APB.... musician down! In need of backup!

I think it's time I took my own musical career into my own hands again, just like at the beginning of the journey detailed in here.

Kicking around doing some covers occasionally is fun, but I'm in danger of letting myself wander into the terrible stage of middle age where people just give up by degrees. If you do that you might as well just hang up your fun for the rest of your life and settle down to prepare for death!

Life must have passion: if passion is only available through dedication, then so be it.

So this is an APB: if you read this, and you're located within 15 to 20 miles of Slough (there are some pretty places around there! - and I'm including West London, where Jamiroquai came from) and you want to start something original which could get huge, with a lean towards all things funky (no gauge of how hard the music will be yet - i.e. skunk anasie or james brown, or both? Who knows?!) then get in touch with me at letsdoit@funkybass.co.uk (yep, it's a real email address) and we'll see what we do from there.

Even if this means I can't do covers anymore, I've got to reach for something and not turn into a wrinkly Rollings Stones cover player... argh!

If you read my profile on http://www.funkybass.co.uk and follow this blog, you'll know I can play. Question is, do you want to?

I'll be looking through the want ads again as well. I may find you first. Be prepared...

Oh and BTW, anyone want to buy my small rig? One Warwick CCL combo (250W, 15" driver great sound) and one 2x10 Trace Elliot extension cab making up a great portable rig for any pub gig. I'l selling the two huge speakers from the main rig as well to upgrade to something a little lighter. Any interest to sales@funkybass.co.uk.

L8rs

Floods, eh? Who'd have em?

Well, even though I reside in the hallowed halls of South Bucks I am still at least a little affected by the extensive wetness on this emerald swimming pool isle at the moment...

We're not playing O'Neills this friday, which is pity. I was looking forward to that - after the holiday (greece for a couple of weeks - hence why I've been away!) I'd been digging into the 5-string (re-loaded with boiled Hartke strings from Andorra - which polish up very nice, thank you!) really hard in an effort to get gig-fit ASAP. Now it seems that the river from which Oxford takes its name has had its revenge! Poo.

On the plus side, I'm looking seriously at the possiblities around here. There must be some musicians who want to make a quality racket, and not just fart about in a pub every so often...

Big shout out to Virtu from the Aspen in Soldeu: she's off to Argentina with her son this summer, but somewhat mysteriously insists she'll see us in september!

Look forward to that. She nice person. Bail Janeiro out. So to speak. :)

Greetings from Kite Surfer central on rhodes!

Hullo chums!

OK, I figured I should tell you where I got to... rhodes! I've figured out that Janeiro could make a small fortune here (the Greeks do like their Rock) and also that sometimes the road less travelled can lead you somewhere really cool.

The picture is this wicked outpost (believe me, it's like a cool oasis) called Fanes where kitesurfers skid up and down and rapid speed (good winds on this north-western shore) and catch some cool air.

From where I sit I can see ads for snowboard gear, which is wierd in 28 degree heat! I can tell that some of the guys out there are wicked on piste when they're not out here having fun making windsurfers look slow! :)

If you make it out here check out Delfini restaurant (www.delfini-fanes.gr) where the waiter, this total friend ol fella, will challenge you to his cold beer!

I know the weather in the UK sucks at the moment. My advice would be to get into a watersport with wetsuits, then a) you don't care and b) you'd be as cool as these guys on this beach.

peace (it's here)

andy

Poddly pod!

Today I've decided to get my iPod ready for the holiday season... wish me luck, I'm filling 40GB with top quality sun tunes here.

Deep breath...


----- Today's Practise Diary -----WarmupsSlap practise and reading on a new set of 5 strings!

The O'Neills sweat-pit...

WoW.

Friday night was a night to remember... all four of us were totally blown away by the crowd response, the first set went well but the second and third were huge too. In particular, Jamie's usual calls for all the laydees to get down the front and dance actually went answered - with the result that at one stage he nearly got fallen onto at the front of the stage by some rather unsteady dancers :)

A great night - when the Arctic Monkeys track started I thought the floor would give way. Not a good idea, as the toilets are under there...

