Paul: Yeah rickies were great, but no two were the same, you had to be careful. The necks went on all the ones I used for gigging - hot gig,cold truck constntly I guess, nothing to do with the strings. The truss rods were a bugger to fix, there was only so much you could do. Thelast gig I did with one was in Budapest with UFO in 1985. It was my mono one,no character to it. I trashed it on stage during the last song. Too late I realised that basses werent exactly 10 a penny in Communist Hungary! The next gig was in Stockholm, and when we arrived 2 days later and my basstech JJ rang the record company and got them to take us round all the vintage guitar shops. He'd worked for Slade and was full of Brummieblag - "bet I can get the fookin' label to pay for it!" he said. And he did, too. I've never seen so many lovely basses, including a Gibson"fuzz bass" which i'd never seen before. Loads of Gibsons and fenders,all vintage, but no Rickies. I disliked Fenders and tried a couple ofThunderbirds - terrific! The best was a 76 reverse body reissue- Ididn't even plug it in, it just felt completely right. And when I did,
it growled, so i wanted it even more. It was $1500 - thank youPhonogram! They said they'd bill our British label but if they did Inever heard about it. I've used it on every single gig since, the headstock's been broken off 3 times and just superglued back!
Q: Your bass tone, especially with The Damned, is verydistinct. One song in particular that always comes to mind is 13th Floor Vendetta from The Black Album. You got an absolutely wicked tone on that song! Do you remember what sort of setup you using when recording the Black Album and namely how you got such a tone on that song? Its been the subject of much discussion on the Damned message board quite a number of times!
Paul: See "basstuff" to be added to paulgraybass.co.uk in December, I'll go into this in some detail.
Q: Billy Bad Breaks is one of my favorite Damned songs, from probably what is my favorite era of The Damned(Fri 13th EP circa 1981) It has what I condsider one of the best bass parts of any rock song ever, still blows me away everytime I hear it. I'd always assumed it was one of your songs due to the bassline being the main part of the song, is this correct? If so did you write the lyrics as well? Is "Billy Bad Breaks" based on anyone in particular?
Paul: Well thank you kindly! It was one of the first things I wrote on my portastudio. 20 minutes it took I think. Yes lyrics as well. Its about a character in a book called "Snowblind", about cocaine
smuggling, who was always getting busted, silly sod. Captain played drums on it I think.
Q:You mention on your site that you've also been teaching bass, have you found that to be a rewarding
experience? Do you ever have students come in wantingto learn Hot Rods or Damned songs? ha :)
Paul: I don't have a traditional way of teaching - too bloody boring! I show'em the shortcuts and teach them how to work stuff out for themselves. I've got loads of stuff pre-recorded on cassette and use Cubase or Logic Audio too. It all depends what they wanna learn. I draw a line at musos and Mark King
fans, they can go elsewhere!
There's so much crap written in rags like Guitarist. The bass line to "Beginning of the End", a Hot Rods track, was tabbed out a few years ago. They made up a load of guff that wastotally misleading about how I played it and it was full of mistakes. It took me 2 days to work it out! Since then I've had an anti - crusade against tab! Funnily enough I did a seminar a few years back for "Bassist" magazine at the Wembley Music Fair in London with the unfortunately named Guy Pratt who is Pink Floyd's bassist. "What are we gonna start with" I asked him. "Fucked if I know, lets go get a beer" he replied, so we did. His approach to inventing basslines turned out to be the same as mine, just go for it! The assembled muso masses couldn't comprehend this at all. I'll be putting more about this up on my site next month.
As long as you know wether its major or minor and you know your pentatonics the world's your lobster. Its like a musical "join the dots".
Not many want Damned or Rods stuff, oddly enough more want UFO. At the moment its Blink 182, Sum 41, and Alien Ant Farm with a bit of Slipknot (a bit tricky on a 4 string bass!) that they're into god help me. (Continued...)
