Yes. I wish I would stop it

My beautiful speaker driver — lovingly rebuilt only last year by Australia's leading speaker repair specialist — may have been ruined last night when the odour of my burning coil filled the rehearsal room.

In what has proven to be a bit of a mistake I had borrowed Crafty's amp as my old and crappy Laney head had a loose plug or something and needed a little bit of repair. The Laney has given me difficulties in the past and while a loose plug is not what an experienced technician would call a tough job to repair I see it more as the latest in a string of disappointments than as the ultimate relationship-breaker.

And so I am contemplating using the Laney perhaps as an artistic installation: I want to explore the idea of stage equipment as places to put potplants on. Certainly not as a reliable way of getting people to hear what I play on a bass guitar.

But, as I say, I wasn't using the Laney last night. I had borrowed Crafty's amp: he drums these days but back when he was a bright-eyed, slim, handsome young man he preferred the bass guitar. In only one of a number of things that made last night's rehearsal unpleasant (others included an uninspiring halal pizza and having it driven home, as you can read below, just how bad we sound without one of our guitarists) my bass cab fried. The amp must have had too much juice for the box and there are absolutely no lewd plays on words that could be made from that sentence.

When we played at the Empress last year the screws pulled out of the chipboard of the speaker cab as we were loading our gear on stage, the driver fell out and I had to borrow a bass rig.

When we played at the Barleycorn a few months ago my speaker cab was irretrievably locked in the old Falcon and I had to borrow a bass rig.

Looks like I'm going shopping this weekend: We are playing at the Barleycorn in a few weeks and I don't want to have to borrow a bass rig.

I don't care what it sounds like. I just want the bloody thing to work.