guitar – Noted

12. Starter Guitar

‘Can I borrow that, Paul?’

It’s a cheap three-quarter-length Spanish my younger brother got for Christmas and if there were any justice in this foul world it would belong to me.

I remember the moment he unwrapped it on Christmas Eve, the surge of resentment. Why were they buying him a guitar? Guitar was my thing. And I am desperate for something like this. Desperate for a starter guitar to learn on so that when the day finally arrives when I own a beautiful gleaming electric like the one in the guitar shop, I can strap it on and instantly reel out killer riffs.

True, this desire of mine was not an especially well formulated one before the moment Paul tore back the wrapping paper. Neither had there been any discussions between Mum and me about guitars—not since the row when I demanded a Vox Phantom VI Special.

She used a lot of bad-sounding words then I didn’t understand, like ‘mortgage’, ‘bankrupt’ and ‘bailiffs’, but her excuses were facile. Surely, unless the woman is entirely incapable of managing household expenses, there must be money left over for essentials like a Vox Phantom VI Special? I mean, we live in a detached house on the good side of the park, and I go to grammar school, where I was sent with a new leather satchel and a cricket bat of such superior quality that an older boy promptly ‘borrowed’ it for his net practice.

So the subject became too hot between us, and I never got round to asking for something a bit cheaper to start on: a starter guitar—but surely she must have known I needed one? Aren’t mothers supposed to telepath things like that?

As I reach for the instrument, Paul signals acquiescence by the faintest of nods and carries on watching the Monkees on TV—oblivious to the massive irony of what he is doing. Or not doing. The Monkees play a bunch of kids who want to be pop stars: here I am taking actual steps towards being a pop star while all that he, the owner of the only guitar in the house can do is sit there on our G-plan sofa watching TV like a slug. I take it upstairs and begin shaping my hands to chords from the Burt Weedon Play-in-a-day Book, reflecting on this contrast between Paul and myself; a difference that I feel licenses me to an act of appropriation similar to the older boy’s with my cricket bat. The next time I feel like playing the guitar I don’t ask, I just take. Pretty soon it begins to look a lot more like my guitar than Paul’s. It’s a thuggish logic, I recognise: the toy belongs to he who can play with it properly, he who loves it best. But it turns out I love it quite a lot.

* * * *

Guitarist Bert Weedon with inset his guitar tutor 'Play in a Day'

The truth is, I don’t really remember how I learned to play guitar. At least, my brain doesn’t. My hands still know how to make the shapes and hit the strings. I can play. So clearly there is a residue in ‘muscle memory’ (if that really is a thing) from learning—but I have no conscious memory of the process by which I learned. What went on in that bedroom, exactly, during all the hundreds of hours I spent compulsively repeating a riff or a chord sequence over and over again, varying it with each repetition by tiny, barely imperceptible increments until it finally approached adequacy? The flow state is mysterious. But … Play in a day: did ever a book’s title hold out a falser promise? You can’t learn the guitar in a day. It takes hours and hours. Weeks and weeks. Years and years.

Luckily, I have an obsessive streak a mile wide.

I was spending less and less time in the sitting room anyway watching television with the family. The crunch point was when Mum brought tea for my father and grandfather and all three of them promptly fell asleep after just a few sips: moments later my grandfather’s jaw sagged and his upper set of dentures, expanded by the hot liquid, fell onto his lower plate with a loud click. I slipped upstairs and started strumming.

The three-quarter length guitar fitted neatly against my body. Its nylon strings weren’t hard to hold down. Soon I was developing for this thing the sort of feelings I had only previously experienced with bikes and go-karts; a sense of speed and freedom, allied now to a new sense of entry into an expansive, self-created world.

At school I was learning proper grown-up classical music with a slightly unhinged teacher called Gerwyn Parry who told stories about Handel in a lugubrious, Welsh-accented voice. For a while it seemed that I might go that way: I remember writing a couple of bars of actual music—a tune I had made up—and staring at it afterwards in wonder. I even started learning the ‘cello. But to be honest, I never got on with the thing—it was huge: it dwarfed me. And it had no frets, so how the fuck were you supposed to know where to put your fingers? Meanwhile my nightly practice on the guitar, picking out tunes heard on radio or records, was building an ability to play by ear that outpaced my struggles with learning to read ‘the dots’—with the result that I never learned to sight-read.

This didn’t stop them putting me into the school orchestra, however, where I spent most of the time miming. A skill that was to come in handy later on, when I finally got to own a beautiful gleaming electric guitar of my own, and to tote it on Top of the Pops.

11. Electric Guitar 1967

‘Let’s get sweets,’ says my friend. We’re walking home from school and we’ve reached a parade of small shops by the park near my home.

‘Hold on, I just want to look in there.’

‘In that junk shop?’

His mistake is understandable. It looks like a junk shop. It has the same down-at-heel, functional look; with its harsh strip-lighting and window display screened off by perforated hardboard. But this is no bric-a-brac emporium. What this shop sells is not spurious antiques and suburban rejectamenta, but guitars.

