Leonard Smalls

Many years ago when I was a trainee sound recordist I was on "Keeping Up Appearances" for a month as boomswinger. In the evenings in true BBC style everyone would meet up in the bar and get p1ssed up. I got chatting to Geoffrey Hughes (of Eddie Yeats fame) and we discovered a mutual love of whisky, and he'd also brought 2 guitars. So we spent many an evening jammin' away, me on "bass" (i.e. bottom 4 strings of an acoustic) and him strumming drunkenly, there may have been singing involved... Not a bass hero, but a hero nonetheless!

I taught myself to play bass by playing along to Bootsy records. That put The Funk in me!

Back in the late 80s we had a band who supported us regularly - The Lost T-Shirts of Atlantis - who were a sort of skiffle punk... They had a tea chest bass, made (funnily enough) out of a tea chest, a bit of stair banister and some thick string. Their bass player could get various frequencies of thump out of it, but had to draw the line at Stanley Clarke covers...

Just checking my new fabulous trousers for Saturday's gigno

I shared a funny cigarette with Norman Watt Roy once!

Sold Brian a pedal - all went exactly as it should. Top bloke!

My band's first album... Soon to be available real copies on cd as well (can't afford vinyl yet!). https://choked.bandcamp.com/album/choked?fbclid=IwAR1-qD88sDLKUZe2SN6LUr3kDiyTn-R38-SrWNGY_4v89OyIT2mwrSCF4l4

You mean there's a good version? While it's undoubtedly very skillfully played the lack of any sort of groove and the pompous annoyingly folky vocals turn it into nails-on-a-blackboard for me! Still, while Mr. Beggs appears to be an extremely good player, my main memory is of Kajagoogoo playing Leeds University in the mid 80s. I was on security and barely noticed any funkystuff because of the screaming girls, and the need to pull said screaming girls out of the crowd as they fainted, put them on the side of the stage only for them to run into the crowd and faint again.

One of the best bikes I ever rode, and the M2 Cyclone, especially on twisties... Though I tested it against a Guzzi V10 Centauro with the Dr John motor which was a little less flick-ey but far more stable!

That's quite a lot of the time 😁

In that case, I'm 18 miles westish of you...

It's also important to listen to the best players in order to really appreciate the piece:

G'day! I'm almost as far as you can get in Shropshire without being in Wales or Herefordshire...

As ZBD and others have said, Bach is always a good starting point. Always great bass! Though when it comes to his many piano works, I much prefer the way Jacques Loussier does 'em to the no-pedal soul-less-ness of Andras Schiff (a source of much disagreement with my classical-only music piano teaching mother!). I bet Bach would have liked his Italian Concerto done all groovy! And more Vivaldi recommendations - I get sick of the usual overplayed 4 Seasons... I much prefer the bassoon and lute concertos, and for more baroque, Scarlatti's Sinfonies. For more lovely bass lines, I'd also recommend Schubert's Impromptus. I also like a bit of heavy, so loves a bit of Shostakovich's symphonies and can get as modern as Varese...

Oldies but goodies!

I've spent a bit more time than usual on the bass for this month's songlet... We've got 8 different basslines played on 4 different basses! It's inspired by the time I worked at Chester Zoo (as a boat driver, what else?). One day loads of police turned up and completely locked the place down - they thought they'd smashed a major drugs ring. Turns out a lad who used to work there had been caught in London with a carrier bag full of weed, that he said had come from Chester Zoo. The police duly found a large amount of cannabis plants growing behind the bird house; however, they'd grown from hemp seeds thrown out while cleaning out the bird cages! For those who only want the very funky bit, rather than the ambient build-up, just skip to 3 minutes... Basses are Lightwave fretless, Wal Custom, ACG Recurve and Parker PB51. Guitars are an old Epi semi-acoustic and a Strat with lots of pitch shift, reverb and delay and Valves overdrive. Drums programmed in EZ Drummer and Addictive Drums. All mixed in Ableton and polished with Ozone 9.

I suspect I wouldn't get on very well with your record collection! But then most people of taste would baulk at my love of avant- and free-jazz 😁

As a young punk kid I really hated all that Americana - basically that middle of the road US muzak dribbling with hippy looking dudes and strummed acoustic guitars. And now, may years later, I still hate it.

An actual single!

Indeed! I've been trying to convince our guitarist to play almost anything but blues-ey widdle by introducing him to Primus, and Marc Ribot and David Fiuczynski, but only limited success so far...

I think it's the more usual position! However, I preferred Youth-era - possibly because they were sparser and groovier...

I would like to see some live music on TV that isn't just the latest boy-girlband on Graham Norton promoting their new single, or Jools' "Later" and Hootenanny - which is about the sum total of TV live music! I remember back in the 70s80s there was quite a lot - Rock Goes to College, OGWT, TOTP (!), The Tube, Something Else etc, all of which promoted the idea of actual bands playing actual music in an intimate space, rather than just a superstar in a football stadium charging everyone £100+ to get in...

New Model Army at the Cosmo Club in Leeds 1984ish... It's not that they were bad, but that the Cosmo was largely a reggae venue - we'd seen Mad Professor, LKJ, Black Uhuru etc, and assumed NMA were also reggae. So we arrived after some serious herbal refreshment, all ready to skank the night away, and what did we get? Noisy oiks in clogs. Never forgiven the beggars!

The Parker that this ultra-cool dude is playing 😁😎

Parker bass pics would be nice Just got this!