A huge shout to anyone who came to see us that night: one of the best. You could tell it was going to be a good one by the sheer number of uniformed police on duty in town! I got told to move my car (while unloading, I might add - how are you supposed to make a living around here???) by no fewer than 2 carloads of coppers, one of which was unmarked and stuffed with plainclothes guys!

Great night though. CHEERS!

And a huge shout to John, Alison and the Andorra frat who totally surprised us by turning up and getting the Sambucas in. SHOTS!


----- Today's Practise Diary -----Well, the weekend's anyway... lots of funky stuff, but i did about 2 hours of guitar(!) yesterday as I wanted to learn "Riviera Paradise" by Stevie Ray Vaughan. After ploughing through several crappy tabs, I found a video on youtube and worked it out for myself. Got the intro and first section, which is what I had in mind!

pseudo fame

You know, it's wierd. I'm on a minibus at this moment speeding back (literally, this driver is a nutter) from the cambridge area, having been on the sepura barbecue evening, which was fun. Met people i have emailed, which is cool in itself, email can get a lot across but face to face is something else. I mentioned the andorra trip to give my move to sepura some context, and a couple of people did the 'you're interesting' dance in our chat which was cool. People should keep being interesting, it's such a shame people give up.i was thinking i'd have to do the same yesterday morning, but now i'm not so sure. Maybe there's a strata of pseudo muso i can be. Still pushing myself but not living in bedsits?

Quick note - looking forward to this friday's gig at O'Neills. Should be a cracker, I'm going to take the 6 string and get the bugger gleaming with a brand new set of medium elites on there.

Heard from Jamie s new job is giong well - he's got a company Hyundai(!) and he's waiting for the S3 roadster he's getting as his kosher company car! Says he's doing really well and I'm starting to think I'm in the wrong job :)

He was driving a Nissan Micra before he took this job... with his rock n roll coupe he'll get himself killed Bolan style! Jeez....

I'll try to talk him down this friday. Wish me luck :)


----- Last night's Practise Diary -----After the standard warmups on the Warwick Fretless...I sight-read "the chicken" from the Jaco book. Man, he was funky...

Waitin' in for a parcel....

... so I grabbed me some practise time on the ol' 5-string! Yes, Cliff the Hohner B-Bass V got a few good licks this morning. A bit of Jaco too, I was working on Chromatic Fantasy again. I'm up to about the end of page 2 at the moment, but you need to be very warmed up before you can work on that stuff!

Finally left the house at about 930am. You can tell I'm dedicated... breakfast was still arguing with my stomach when I sat down for a moment's practise, knowing I'd be there a little while.

The heavens opened while I was doing it though - I've seen thunderstorms come on quick but this took me by surprise.


----- Today's Practise Diary -----AM (smug grin) : 45 minutes including warmups and some reading Jaco

Ooooo, I've been naughty. Popped out to see a couple of friends in Chesham. Wierd place. Spent a nice evening in a nice pub drinking nice beer and musing on the collective niceness of open-source and how, paradoxically, it produces greate software for no fiscal return.

You must all slap my writst in comment form.

----- Today's Practise Diary -----

Skegness!

Wow, surreal stuff! Just had a 2.5 hour trip across the fens in an authentic london routemaster bus! I'm now in Skegness thinking about fish and chips in a classic english seaside setting...

Wierd being on the top floor of a london bus careering through the fens, watching harvesters taking broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes... Like the driver of the marble arch route got horribly lost! Ever seen the harvesters they use for cauliflower? Regular tractor, trailer, and a huge conveyor belt which carries the veg from the front of the tractor to the covered trailer behind!

You get a lot of smiles in a london bus outside london.

Rats! Had to throw over a gig!

Nuts. Saturday night and I should be in London, but it's work work work. The new job has a rather large learning curve on it so I'm treating myself to some research. Hmmmm.

Oh well, tomorrow should be fun. We're heading for Skegness on a london routemaster bus!!!


----- Today's Practise Diary -----Usual warmups including slap ones for scales (2 octave)B flat scale stuff"Chromatic Fantasy" reading from the Jaco book.