‘Are you going to get one?’ says my friend, after we’ve been parked in front of the window for some minutes.

I snort derision. As if I, an eleven-year old schoolboy, could walk into this shop and walk out with one of these fantastically desirable pieces of hardware. As if. Secretly I’m flattered that he thinks I might be that type of person. Secretly I’m flattered he thinks my parents might have that kind of money—or if they did that they’d let me spend it on this type of thing. True I live in a detached house on the more affluent side of the park, while my friend lives in one of the cramped, tree-less streets to the North—a difference of which I have become more aware since I accidentally passed the Eleven Plus and got into our slightly snobby grammar school. But it seems risible to me that he should therefore imagine I can have anything I want. If my parents wouldn’t buy me the Johnny Seven gun after which I lusted for most of my primary school years, they’re hardly likely to fork out now for a Vox Phantom VI Special, the thing in the window that is currently fixing my interest.

I stare at it, enthralled. To its right is another Vox electric, a teal teardrop-shaped model like the one played by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. But it’s the Phantom that obsesses me; polar white with an odd irregular polygon of a body, like something off the set of Thunderbirds. As well as a formidable array of the usual rotary knobs, it also had a baffling row of push buttons, which look more like something you’d see on a vacuum cleaner. I have no idea what all these knobs and switches actually do, but there’s no doubting that this is superior technology. With a machine like this, with all its controls, its three pickups—and even a tremolo arm—you could take on the world: you couldn’t help but become a massive pop star. Everyone would love you.

When my friend finally gets bored and shades off home, I’m only dimly aware of his saying goodbye. I stare and stare. And come the next afternoon I’m back here again to continue staring.

Of course, just as you’re never aware when you place your first bet on a horse or accept an unaccustomed bump of cocaine that you are potentially laying the foundations of a long-term habit, I had no idea of the significance of what I was doing. Even now, more than half a century later, I can’t pass a guitar shop without checking out what’s in the window; a fact to which members of my family will wearily attest: there are streets in my home town of Brighton none of them wants to walk down with me for fear that I’ll lapse into trance state.

I very rarely actually enter the shops though, much less try out the instruments. My guitar-buying days are over. It’s other reasons that draw me at this stage of life. I love the stories that second-hand electrics tell, and for that reason I prefer the smaller, shabbier shops, the odder-looking guitars and the more obscure marques. I like to speculate about the musos who might have owned these instruments, the music they played on them, and how their once-sleek Arabian steeds came to end up here, in the knacker’s yard of musical instrumentation, a backstreet guitar shop. From experience, there is usually something wrong with them: warped necks, obsolescent electrics, botched repairs, inappropriate additions and restorations … and if they were any good, my inner cynic says, they wouldn’t be in this shop, at this price. But there is a romance to them, a poignancy. Like rescue animals. Were they mistreated by a callous owner, or thrown out on the day after Christmas? Were they unwanted gifts? More likely the owner just ran out of money—but many will have been rejected simply because their looks fell out of favour. Guitar shop windows are barometers of fashionable taste, the Vox guitars I stared at on my way home from school being just a case in point.

English guitars had their heyday in the Beat Boom of the early Sixties, when the US-made Fenders and Gibsons everyone really wanted were next-to-impossible to get your hands on. As the Sixties progressed things changed and American guitars flooded the market. Homegrown was out. No matter how many knobs it had, if it wasn’t a Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Martin or Rickenbacker, you probably weren’t going to see it on Top of the Pops. That was when the backstreet shops began to fill up with the logos of Vox, Burns and Hofner—coincidentally, just as I was getting into staring at them.

* * * * *

The year I started at my grammar school, Westcliff High School for Boys, was a bit of a pivot point for other things too. 1967 was the Summer of Love, and even if the full import of this moment in cultural history was less than clear to an 11 year-old boy in Southend-on-sea, the signs were definitely there. I remember as a special favour being allowed into my older sister’s bedroom to listen to her new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and to pore over the lyrics on the back cover of its gatefold sleeve with her. A girl in the neighbourhood took to wearing a small bell round her neck (prompting my brothers and I to follow her down the street making moo-ing noises). By Chalkwell station someone took a pot of white paint and wrote a slogan along the sea wall that you could see in its entirety only if you swam out. Treading water one day, inhaling quantities of Estuary, I read: ‘WHEN THE MODE OF THE MUSIC CHANGES, THE WALLS OF THE CITY SHAKE’. There was pirate radio: there were drug busts and obscenity trials. Leaders in the Daily Telegraph made my grandfather vibrate with rage. Meanwhile, the portable transistor radio sets that were beginning to be omnipresent in the streets, parks and at the beach, played the hit of the Summer, A Whiter Shade of Pale, wherever you went. We skipped the light fandango.

