- Hello, my name is Horace Panter from the Specials.
I've got a couple of Fender basses
that I'd like to show you.
This one, and this one.
This one is a 1972 Sunburst Fender
precision bass.
I bought it in 1975
and for 165 pounds.
It was the first professional tool that I owned
before I'd had like the copy based guitars
but this was the real deal.
And, and it just gave me
so much more confidence as a player.
And this was a guitar that I used
to record Gangsters,
the first specials album.
And it was a guitar I used when we went on tour in 1979.
So when you hear (plays guitar)
or more importantly (plays guitar).
It's this guitar.
It hasn't always stayed this way.
For a while it had a maple,
a de-fretted maple neck on it,
and the neck, this neck went on to
a Telecaster bass body.
And a guitar that I used
when the Specials toured in 1980.
But it's been reconstituted for a while
and it comes out from time of time.
I played it in the Specials when we did the Isle of Wight
in 19, in 19, in 2012,
yeah and the occasional blues gig.
It's lovely, really nice,
got some flat bones on at the moment,
doing the (murmurs).
The other guitar that I'm going to show you
is,
this one.
This one is a 1971 Fender precision.
And I bought this in early 1981
from a music store in Kettering,
which is where I was brought up.
Visiting my parents and I saw it in a shop
and there it was.
It's very lovely.
When I bought it,
it was painted in this horrible metallic blue paint
and it had a lot of work done to it.
Got Dimasio pick-ups in which I still got
but I don't know if you can see,
but a lot of work can be done on the neck.
It had been shaved.
A lot thinner that it ought to be really.
And that's what I liked about it.
It's really nice.
Like this was the bass that I used to play on Ghost town.
So when you hear that (plays guitar)
This is the bass.
So I used this in the last year Specials life, 1981.
And I use it again when I joined General Public
which was the band that I was in
with Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger for the English beat.
And it's around about that time that it got sprayed
with this really nice light blue color.
So this is the guitar that played on Tenderness,
you know the first General Public album.
But then in 1989,
I got rid of it.
I traded it in for something.
What an idiot.
And regretted it almost immediately.
But hey ho that's how it goes.
Fast forward 25 years,
and it appears in my local music store
in Coventry where I live.
And that's it,
that's my guitar.
So I bought it back
for considerably more than I paid for it in, in 1981.
And it's lovely to have it back.
It really is.
It's got a dead spot on the, on the G,
which is why there's this..
I don't know if you can see that
But this lump of metal here,
that's, that's called a fat finger.
And for some, some I don't know how it does it
but it cancels out the dead spot.
But yeah, what a great guitar.
It's great to have it back again.
There you go.