Biography: Guitar History

My first guitar was an unexpected Christmas present in1968, when  I was 14. Dad bought it for £4 6s 8d, and I still have it, a genuine plywood 12-fret steel-strung acoustic, with a tailpiece. For the record, it is trademarked ‘Artia: Foreign” and was evidently imported by Boosey & Hawkes. A naff, cheapo instrument, but one sniff of that soundhole is worth an episode of Life on Mars....

I’d never so much as held a guitar before, so a neighbour – I’d bless his name if I could remember it, I only met him once – showed me some chord shapes. I could at least sing in tune, so he very wisely taught me Skip to my Lou in the key of D: it only needs two chords.

That was my first and last lesson, unless you count the late-night (for those days) BBC 2 series Hold Down a Chord, presented by John Pearse. He was central to the acoustic guitar scene, recording for Transatlantic whose Contemporary Guitar Sampler (Volume 2) was the second album I ever bought, and much the most influential. (Volume 1 was the third and, since you ask, the first was Parsley, Sage Rosemary and Thyme). People say – and I’d agree – that Pearse was a much better entrepreneur and self-publicist than ever he was a guitarist, but he was a good teacher and his simple, effective Guitar Train was my first instrumental.

In memory, every boy in my form at school had a guitar. That can’t be true, but there was certainly an awful lot of playing going on: the acoustic guitar was Cool in those days – Dylan, Donovan, Joni, Paxton, all were mainstream – and there was stacks of material to work on. Close cousin to the Transatlantic label (Jansch /  Renbourn  / Pentangle,  John James, Pete Berryman, Gordon Giltrap et al.) was Stefan Grossman’s Kicking Mule stable, which released only acoustic guitar instrumentals, with instruction books and tablature.Very heaven:  Dave Laibman and Eric Schoenberg, Ton van Bergyck, Duck Baker, Pete Finger and Grossman himself – I couldn’t get enough of the ’Mule stuff throughout  the ’70s.

And an honourable mention here for a fellow pupil at King Ed’s, Stourbridge. Pete Arrowsmith was – and is – one of those players who made the most fingerbusting arrangements look simple, and we all used to hang around him in the hope that whatever he’d got might be catching. In a way, it was: if you can actually see someone doing jaw-dropping, pianistic stuff on just six strings, you know that what feels currently impossible might just, one day, perhaps, with tireless practice, go ‘click’... And I bought my first decent guitar off Pete, an all-mahogany (!) Fender acoustic.

Other local luminaries, mates and influences were Straff Dance, Frank Dudley, and Simon Goodwin, fine players all.  Stourbridge’s biggest folk club (there were two or three others in those days) was in The Mitre, and all us guitarists would meet in the cloakroom outside the upstairs Ladies’ loo to trade riffs, licks and repertoire, probably only going into the club proper if there was a good player on. A reunion is long overdue.

(Good place for one of my favourite jokes...

      Q. How many guitar-players does it take to change a light-bulb?

       A. Five. That’s one to change the bulb and four to stand at the back of the

            room, going ‘Nah, I can do that.’)

Later, there would be other soloist heroes, some of them out-and-out magicians like Isaac Guillory, Martin Simpson and Chris Newman, and jazzers Joe Pass and Martin Taylor.

Meantime, my biggest single influence back then was a Welsh wizard, John James. His ragtime arrangements and – the only word - charming original tunes and songs still do it for me. And he was funny, with unique dry, sly ’tween-songs chat : I’m ashamed to admit that it wasn’t just his tunes and songs that I stole, pretty much  wholesale, for my first, er, somewhat derivative sets.

And it was trying to find an E9 shape in John’s The Stretching of a Young Girl’s Heart that suddenly turned my technique around...