Total Guitar’s work experience bloke meets Bowling For Soup. Doesn’t make tea. Gets glowing report anyway

Every so often we open the door of our office to work experience dudes. It makes us look good in front of our bosses. Plus the office hotties go goo-goo when they see us acting paternally to ‘da yoof´. We even have the young pluckers making us tea and restringing our guitars. It´s the perfect scam! (I so hope Lucy and Claire don´t read this…)


Ah yes, life is sweet in TG… But wait, what´s this? Apparently we have to dangle the carrot of ‘meaningful work´ under the eager snouts of our young charges, or it´s no more work experience for your favourite guitar mag.


With this in mind, we sent our latest sucker, er, ‘candidate´ off to Bristol Academy where he shadowed TG´s News Editor Nick Cracknell on a mission to find out what gear makes Bowling For Soup simmer.


His name´s Alex Ventura. He seems a nice lad and, more importantly, his dad is quite high up in the company that publishes TG. Needless to say, he´ll be getting a glowing report from us, even though he hasn´t made tea all day. Over to Alex…


“On Thursday 10 July 2008 I met Jaret and Chris from one of my favourite punk-rock bands, Bowling For Soup. TG´s News Editor Nick Cracknell thought it would be a good idea if I tagged along while he interviewed the guys for a couple of regular features in the mag. I´m glad he did!


“They say you should never meet your heroes because you´ll always be disappointed. Well, based on my experience yesterday ‘they´ are wrong. Chris and Jeret are two talented, funny and very nice guys.


“As they joked around while TG´s photographer snapped away, it became obvious that they´re really just kids in grown-ups´ bodies. They don´t take anything seriously, as Jeret said: “You can make anything funny by pulling your pants down.” I´ll probably just take his word for that…


“As Nick asked Chris questions about his gear, the BFS behemoth showed us round his set-up. His amp is one I´ve wanted for years, but so far haven´t been able to afford. It´s a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier and it sounded amazing at the soundcheck. Jeret plays the same amp, so that´s a double thumbs up as far as I´m concerned.


“Although we couldn´t stay for the gig, the band sounded just as good in soundcheck as they did when I saw them live at Download in 2005. Like so many other punk players, Chris and Jeret prove you don´t have to be a virtuoso to sound great.


“Today was an awesome experience and Chris and Jeret are great guys!”