Leonard Smalls

I prefer to drive! From Shropshire to Saalbach in Austria is 2 500 mile days with an overnight at a £50 Ibis in Luxembourg which has a most excellent Italian restaurant next door... We stay for about 10 days skiing, and it costs us about a grand each including liftpass...

Tips? Have a lesson... And keep your ankles flexed so your shins push into the front of the boots. That keeps weight over the front which makes turning much easier, as you'll then be using the whole edge. And learn how to carve as quickly as possible, as the beginner's snowplough turn and stop hurts far more!

I suspect it's because it's a .mov file... Don't work well with windows! Is the band The Bridge? Or Valley Uprising?

That's Scottish skiing (and mountaineering) 😁 But when the weather and conditions are good is one of the best places on earth... However, that's for maybe 4 days a year! Skiing is much easier nowadays, as the skis are so much easier to turn with. But my tip is to get at least 6 hours of tuition in. And go to Austria - the chair lifts are heated, the mountain food is on the whole better than France and beer's cheaper. And it's weissbier! Though saying that, I love France too, though choose wisely as it can get very crowded. Don't go at half term!

Me too! I remember a school trip to Aprica in about 1981... Shame I'm not as young and supple as then - otherwise I'd be doing lean angles just like this 😁

File doesn't seem to work... What was the bar?

It might be worth thinking about getting one of THESE. I know people with serious arthritic knees who can ski again by using a Ski Mojo. Not cheap, but it means you could get back on the slopes... Just to get you more jealous, I've just bought my first ever pair of new skis - they're 95mm at the waist, and 154mm at the shovel. And despite their proper off piste/all mountain shape they're designed for fast on-piste carving. They catapult you out of turns like you've got a jet engine!

I used to play these at my gothfunk'n'soul disco in the 80s!

I'd suggest going to your device manager, right click on all the USB options, open the power management tab and make sure windows can't turn the device off to annoyingly save power... Do the same for graphics and any onboard sound. And as right click on any DAW, and make sure it always runs as administrator. I found my laptop speeded up quite a lot after that! However, the 16Gb that had still tended to max out when running 6 VST instruments and 16 other tracks, all with Ozone/Neutron/Raum or Bias FX on them. So I went to Bargain Hardware, and bought a refurb HPZ440 audio workstation with 48Gb RAM, 2x Xeon 8 core processors and 3Tb of solid state storage for (wait for it) £867... It's pretty quick!

Coolest bass solo from the funkiest mutha in the universe? I saw him at the Barbican on this tour, doing this very solo. I don't think my internal organs have ever vibrated like that!

One man's crap is another's steaming pile of heaven... I would file all the above in my stinky crap pile, and my steamy pile of 80s heaven would include Bauhaus, Trouble Funk, The Exploited, The Meteors, Guana Batz, Jonzun Crew, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Mad Professor. Funnily enough, from my NotDooDoo Pile, only 1 charted in the 80s (that I noticed) - Bauhaus, with a cover of a 70s Bowie song...

Has this thread been resurrected due to Hucknall's recent arrest for molesting a rabbit? I heard that when caught, Mr. Hucknall was singing "Holding Back The Ears" , then "Bunny's Too Tight To Mention"... 😁

I'm wearing some in the pic above... Proper rock'n'roll me - came to the gig on this! Luckily the band brought my gear in the van...

Not always 😁 Bought that one from Allbang and Strummit in Covent Garden for £500 in 90ish - chose it over an Alembic at £650 and a Jaydee at £400. It was my 2nd bass - first was a Kawai Sleekline ; also got a Sandberg Bassic, a Parker PB51, an ACG Recurve and Lightwave Sabre fretless. I've still got all of 'em...

One person's cacophonous din is another's Mariah Carey... 😁

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'!