I saw/used/ended up with a lot of Stuart's old gear when I joined. I even ended up borrowing his stuff for my first audition, which became a little embarrassing when he turned up at the rehearsal room looking for it.
Stuff that was around in June 1985 included:
A "Kay's catalogue" Fender Precision copy, which he kept, along with a Sharwood 6-string bass (of the sort Peter Hook used a lot) for Grandmother's Footsteps. The fretless at that stage was an Aria Pro II, which ended up with just one string for the cello bow stuff on Shot 18, and there was some other Aria bass lying around that I can't remember. As I recall, it was just called a Kay bass, I don't think the catalogue were involved, see later.
He also had an old Carlsboro (Stingray?) head and an unbranded 4 x 12 cabinet originally, and these were used on the early recordings, but following the signing of the EMI deal he bought possibly the worst Trace Elliot stack in the world. A 500 watt head, with a 2 x 10" speaker and a 20" bass bin. It was hopelessly unmatched and blew up on me 3 times in 6 days on the second leg of the No Rest for the Wicked tour.
The Westone Thunder Jet was crap. Muddy sound, badly made, kept falling to bits during gigs, the jack socket would always short out and the knobs fell off. Noddy, who used to do my backline, would have to rebuild it every night ready for the soundcheck the next day. Eventually, through pure frustration, I delivered it a fatal pile-driver into the stage on the Brave New World tour, snapping the head clean off. The truss rod was just for show, and was only about 4 inches long, hence it snapping so easily.
The pedals were both Boss, the original DM-2 analogue delay and a CE-2 chorus. Both ended up pummelled to bits through extended and incessant clog blows to the metalwork. Have a look at the Marquee video to see the sort of pounding they got. I replaced them with whichever evolution of delay and chorus Boss did next, including their first digital delay (DD-1) and a CE-3. As they fell to bits, the numbers kept going up.
I chopped in the Trace Elliot with John Henry's in Holloway for an old Hiwatt, initially with a Marshall 4 x 12 and a Fender 2 x 15, but as I was able to accumulate more Hiwatts (3), so I decided to trade up the mismatched cabinets for a pair of Ampeg SVT810Es, as Stuart had raved about the Hiwatt/Ampeg combination after using it at a festival in Rotterdam in 1983. Best sound he ever had, apparently, so I'd have been mad not to adopt it. Best sound I ever had... and still have, if only the one stack these days.
I replaced all of the basses with Fender Precisions, although I too bought a Kay copy from a shop in Swindon, and made that into a fretless myself. I still have it in my loft. £89 of pure crap, but with amazingly powerful pick-ups. There was another Westone, because No Rest needed 22 frets, but that too was rubbish, and eventually I worked out that retuning the G to an A made life easier, so it was binned off somewhere.
Hope this is of some help. I've not seen Stuart in about 5 years so I can't ask him for any further detail.
