Grimalkin

Merry Christmas everyone...

I'm a fan of Jazz basses, as long as the spacing was alright this would be an easy one for me.

String spacing would be the first thing I would consider. I've owned three Stingray 5's, one I bought in 1987 a year after they came out. I like wider spacing, so the Stingrays got sold in short order. Never to be.

I take it as a statement on the ever decreasing brick and mortar music shop, and the ecosphere and creatures contained therein.

The only time I've bought second-hand strings was in the late '90s from a music shop in north London. The guys had been doing back-line tech for level 42 while they played the London dates. I went in to buy a set of Elites but they didn't stock them. "How about these? They've only been used for one gig" he said. He explained where they came from, I think I paid a fiver for them. Quite light, a little bit worn in, which wasn't surprising, after a squillion thumb hits.

I'm chewing the cud on this one.

Thomas Dolby - Aliens Ate My Buick. Some great playing from the late Terry Jackson who was killed in a plane crash with other members of Reba McEntire’s band in 1991, aged 28. The walking line on 'Keys to Her Ferrari' and deciding to put 'Budapest By Blimp' on the thumb. Which is a nice touch, it wouldn't have had the same punctuation played with fingers. It's a great piece of work, especially considering his age.

A sensitive and heartfelt tribute.

Depends on how much, I bought a bass a while back that had some corrosion on the back pickup poles. I managed to get it off with a coarser microfibre cloth and some thumb pressure.

For consistency, I love the softer P bass twang Scott Thunes has on this.

Ah yes, I remember it well. Mark overcharged me for a bass in 1976. I later bumped into him in the off-licence. "Mark, you overcharged me for that bass" I said. "Only a bit" said Mark, "you wouldn't deprive a man of his snout and cider would you?" I let it go.

I've got a bank lined up. It's next to a Library, which has very scant security and whose cellar is adjacent to the bank's main vault. So it's get all the drilling gear downstairs, a couple of hours on the coalface.. and I'm in.

Come on, no one is under pressure to buy it. I certainly can't, I'm living on Seven seas and rye here.

The whole album changed the definition of funk for me, I do consider it a landmark album. Just take Andy Newmark's drum track for "In Time"... It's the sh.... It's exceptional.

Into the oven at 200 degrees C for an hour and a half, for a lovely custom roasted neck.

Something about sausage rolls.

Squarepusher - Feed Me Weird things. Toward the end of the '90s, I'd never heard anything quite like it. I would recommend a few SP albums, "Just a Souvenir" would be another.

In an interview a couple of decades back: "What are your influences Pino?" "Stevie Wonder's left hand." Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life.

Sly & The Family Stone - Fresh. "Jazz legend Miles Davis was so impressed by the song "In Time" from the album that he made his band listen to the track repeatedly for a full 30 minutes. Composer and music theorist Brian Eno cited Fresh as having heralded a shift in the history of recording, "where the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly [became] the important instruments in the mix." George Clinton, who has listed Fresh as one of his favorite albums, later convinced the Red Hot Chili Peppers to cover "If You Want Me to Stay" on their second 1985 album, the Clinton-produced Freaky Styley..."