I remember watching Gary Brooker of Procol Harum singing it on Top of the Pops, and being struck by his diffident, non-showbiz affect. This was no Tommy-Steele-all-round-entertainer. He bothered less with putting on a show than the Beatles or the Stones. He actually looked quite depressed, which I sort of liked. Together with the inexplicable but oddly evocative lyrics and the churchy Hammond organ on the track, this non-performance made a deep impression on me.

Around this time I had a memorable dream. I was on the beach and it was a sweltering day. Out at sea, near but not so near that I could swim out to it, was an island where all the cool people were; the teenagers and the twenty-somethings in bathing costumes, with transistor radios wedged under their ears. They were dancing and laughing. All wore sunglasses. I saw that the island was on the move, having somehow slipped its moorings, like the lily-pad on which Thumbelina escaped her ugly toad-suitor. As I sat alone on the mainland with my towel and my Tupperware box of sandwiches, it floated past me and away, seeming to stand for something ungovernably desirable, impossibly out of reach.

10. Gig

‘A-one-two-three-four …’

The smell of warm grass rises in the tent. Afternoon sun throws a strong but diffuse light as, smartly turned out in their tailored suits and winklepickers, The Fourmost from Liverpool bash into it.

The tent is not large. It’s not like The Big Top at the circus I went to in London that had horses, elephants and lions tamed with whips. This one holds maybe 50 people max, though it isn’t that full for the Fourmost. I was the first in here, and I’ve been sitting cross-legged in front of the stage for what seemed like hours waiting for something to happen; staring at the drum kit and amplifiers with anticipation, tempered by not a little resentment.

Living no more than two minutes’ walk from the park in which this tent is pitched, I feel a strong sense of ownership when it comes to this field where I spend most of my non-school hours, playing football or cricket or just hanging out with my park mates, drinking R Whites Cream soda and chalking swear words on the shelter. Imagine my outrage on turning up to find the field fenced off and a charge of thruppence to get in. It was like being taxed to get into your own sitting room. The pretext for this intrusion is of course charity. It’s something called a fête. None of my park friends is around, and it’s full of boring rubbish like tombola stands where grown-ups can win booze—together with a load of God stuff.

If you ask me, there is already far too much God stuff in this park. If it’s not the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s the Mormons or the Baptists, all of whom flock to the field in holiday-time to feast on young souls. They’re always trying to separate you into groups for organized games; giving you free lemon squash and saying, ‘this will be fun!’ Then before you know it you’re sitting round in a circle bashing tambourines and talking about Jesus. And if it’s not the God-people it’s the nonces …

Watching the Fourmost from Liverpool has got to be more fun than Kumbaya with the Baptists or dodging paedophiles. This is, after all, my first ever live gig. However, right from the start something is telling me that the band’s punning name fulfills only the cardinal half of its two possible numerical interpretations: yes, there are four of them, but no they are not, let’s be honest, the foremost, F-O-R-E. Granted, if you screw up your eyes and let your vision go out of focus they look a bit like the Beatles (though less handsome, and with not such good songs) but it’s the Beatles of a few years ago. The actual Beatles have moved on from tailored suits and winklepickers. Their new film Help! has fancy abroad locations and a whole new way of having fun that you don’t always understand because it’s completely weird. And the Beatles are in Technicolour now, where the Fourmost seem to be still in Black & White.

The level of excitement in the tent is not high anyway, the audience being mostly grownups with kids, a few dogs and hardly any teenagers (a bad sign). But even with my undeveloped nine year-old critical faculties I can see there’s cause for concern. I mean, I don’t want to come across like some kind of prepubescent Kenneth Tynan, but it’s clear that what we’re watching here is not the first division. Not even the second or third. Watching the Fourmost, in fact, is a bit like watching Southend United lose four-one to Tranmere Rovers at Roots Hall; better than bashing tambourines for a beaker of lemon Treetop, but not something to set the heart of youth aflame with rebellious passions.

Nevertheless, among the mixed emotions I feel—balancing if not entirely cancelling out the umbrage taken from being done out of an afternoon’s football and low-level vandalism—there is a sort of visceral fascination.

The way everything gleams. The light glinting off cymbals and the metal pickup covers of the guitars. The bigness of the sound compared to listening on the radio—or even the stereogram at home—so you feel the bass right inside your chest and the snare whacking you round the head. The kinetic force of the performers: the thing it does to the air to have four grownups going hard at it with their lungs and their instruments. And somehow the fact that the Fourmost aren’t exactly the crème de la crème doesn’t matter so much compared to fact that they are here in real life rather than on the TV (which at this point in the sixties means small screens and tinny sound). Everything is bigger, louder, more blatant in real life, and the blemishes that come along with that only seem to bring the music closer. A gig is a gig, just as a football match where your fourth-division team loses four-one is still, for all that, a football match—with corner flags, officials, and a cheering, jeering, swearing crowd—a big-boy step up from your park kickaround.

Eventually the hit is played and the set comes to an end. Liverpool’s not-quite-finest make to leave the stage, then take a polite smattering of applause as justification for an encore. I drift away—unimpressed but hungry for more, and better.