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

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СКАЧАТЬ living together. But when they found out we were brothers and our mother was Irish, they were fine with us.

      The Irish guys would have fights, throwing each other out into the snow in their underpants. It was unbelievable, really wild. They were roadbuilders, and they befriended us. They’d run out of food mid-week, then come to us. Now we didn’t have much ourselves – maybe a few tins of beans and a bit of bread – so we fed them. When the weekend came and they’d had their pay-packets, they’d give us tons of money, beer, fags, and so on.

      At this point ‘Donkey Knob’ Spinelli enters the scene. What’s that? Will he object to his nickname being used in the book if he reads it? Well, would you, if that was your nickname? I didn’t think so. Not only did Donkey Knob have the biggest cock you’ll ever see, he was the tightest bastard known to mankind. At this time, he was the only person in our circle with a car, a Jag. I think his parents were fairly well off. He was quite a good drummer. I wasn’t so wild about his singing, though. He went on with Pete to play with Brand X, Phil Collins, and all that lot, so he was fairly talented.

      A guy called Pete Hampton then figured quite strongly in my life. He wasn’t a musician, but he had hundreds of records and he loved blues. He kept bringing me into Carousels in Bedford and other music shops where you could go in and listen to music in the booths. He told me I was a good guitarist and should learn to play ragtime music.

      A few people were by now starting to say I should try to earn some money through music. Now at that time I had very little money. I was completely brassic in fact, and still living in the shithole at the top of Goldington Avenue. And so it was that I realised I should really try to knuckle down with my guitar playing, and learn the ragtime songs that Pete Hampton would bring me. I did it all by ear. You couldn’t buy books on ragtime music.

      At this time in The George and Dragon pub in Bedford they had a club, Club Mezz. It was a jazz club, but then a friend said he was going to open a blues club there on Friday nights. I thought that was great so I turned up on the first night, but there was nobody there. It turned out that the guy had not arranged anything in the end and the event had been cancelled, but nobody had told me. I wasn’t very happy.

      Now at this time I’d been playing the odd gig with an Italian band. You wouldn’t want to play in an Italian band; they’re so traditional. They wouldn’t allow you into the wedding because you were English. I mean, God help us. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their van and all the amplifiers. So I called Pete and we quickly cobbled together a band with Donkey Knob to play the first Friday night, which should have been arranged by the other guy.

      There weren’t many people the first Friday, but through word of mouth the place was packed the next week. Bingo. The gig was a knock-out, and we called those nights ‘The Blues Club’. Two or three weeks after we started, another local guy, Bob Carter, started playing there regularly too. By the time it was taken over two years later by a local businessman, Angie Russo, it was really throbbing. But what got me was that after six months the bloke running the event, Dave Balfour, had the cheek to demand entrance money from me. I said, ‘Fuck off, Dave, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even have a fuckin’ Blues Club.’ So I never paid and I just walked in. When Angie Russo ran The Blues Club he tried to turn it into a money-making business, and the event completely lost its edge.

      We’ve got to about 1969 now. Bob Carter went on to form a band called Lynx. They got into the charts. He was a good writer, and he was taught by Dave King. Bob died some years ago of a strange illness.

      We were all mainly playing blues by this time, mainly standard blues covers, though some of it was original. Spinelli wrote some songs.

      Pete was in a band called Little Women. Don’t ask me how they came up with that name. The band was entirely blokes, so it was quite bizarre really. Phil Trenworth played in the band with his brother. Now around this time, Pete was increasingly picking up guitar work in London. He sort of disappeared into the metropolis and started to get to know and play with some relatively famous people, such as Jim Capaldi.

      In Pete’s absence I obviously had no playing partner, but I’d become pretty good at ragtime, so I started to go around the folk clubs. But in the early 1970s folk clubs had customers wearing chunky white Arran jumpers, and the singers stuck fingers in their ears. They were jolly decent people, but ragtime music didn’t really fit into the traditional image. It was too American, and they didn’t like it much. I stood out as a good musician, but I aggravated them. They allowed me to play, but I always got the distinct impression that I was part of the furniture.

      In the 1970s I did little manual work. In 1976 my New Year’s resolution was to not do any manual work in 1977.

      I met some quite interesting people on the folk circuit who are now famous, including Martin Carthy and Saffron, Donovan’s girlfriend. You may recall his lyric on Mellow Yellow, ‘I’m just mad about Saffron, Saffron’s mad about me’. She was bloody good.

      I thought that if I carried on playing the folk clubs, I’d eventually break through. Folk clubs are very traditional and you do have to be a ‘known known’. Really, if you’d just fuckin’ sit there for 30 years, you’d become famous. That’s what they’re about, they’re not about spontaneous flavours. And while I now play some folky stuff, back then – in my twenties – I was still only playing ragtime. I had fuck all to do with folk music, I didn’t like it one bit.

      But I was still doing pretty well. Sometimes I’d play an hour-long set while people were filing in for a gig by some famous band. I played the Milton Keynes Bowl once, and a big place in St Albans – the Corn Exchange, I think – and lots of other places, wine bars and so on. The money was good. I’d have to deal with the hecklers, some of them already drunk, which I always enjoyed. Someone would shout out to me, ‘Fuck off!’, and I’d respond with something witty like, ‘No – fuck off yourself!’

      Women finding musicians attractive is actually an occupational hazard, as drink is. This isn’t bragging but . . . well, it’s fuckin’ terrible really, because what happened was, a girl invited you back to her place, you spent the night with her, and had a great time. But you might already have a regular girlfriend who you saw more often. Then you’d meet a third girl at a party, who would ask you if you were good at fixing broken record turntables or whatever. So you’d go back to her place, look at the turntable, discover it was working fine, tell the girl, and she’d say, ‘I know.’ That sort of thing happened a lot.

      Now the problem came when you were doing a gig and all three girls turned up – and of course you were trapped. Normally I’d stop for a break during the gig, to rest and get a drink, but in those circumstances I’d just keep playing.

      It’s like the Dire Straits lyric, ‘Money for nothing, and chicks for free.’ The funny thing is, I didn’t see it as anything special. I saw it as a problem. I think women are just attracted to musicians, for whatever reason.

      But you also have to look at the arse end of it, jealous boyfriends. In the early ’80s, when I was in my early thirties, Nick Edwards – a fiddle player – and I were playing everywhere. Pubs, barn dances, you name it. Now, if you’re on the dance floor and some girl comes up to you and is drooling all over you, the boyfriend obviously gets shirty. I’d get weird phone calls in the early hours of the morning where nobody would speak. Eventually, I used to pull the cord from the wall to stop the problem. I never came to blows with jealous boyfriends, but there were a lot of uncomfortable moments.

      I knew of Nick because he’s Patrick Knight’s stepbrother, and Patrick had always lived in Oakley. I was giving guitar lessons to John Duffield and John suggested Nick and I should get together, because Nick was a great fiddle player and our styles would work well together. And so we teamed up. It was a bit lightweight at first, but we soon developed СКАЧАТЬ