Anne had Cuddles put to sleep today. When we got back from holiday, she wasn't right - clearly not been eating or drinking much (despite the neighbours being in every day to check on our cats) - and a test yesterday revealed that her kidneys were (to quote my lovely wife) 'rubbish'.

Cuddles came to us in 2005, having been brought to Anne's surgery as a stray, having been hit by a car. She had a broken pelvis and a very knackered hip joint, which never really healed properly, so she was always a bit 'dot and carry one'. Probably not helped by being hit by a car twice more while we had her: not one for learning from her mistakes, wasn't Cuddles. Her original name (I think given her by someone else at the surgery) was Amy, but James christened her Cuddles. Which went really well with the X-men naming scheme we followed later...

Despite that, she was a remarkably good mouser. I have many memories of waking up at 3am to loud cries of 'mowwwfff! MOWFFFF!!!!!" - picture a cat with a rodent in its mouth, trying to say 'mouse!' and you get an idea of the noise. And it was always my side of the bed she'd settle down (after a sleepy, 'yeah, whatever, cat') and the next few minutes would contain crunching noises and a mental note to watch where I put my feet (and shake out my slippers) on the morning.

She had THE most impressive whiskers - Anne likened them to a Babylon 5 Shadow ship - and they'd practically meet in the middle if you scratched her under the chin. She was definitely the most 'lap cat' of ours, and (poor thing) did get beaten up on by Rogue and Callisto (and even Gambit).

Gonna miss her. The mice will heave a sigh of relief though, as the threat of the Black And White Death will fade slowly into legend.

Tricky Pixie will be being streamed live in concert from the Mill House at 7pm BST tonight - that's 2pm EDT, 11am PDT, and heaven knows what in Australia :D Check http://live.the-mill-house.org.uk/ for full details.

The non-techie summary - disable the Kaspersky URL Advisor browser plugin, unless you want some website forms to break.

( The techie version... )

So... I spent the weekend playing bass for the worship band for our church weekend 'away' (the one two years ago was actually a weekend away, this one, for various reasons, was actually 'at home'). And I had a bit of an epiphany, quite aside from any religious eye-openings...

Y'see, I didn't, as such, identify as a bassist. One of my many email sigs, and my short personal profile on most sites, self-identifies me (usually in no particular order) as 'Perl programmer, Christian, guitarist, photographer, writer' (to which these days I add "wargamer"). However, the various church worship music leaders have a tendency to nab me as a bassist - this partly stems from the first worship band I volunteered for, which already had a guitarist, and to my ears desperately needed a bassist. Result, everyone goes 'oh, Mike plays bass...'. [Leading to considerable surprise when folks from church saw me cut loose on "The Chain" on guitar with Fleetfoot Mike at the LAST church weekend away, and even more when I deputised for the regular worship leader for a couple of Sundays in June on piano.]

I actually should have spotted it then, having identified the lack of a bassist: subconsciously, I had, but even spending a year playing bass for the Divisionists didn't bring it to the surface of the brain...  "It" being a fundamental understanding of what a bassist is for. I've sort of understood it, consciously, in pieces, but sometime during the weekend the pieces shifted and clicked into place, and I 'got' it, on several levels. Helped by having several people apparently *recognise* that the bass I was playing was fulfilling a role that had been noticed as missing in the past...

The world calls the drummer and the bassist in a band together "the rhythm section". I've said to James, several times, when he's been learning songs on drums, 'your right foot should be linked to the bassist's right hand' - basically, the underpinning of rhythmic accents is the kick drum and a good solid bass note. If one's missing, you notice. If both are missing, you *really* notice. As I've put it, 'the bottom drops out'.

There's more to it than that, though, and even now I find it quite hard to articulate. For all you play notes, a bass is a fundamentally rhythmic instrument: it's very much the pulse of the song, even more in some respects than the drummer. Even on a ballad, the 'one' (or wherever it gets pushed/pulled to) is (usually) yours, to keep the pulse going, often with a little pickup run into it (the bassist's equivalent of a little fill round the kit). Even if you only play the root of the chord, if you play it in the right places, you'll give the song a pulse, a heartbeat. 

Having said that, the other half of the job is just as vital. What you play, not just when you play it. Melody and harmony. OK, that famous riff of John McVie's on "The Chain" (the BBC F1 theme, if you've been on another continent for all of the last 25 years!) is overstating the case, but if you want a great example, stick "Go Your Own Way" on on a decent pair of headphones, and listen to that amazingly propulsive and melodic bass line in the chorus. Every phrase lands smack on the right note of the chord on the downbeat. Then try and imagine the song without it. Or any of a number of other examples.

People working out chords to a song will instinctively start with the chord rooted on the bass note - heck, stevieannie can't pitch her starting notes properly if she can't hear the bass! But yours is the power to suggest tensions, to imply motion (me, I'm a sucker for rising or falling bass lines...).  

Bass playing is about the whole thing, rhythm, melody and harmony, and you can't do it properly without all of them. People *respond* to bass lines at a very instinctive, emotional level, even if it's not consciously - heck. people write SONGS about it. We talk about groove, about feel. And both those words are a combination of all three, rhythm, melody, harmony: listen to (and I make NO bones about picking John McVie again, because the man ROCKS) "Miles Away" off the oft-underappreciated "Mystery to Me" by the Mac, once that fantastic bass groove kicks in at about 0:28. It has all three - it tracks Mick Fleetwood's bass and snare (boom chick boo-boom chick boom b-chick b-b-chick), but it wouldn't sound the same if John just plunked on the root note. It tracks the (admittedly simple, in the verse) harmony - that downbeat is the tonic of the chord, and listen from 0:50 how the bass line tracks the descending chords in the chords. And it has a great, cooking melody that ties the whole thing together. I defy you not to finish listening to that track and be humming 'dum dum dada dum da dadum dadada" for the next half hour. 

My name's Mike Whitaker.

I think I've finally figured out I'm a bassist.

[cue 'welcome to the dark side' comments from my assorted musician friends]

We'll be restreaming Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps' house concert from the Mill House at 8pm UK time tomorrow (Saturday June 2nd)

Watch http://live.the-mill-house.org.uk/ for details.

I note with sadness the passing of the man variously and affectionately referred to as the Guv'nor and the Father of Loud - Jim Marshall, founder of that bastion of rock, Marshall Amplification.

If ever it could be said of someone he got where he was by standing on the shoulders of giants, Jim Marshall was probably that man. Marshall valve amps, by his own admission, were based on Fender circuits which were in turn based on the example circuits in the original data books for the valves used, but Marshall the company added to that an attention to build quality and customer service that made their amps second to none.

I've owned a Marshall valve head - a friend once described it as a one-trick pony, but added the caveat, with a massive grin as he hit another face-meltingly awesome power chord, "It's one hell of a trick". 

RIP Jim, and thanks for creating the sound of rock.

Life, as they say, is what happens when you're making other plans. I'm pretty sure I can speak for all of the 'acting' concom of Duple Time when I say that none of us wanted to have to be up the front at the opening ceremony, but equally I think we all accepted the sad necessity that it took four of us to fill just that part of those larger than life shoes.

As realfranklin (as Toastmaster and effectively the voice of the con) said, the best thing we (by which I don't just mean the concom, but all of us - singers, performers, listeners, even the hotel staff) could have done for Keris' memory was to make Duple Time the best damn con it could be.
( Did we succeed? )