Guitar Gods in Beds. (Bedfordshire: A Heavenly County). Mike Buchanan

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СКАЧАТЬ If you only have one, you play it and make a bloody good job of it, don’t you? Has my upbringing made me the person I am? Who knows? But there’s no doubt that material wealth does nothing for anyone spiritually.

      I really wanted to play the guitar when I was about nine or ten. I’d listen to bands like The Shadows on my 78rpm wind-up gramophone. My first record was Wake Up, Little Suzie by The Everly Brothers. I was really jealous of the boy next door, who was a spoilt only child, because he had a Dansette which played 45rpm records. It had an auto-changer, which was cutting-edge record playing technology at that time.

      I begged my mother to buy me an old record player which played 45rpm records, and she bought it. It didn’t have an auto-changer, so it wasn’t quite the swish thing that the kid next door had. My first 45rpm record was Kon-Tiki by The Shadows. You wouldn’t believe how many times I must have played that. To this day, I still love that record.

      I just had to get a guitar from somewhere. When I was about nine, I saw a plastic Elvis Presley guitar that had four strings. Why the bloody hell it had only four strings, I don’t know. It cost ten bob. I pressed my mother to buy it, and she did. I’d play it, then Pete would have a go. I tended towards rhythmical things, while Pete would tend towards melody. That’s interesting because it’s exactly where we’ve ended up, with me playing mainly acoustic guitar and Pete playing lead electric guitar.

      There was a girl at my school whose father was a Teddy Boy. He’d been playing guitar in a jazz band. He nicked one of the guitars and was offering to sell it for a fiver. Now I had 30 quid left by an aunt, which in those days was a small fortune. It was held in a bank account, but I needed my mum to sign a bank form before I could get hold of any of it. I asked her if I could withdraw five pounds to buy the guitar, but she said I couldn’t. She thought it was a very frivolous use of so much money.

      So I had to develop a plan to get the money. Now we’d got into a routine whereby – quite unknown to dad – we’d give mum two pounds a week to help with the household bills she frequently incurred. In exchange she let us bunk off school one day every week. I spontaneously arrived at the idea of blackmail. I told her I was going to let dad know she was letting us have days off school and that we were paying towards the household bills with our own money, unless she agreed to help me withdraw five pounds for the stolen guitar. So that’s how I came to get the money for my first decent guitar.

      I went to the Teddy Boy, who lived in The Folly caravan site in Clapham, where we had lived ourselves. He gleefully parted with the guitar, because a fiver was a lot of money in those days. You must remember that a fiver would have been half of my dad’s weekly wage at the time.

      So I had a good guitar. Pete was green with envy. In those days I’d ‘open tune’ the guitar, so when I strummed all the strings, I’d get a particular chord – C, G, or whatever. I didn’t know there was a ‘proper way’ to tune a guitar. A local band had seen me play and said I needed to tune it properly, but I didn’t listen to them.

      When I was 12, the family moved to a house on Station Road, Oakley. My youngest brother still lives in the same house.

      A year or two passed, and eventually Pete cottoned on to my trick. He too blackmailed mum into releasing five pounds from the bank, and bought a crude electric guitar.

      Pete and I never received any formal music training, or read sheet music or anything. We just played and learnt everything by ear. The local band – The Dell Vikings, or something cringy like that – were older than us, maybe 16 or 17. They saw Pete and I play, and were impressed. So when they bought some new equipment, they very generously gave us their old amplifier, a Linear 30-watt affair with a couple of speakers in it. We thought it was fantastic.

      Then we bought the Bert Weedon book, as everyone seems to have done in those days. I distinctly remember reading, ‘These chords will seem impossible to you now, but soon you’ll be able to play them easily.’ I thought, ‘Well, I doubt that!’, but of course he was right.

      We met up with a kid who played drums, who lived just down the road. A red-haired kid, Andy Mason, he worked in the chip shop on Saturday mornings. He now runs an agency for musicians. I say he played the drums, but he was particularly fuckin’ useless at them. He had the nickname in the youth club of ‘Chi-chi-boom’.

      Pete’s mate Ray Nicholson played bass guitar, although he wasn’t much better musically than Chi-chi-boom. And so we formed a band, The Vultures. I chose the name by opening a dictionary at random and blindly sticking a pin into the page. Maybe The Eagles did the same. We were 13 or 14. Pete drew a picture of a vulture on the bass drum.

      By this time we’d moved out of the pre-fab and into a house in The Close – number 12, I think – in Clapham, behind where the new shops are. That was the first proper house we’d ever lived in. We had a nice big back garden and we’d practise there. It drew the heat a few times. People would complain and get the cops round. Some people liked our music, but mostly they complained.

      We then used to play down the youth club. First of all we played at the Methodist Junior Youth Club, where kids up to 12 or 13 went. Someone gave us an old applecart and we’d put our amplifier in it and walk to our early gigs. I wish to God I had a picture of that, that would be epic. Some of the older kids would come to the junior club just because they loved to hear us play. Most of them were bikers. But after a time we only went to the youth club for older kids.

      The song that always got the best reception for us back then was Smokestack Lightning. We’d get to a point where we’d play to a wild crescendo and roll about on the floor like we were having fits. The kids thought that was fantastic. We were soon playing all sorts of places and were billed as ‘the youngest group in England’. We played at the Bedford Corn Exchange when I was 12 and Pete was 11, on the same bill as The Pretty Things. 1963, I suppose.

      The Bedford Corn Exchange, The Granada, and The Empire used to put on big-name bands. The Beatles, The Who, the bloody lot. The people who ran these places were local, and where there was a chance to put on a local band to warm up the audience, they took it.

      We’d also get gigs at working men’s clubs. I remember being offered beer at one of the clubs when I was about 12. It seems ridiculous now, but in those politically incorrect days you could do almost anything you wanted to. To me it seemed the ultimate sin to drink beer, and I would only drink orange squash.

      We’d see a band called The Odds in Bedford. I still see one or two of the guys around. They used to play at the Drill Hall, and we’d sometimes play with them. We got around a bit and started to get really good.

      I left school as soon as I could, at 15. Pete went to the Pilgrim’s School in Bedford and was expelled. I did all sorts of shit jobs after I left school. I worked on a farm in Clapham. I must have had 20 jobs in the first year after I left school. I just wasn’t cut out for ‘normal’ jobs, with shifts and so on. At an early age you don’t realise that while you’re not cut out for certain jobs, you may have some other talents to exploit. Everyone was moaning at me about my lack of work ethic and all that. But of course in those days you could go and get a job anywhere in ten minutes. You didn’t need a bloody degree to land some second-rate fuckin’ job. The sort of jobs you need a degree for nowadays, I could have landed back then by turning up on the doorstep. But I wouldn’t have wanted them.

      By the time I got to 16 or 17 Pete and I didn’t play together much anymore, apart from the odd party. I left home at 18. Pete and I lived in a real slum for a year, a shithole of a bedsit dive at the top of Goldington Avenue, Bedford. Pete never paid any fuckin’ rent. I always had to find the money. I worked in a junk shop at the time.

      Pete and I were pretty boys in those days, with long hair, and we shared a bed in the bedsit. In the СКАЧАТЬ