I've recently bought my first brand new Rickenbacker 4003 in Fireglo and I just love it to bits. I was formally a great fan of the Fender Jazz but something about this guitar does it for me.My question to you is simply: did you ever use the Rick 'O' Sound facility on the Ricky Bass? And do you advise any bass effects that you think I should purchase?
I've always associated you with the Rickenbacker 4001 and I loved your bass playing on Strawberries. BTW, you have a great website and so refreshing the humour is, too. Long may you strum.

alan_gerrard2003@yahoo.co.uk

Altho' a Jazz was my first "proper"bass I can't say I was ever a fan! I've toyed with Fenders occasionally - the best was a 74 P bass that for some reason i sold to a guy i was teaching and have been trying to buy back ever since! For a while I had a Telecaster bass that saw a little stage action, the Fender Performer I bought for a song becuase it looked so un- Fenderish nobody wanted it which I'm hanging onto until the Ebay price goes silly, and I currently have a 78 P bass that I bought cas I liked the colour - a sort of nicotine yellow. Wew'', it's as good a reason as any!

So onto the Rickenbacker 4003. I couldn't quite place the design and just checked on their website - I guess it's replaced the 4001 now?
Looks lovely as ever -why oh why did I ever sell all mine!
The rick o sound facility - d'ya know I can't recall which position that was! Bass (neck) pickup?? It actually depended on which ricky i was using more than the amp / speaker setup, as I found the guitars varied quite widely tonally. I did often use just the neck p/u, but more often the middle switch with bass on full and treble (bridge) p/u around 7/8 to give a bit more "bite".

Even as I'm typing this I have that craving for another ricky coming on...watch this space!

As far as effects go it's a nono, apart from copiuos amounts of compression in the studio, preferably thru' an old dbx unit. I did toy with a chorus unit after Journey's "Escape" was my album of choice for a while during the early UFO period. I only used a chorus unit in one gig, at the Knebworth Fayre (with Deep Purple in '85). It was recorded for broadcast on Radio 1, and after listening to it back it was definately "never again"!

Thanks for the "Strawberries"compliment, all the best, Paul

Rat was indeed a phenomenal drummer to play with. My first time onstage with him was at a Johnny Moped gig in a Wardour Street dive, sometime around 1978. At first it was like trying to guess which way a whirlwind was going next - kinda impossible, but dead exciting! I'd always loved The Who's "Live at Leeds" album (it rivals the MC5's "Kick out the Jams" for me) and Rat had obviously taken a leaf out of Mooney's book. Having played this album almost to death it didn't take too many songs to guess where Rat was going next, especially with his round-the-kit-falling-down-the-stairs tom tom fills. I guess after that gig we at an inkling that one day we would work together - our styles complemented each other perfectly, as I'd pretty much sussed out his modus operandi by the end! When I eventually joined The Damned we'd often try to catch each other out during gigs or soundchecks to test how much we were listening to each other - it became a kind of game, and I think Rat would agree with me that it was usually an equal score!
So how did we lock in?
I basically played a bunch of pentatonics (major or minor depending on the song, altho' I didn't know any of this at the time!) with all the blue notes thrown in - one for every drum hit, sometimes doubling, sometimes half time, and not necessarily in any scale order. I took all my favourite bassist's approaches and mixed them together to make my own - Entwistle, Felix Pappalardi, Roger Glover, Lemmy, Geezer Butler all figured highly. I call it the "sun and moon approach" - if the root (key) note is your sun, then all the others are the moons that orbit around in some form or another, and as long as you know where your sun is you won't go far wrong. However, some of these notes fit together better than others - that's when the x -factor of taste kicks in!
However, towards the end I think everybody's playing deteriorated, and it became more of a free-for-all; songs would drag out interminably, and I have some videos that are too painful to watch. The tensions offstage invariably had an effect upon our onstage performance, it was every man for himself and songs began to lose their structure. I sometimes felt there was no point in me playing, I might as well bog off and leave the Duelling Soloists to it. Yes, then that did piss me off - great songs started to become caricatures of themselves.

Maybe this question follows on from what I was talking about above! Whenever you join a new band, sooner or later past and present influences will be absorbed to some degree, knowingly or unknowingly, visually and/or musically. While Pete may not be the best bassist in the world, who cares! What he played was absolutely right for UFO, and "Love to love" was a haunting beauty to play - nobody could have written a better bassline to it, and I tried to copy it pretty much note for note.
The fact that I'd bought a Thunderbird actually had nothing to do with Pete, altho' I know Moggy loved the look of 'em ("they look like a giant cock!" he once said - it almost put me off buying one!). Again, I loved the earthy bass sound on "Live at Leeds" - a Thunderbird going thru' Sunn Colieseum amps, which I used to hire from ML Executives, The Who's company, when touring with The Rods and The Damned. When I trashed my last Rickenbacker in Budapest (click here for the story) and looked for a replacement at the next stop on the tour in Stockholm, the shops were stuffed with lovely old T-Birds but few Ricky's. As I wasn't paying for it I figured now was my chance to get one! Subsequently I bought several more, usually for peanuts from support bands who had shiny new Warwicks etc and had the T- Birds as a spare, which I then flogged for a handsome profit back home!
Obviously, if I'd have worn exactly the same gear as I did with The Damned I would have looked a little out of place in UFO so yes, of course there was an element of fitting in visually, and at studio photo shoots there would be a pile of clothes that we'd swap around to maintain a "band look" to some degree (most bands do this).
The pic you refer to was actually taken the morning after the Ritual Trashing of the Rickenbacker in Budapest by Kerrang's Ray Palmer. If you look back thru my website, from 1976 onwards mirror aviator shades and stripy appareil had figured quite highly as favourites of mine. The fact that Pete and I were both skinny buggers with shaggy barnets and favoured similar clobber neither of us could do anything about!!
I've met Pete a few times since, and like the rest of the UFO guys I played with, you couldn't wish to meet a nicer bloke, which is more than I can say for Michael Schenker. I was backstage at Newport Center in 1998 for their show, when Moggy said "lookout, here comes H-Bomb!". Schenker had a dressing room separate from the rest of the band and had just walked in. I went up to him, held out my hand and said " hi Michael, nice to meet you at last, my names Paul and I was the bassist for UFO during most of the 1980's". There was a short silence.
"There was no UFO during the 1980's" he replied, and walked away...