Daily practise reaps its rewards once again!

I know, I missed a few days in the diary - new job and all that! - but I'm religious in the evenings at the moment. I'm working from the Jaco book with Chromatic Fantasy (which I did learn the first couple of pages of a year or so ago) and Teen Town / Portrait of Tracy (hullo Smurf ol mate!) which I worked out from record before getting transcriptions. I'm enjoying a spot of reading again!

All that live playing is great - it's definitely made my hands one hell of a lot stronger - and now to go back again to something more cerebral... well, it's actually pretty cool. I suppose the variety is helping. All that as-you-go-along was bound to make me lust after some brain stuff eventually!

I must collect my strings from the local place - they can order out for me for reasonable price, which is cool - BTW, does anyone know where you can get Warwick EMPs online?

Nic and I had a wicked time yesterday, we played Wii tennis for about an hour straight as doubles partners against the Wii, and we totally whipped their ass - by the time we'd finished, the skill levels of the opposition were 1900 and 1200!!! That's very pro, by the way.


----- Today's Practise Diary -----A warm veloute of the usual warmups (which I'm shrinking a little), followed byAn Entree of Chromatic FantasyCompote of Sweet Fretless Scale Practise

That should do nicely. :)

First days...

Well, I think I'll be OK at Sepura. Lots of stuff to read, lots to take in as you'd expect, but I reckon there's some dweebyfun to be had.

In an attempt to keep my practise diary again, I'm going to use Blogger's templates to make a note of how much I do like I used to do on A4 bits of paper...

Warmups and exercises: 30 minutes.
(cut short for dinner)

Well, it's time.

The wedding gig on friday night was ok. Jay's new job is definitely tiring him out though, he was pretty shot by the third set. Steve had an entire bottle of vodka to himself (it's like having rasputin as your drummer) and even blagged some red bull substitute off me late in the evening.

The guitar gear misbehaved again. The guys really need to dig out the gear from the van of an evening, set it up and check all bits. Buzzing for 2 minutes on stage and cutting the set short is not good!!!

Today I start a new desk job at Sepura.

Thanks to everyone who wished me good luck. I've heard from several agents that they're a good company to work for. Just wish they weren't at green park. Reading really sucks.

Maidenhead town centre is like Faliraki on a saturday night btw. There's more baby chavs conceived in piss-laden doorways in that godforsaken hellhole than are planned in china I'd wager.

Wedding gigs!

Tonight, matthew, I'm going to wear a gold suit. I kid you not. I'm going to look like something out of either a bond movie or maybe a poor-taste talking heads gig.

Should be a giggle though.

Listen, if anyone's reading this I want to know about motivation. What keeps you going? I'm losing interest in keeping Janeiro's myspace running! Help me out...

Toodle pip!

Modern advertising - is anybody watching it?

Having spent a few weeks at home has given me a chance to catch up with the advertising around at the moment whileb hoovering, etc. yes, this is a bass player who does housework heh heh!

It's total pants, isn't it? (the advertising)

I mean, there are some tragic obvious bits like continuous wobbly camera to try to make it look like "real footage" (despite the fact that all modren camcorders have stabilisation), negative positivity (by that, I'm referring to ads which say the service provider doesn't do something obviously nasty like "talk down to you" - what company would, you morons?), a profusion of CGId nasties (domestos-you can keep putting different voices over that crap "bug" but it won't make that ad work).

I think even less people really take notice than we think. But this is another unaskable question, isn't it? We can't kill the advertising industry, so it just strides on, the money gradually drying up and everybody keeping their heads firmly planted in the cat tray...

O'Neills last night.... nutters!

Well, that was a fun gig, from the bass point of view ;)

I took the minimum I could, and didn't regret it - walking across Oxford with all my gear meant it was easier to get out of town at the end of the night, I didn't have to drive back across town to the pub. Oxford is a pain in the arse for the jobbing musician, the one-way system means you spend huge amounts of time driving up and down the same two streets to get to that part of town.

