Leonard Smalls

The only wedding we ever played - I came on my mosickle: And channelling my inner Hellborg:

I first discovered music-that-moved-me by watching films like Rock around the clock, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole as a kid... Quite liked a bit of glam rock, but didn't really get keen on music till punk; then I'd sit up at night with my finger over the record button on my mum's music centre, waiting for Peel to play something epic. And after quite a short while, as punk grew more formulaic, I'd get much more excited by other esoterica that Peel played such as Monochrome Set, Gang of Four, Comsat Angels... As a result i used to save m dinner money from school and schhlepp up to Penny Lane records at lunchtime to buy the latest bizarre 7". And I'd sit watching TOTP with bated breath, just in case something interesting came on - which it very occasionally did! Then I stumbled into funk and reggae; there was no radio or show that catered for that, so (having moved to Leeds) I spent hours sorting through the imports in Jumbo Records - that's how I found Trouble Funk, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and the Jonzun Crew (whose "Pack Jam" original Tommy Boy 12" single set me back over £6, when an LP was normally £3.49) - and passed many a night at either the Cosmo Club or 99 Blues to get into reggae...

I saw them a few times in the late 80s/early 90s... Funky and tight as! And few bands were as able to get the whole audience dancing. And they're still playing, despite Big Tony's illness...

Being a funky sort of chap, I find most of the groovy bands I listen to have both keyboard bass and bass guitar... Parliament or Trouble Funk both have phat keys bass lines plus bass guitar supplying syncopated funky stuff.

At the Marquee in 1992ish...

You're playing the wrong kind of jazz then! Play a cacophonous racket with no discernible beat and definitely no melody, and you may just about get some chin-stroking polo-necks in!

Proper rock'n'roll here - probably 1988ish at the King's Head, Fulham...

Barf Roco video from Long Ago, featuring live footage and home made bits'n'bobs... This was our single - only available on cassette!

I done one too... I thought - that geezer's got some serious phones: feel the weight, feel the sound, heavy pressure's going down! We're talking EZ drummer with fills programmed by me. And a Wal, and a strat. And Addictive Keys mark one electric piano, plus some Vienna Sax vst layered with heavily edited 'net-found loops. Plus a bit of singin'!

I played at the Charing Cross Road version 3 times, once supporting Carter the Unstoppables, and twice as headline...

Ooh yes... 40 minutes away!

I remember a number of years ago I was asked to join a hastily put together band to do a one-off improv jazz gig with the guidance of a local trumpeter... We got there, set up for the gig and she handed round a sort of colour wheel - she explained that she'd point to an area of colour, she'd start and we'd all join in as appropriate. There were some good bits, some awful bits and a whole lot of crazy noise! In contrast, another improv jazz band I played with always started with a groove from the drummer and I (we'd been playing in a punkfunk band together for years), keys and guitar would join in and the horn section (who used to play with Lol Coxhill) would do mad stuff; sometimes the keys player would signal an actual chord change, but more often we'd all go chromatically in many different directions. We weren't beholden to any bourgeois notions of key, and our creativity wasn't stiffled by notated edicts from the Capitalist Overlords! 😎😁

Someone said it in the guitarist reading thread... And I couldn't cover every possible combination of what sort of band you're in - just a best fit will do! And by covers band I include functions bands who do a wide variety of covers in any setting. Tribute band would be either bands that exclusively do the work of one artist, possibly trying to look/perform like them, or bands that do shows like best of the 80s including dressing in the style covered. Any more combinations - stick to what is most important to you and fits best...

Aye - whichever is more important to you... Couldn't work out how to do more than one option on the poll!

So who plays gigs? Tribute? Covers? Originals? It'd be interesting to see what sort of mix we have after an assertion that the majority on BC are tribute or functions players... Unfortunately I couldn't work out how to give a couple of options for those who do many of each type, so please choose what you do most!

We should do a poll.... I'm a gigging bassist who does neither functions or tribute!

I tend to play with like-minded people! We don't always completely agree with each other, but we are broadly all coming from the same place in terms of what we want to do; I can guarantee, for instance, that nobody would suggest we did a cover of, say, Lady In Red or Heigh Ho Silver Lining! Though all of us come from completely different places musically we produce something together that we all like; so our singer and other bass player do the punk, I supply The Funk, our guitarist does psychedelic rock and our drummer is like lukewarm water in the middle. And unless we all like it, we don't play it! Not only that, but we go out and gig as well, if anyone's daft enough to book us! (Morecambe Nice'n'Sleazy festival is our next gig)

The way I see it is, if my job was to be a musician I would prefer to only play music I actually like and want to play - preferably my own. If that wasn't possible I'd play most things just to earn a crust. However, my job isn't being a musician... It's one of the ways I have fun, which means only playing stuff I want to play - otherwise it's no fun for me!

At Tramlines Festival in Sheffield with my 1st band (Dredd and the Badass Weeds) - formed in 1983. This was more like 2014 though, complete with dancer Sister Bez and Parker PB51 bass. There's a a clip of this gig on YouTube... It was during our ecclesiastical phase!

Back in 1992ish, when we wore white overalls and everything got painted in fluorescents... I've still got some on my Wal!

I just bought one myself! https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/refurbished-workstations/pre-configured-workstations/audio-production-daw-workstations £867 plus delivery... Didn't buy the Xeon Gold one at £1000+ more!

Made a start! So far there's slappity bass, phat synth bass, wahgeetar, Clyde Stubblefield, funky keys and some sax... Hope my laptop lasts - it's currently taking at least 15 mins to boot up. May soon replace her with a refurb HP z440 2xXeon 8 core, 48Gb RAM and 3Tb of SSDs, all for under £900!

More Marc Ribot... Love his crazy playing!

My favourite cover of it! I did actually buy hte Zombies version at the same time as the Subs coloured vinyl version...

I got into punk as a 15 year old at school; previously I'd been into 50s type rock and roll, anything that jumped. But the 1st music that "spoke" was punk. I remember all the other lads in my class (never the girls!) had nice clean denim jackets with Yes or Genesis (or similar) patches sewn on neatly by their mums. Me'n'Swamp'nSgav were the only ones in the school who dyed our hair pink, wore old prison jackets with "Slits" or "Members" handpainted (badly)on the back in fluorescent orange (we couldn't afford to pay proper punk shop prices!). We were basically our own little tribe, with folks staring or shouting abuse or even attacking us. This feeling of rejection meant a reciprocal rejection - everything that wasn't punk was crap. Though Slits counted as punk, as did many new wave bands that most certainly didn't sound like punk; nowadays punk has to be a stereotype of what punk was, which was then a sort of rejection of the elitism of 70s rock and prog, basically an idea that anybody could have a voice or make music, even if they weren't fellows of the Royal Schools of Music! Talking of which, my neighbour (Tull keyboards 76-80) tells a story of a tour in the US in early '78. They were waiting in the transit lounge of Chicago airport, which was like a hub for flights across America and bands would often meet there while touring. So Tull were there, as was Queen. Then in walked the Sex Pistols. Freddie Mercury was at the bar, and Sid walks up to him and says "Oi, aren't you that geezer that did an album about faahkin ballet?". To which Freddie replies "I feel you were mistaken, it was about the opera, dear Mr. Ferocious"...