What are you listening to?

Alter Bridge- Live at The Royal Albert Hall featuring The Parallax Orchestra

 

Hole - Celebrity Skin. It's 20 years old!

 

Pink Floyd the wall

 

No band on the planet has a better back catalogue.

 

Bob Dylan-Hurricane

 

Metallica - Ride The Lightning....Probably the album that made me sit up and take a bit of an interest in Metal. Unfortunately, it also happens to contain one of Metallica's poorest tracks - Escape. The first 4 tracks on the album are as good a start to an album as you could wish for

 

Not sure how well this will sit in the midst of the Metallica love-in but just heard Tom Ravenscroft play "One More" by Yaeji on 6 music. Not sure how to describe it but possibly a slinky futuristic Korean house ballad?

 

More naughty step than niche surely

 

Back to the 80s again, and bands that deserve(d) even greater success than they had:



A band I was in opened a few times for this next group, before they became big. The memories of humping one's gear up 3 flights of an outside fire-escape to get to one of the clubs don't fade, even after 35 years...



Long live the mullet!

RCB

 

If you gave a musician the choice between a roadie or a groupie for the night, only those who had never lugged a PA or Marshall half stack up some stairs, along a winding corridor and through a narrow knuckle shredding doorway would opt for the groupie.

 

How true that is!

I still have most of that gear, including the 8x10 cabinet with its tube head that weighs some 60lbs on its own. But I'm glad I can leave it sitting in place at home nowadays.

RCB

 

An 8x10!!?? I bet your neighbours are well chuffed that you keep that at home.

The worst thing I ever had to deal with was when I made a rather epic fx board, I made the box and made all the cables to measure with heavy duty Neutrik jacks and Proel cable, I even made my own 5 pin midi cables. 15 separate fx, a tuner, various external controllers, midi switching unit, midi controller, a power attenuater and all the PSU's so the whole thing ran off just 1 plug, it was a thing of beauty and a work of genius. There was just one small flaw with my genius, I'd put it all together on the garage floor and it was only when I'd finished and needed to move it that I realised it weighed about as much as a small planet, I could barely lift it let alone carry it about safely. My band mates soon got tired of having to help me carry it about so it only lasted a few gigs before I took it apart.

 

First thing to ask after a power cut;

Has Fuzzy been plugging in his stuff?

 

Do you know "Sound of the Suburbs" by The Members? "...Johnny's upstairs in his bedroom sitting in the dark / Annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitar..." Replace guitar with keyboards and you have a much younger me. That poor rig suffered for my art, given it's meant for a guitar. But, we had some spare guitar rigs kicking around, and I'd spent all my money on the keyboards... Later I abused it some more by running my bass through it. Now, finally, it is a guitar amp again, and that lyric fits the older me!

Oooo...nice. Great idea to organise it all so well, pity about the weight problem though. Must repeat to self: Thou shalt not covet thy fellow musician's gear!

RCB

 

Not really a listen as such but I went to see the M.I.A. film "Matangi, Maya, M.I.A." last night and it's destined to go down as one of the great music documentaries. If you're remotely aware of her, her music or the Sri Lankan civil war then it's well worth checking out.