Had to park in the multi storey again, that small weird shaped car park was full with the usual zombie-like space-crawlers trying to grab a place quickly, and as usual, we'd just finished soundchecking and I needed to park the car and get back to O'Neills asap! It is cheap (certainly cheaper than a £20 parking fine, which I've had a total of 3 times now)...

The gig went well. We thought it seemed a bit quiet for a friday night on a bank hol weekend but figured it would get lively. Lots of hen parties and large groups of large women in small denim shorts with turn-ups (this season's widely-adopted crap fashion choice) and a large group of pink cowboy hat wearers who seemed to convene on O'Neills en masse over an hour (which is pretty scary if you're about to whip the whole place into a frenzy).

Steve and I ripped out a wicked groove for the soundcheck - his time off has freshened up the whole vibe. In fact, he was in seriously good form the whole night... the bruises on my right shoulder have definitely faded already heh heh! :) I suspect Steve thinks I'm not listening sometimes and cues me by giving me a quick hit. Steve, I'm not a cymbal. But ta for the cues mate!

Great at the end of the night - a lot of compliments, and a bunch of guys Jay knows who haven't seen us for ages who I did recognise! Thanks for the shouts guys, appreciate that loads. A big shout to the guy who said they'd been out to see a pro band that night and then come to see us and thought we were better (!) - and thanks to the guy who said we knew how to really milk a guitar solo! Richie was really havin it last night, his solos on the last two tracks really soared. That's a good word for it, they soared. Definitely. Thanks for doing Comfortably Numb last night Jay, I made sure I got the chorus on there for the big exit solo (which I'm sure went on for at least 8 minutes, maybe more!) and we had that HUGE SOUND.

The fella at the front who bought Jamie a whisky - ta mate, pity Jay doesn't drink whisky but then Steve will drink pretty much anything so it didn't go to waste. The same fella rang his wife on his mobile during the Proclaimers(!) so she could hear 500 miles!

A great night all in all, with loads of people at the front, loads of people singing (what is it about Oasis and Guns n Roses???) - BTW, I heard from a fella last night a band called "fake plastic chairs" played in O'Neills during the week and they JAMMED their way through "Sweet Child O'Mine". HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE??? Answers on a postcard to FunkyBass@vodafone.net and we'll publish the worst ones here!

Cheersh m'deersh!

loki and bartleby again

Here's me, once again, the victim of over zealous estimation of how crappy the drive to terminal 4 heathrow would be. I suppose the pessimistic amongst us might propose that this was sod's law in action, and the geeks would have suggested I check traffic reports properly in future. The hippies would tell me to chill out, the middle-class parents would tell me to stop being so self indulgent, don't i know grammar schools are threatened, the bloggers would accuse me of another tragic waste of bandwidth. The musicians would tell me to find a bar, the drunks wouldn't have heard me, likewise the deaf.

But this does give me a moment to reflect outside the house, where I have been working flat out for the last 3 days, and briefly spy on people as they wait for other people. I may come down here again next week, this could actually build some faith into me.

If you've seen "dogma" you'll know what I'm talking about. Kevin Smith's witty philosophical flick on the absurdities of Catholic Faith includes a great scene in an airport arrivals lounge (although I reckon it was actually filmed in a departure lounge to give them the seats they needed) with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck debating if, at the moment of greeting on arrival, humans are at their very finest, that all traces of the crap we stack inside ourselves are momentarily forgotten and we reveal our true love for one another. I'm not seeing that right now, sitting here in Starbucks watching the arrival gangway-in fact I'm not seeing any smiles at all!

I still believe though.

Gravellin'

Anyone else out there ever moved a hundredweight of gravel 50m using nothing but a spade and a huge plastic bag as a sled?

Just wondered if you had as hard a time as I did...

heh

Gig in London last night!

Yep, I gigged in london.

First time since the last Janeiro gig at Pop Bar in Soho... a bit of fun in the grand style, a la Aspen bar. Justin, Mr S-Bar himself, saw us in Soldeu and decided he wanted us to play in London. I'm pleased he did!

Thoroughly enjoyable, and the first time I've ever mended a speaker cone using gaffa tape and superglue ;)