputs at various loads and frequencies, slew rates and who knows what else+ the most exciting of which was 962W/ch @4ohms for 1KHz with THD <0.05%. There was also a 20 year guarantee, which has just run out!

Jealous Kaeng Pa Gai - Roxy Music (for all you Thai curry fans!)

Here's me going over to the darkside at today's rehearsal... Used a Helix into my 1500w 6x10 bass stack and it sounded great! Fingerstyle too.

We had no guitarist for today's rehearsal. However, I'd bought myself a cheap'n'cheerful Squier Toronnado having had to give back the borrowed Strat. So I played guitar, which I've never done with anyone else! I just played my over-complicated bass lines, while our other bass player did his thing and I got to do extra widdling which was nice. And it went surprisingly well - guitar playing is dead easy compared to bass... 😁

Laibach in discopopdance shock!

Crosswords - Cream

Or even worse, when they're waiting for something to happen, the whole channel has programmes cancelled while a news anchor says "from our correspondent at... What's happening there?" and correspondent says "we're expecting that X or Y might happen, and here's the building it might happen in, and there may be some people in there who it will happen to or will do the happening". Then it's back to anchor who calls up an expert to do some vaguely informed speculating on whether the thing is going to happen. This is repeated until News can no longer justify taking over the channel for no good reason*. And meanwhile, we're all missing Bargain Hunt! *when I worked for Auntie Beeb, News were incredibly arrogant - they felt that all the other programmes were just filler between news. I'm sure that's true of all news organisations!