I came to Sweden in 1975 to join a band, and liked it here so much that I ended up staying. I kept that up until eventually I could turn pro, continuing for about 15 years. Gigging at the Hope & Anchor pub, North London, c:a 1972
I left school, to Dad's disgust, and alternated between a series of day jobs and any gigs as I could get. But I was having fun, and playing my first gigs. The bass player and pianist, the infamous Pantlin Brothers, were a couple of years older than me, had motorbikes, Brycreeemed hair and leather jackets, and Dad had kittens. "The Vigilantes" were into Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and James Dean. Four months more, two 12" Fane speakers in a home-made box for another eight quid, and I was fully equipped.īy then I was playing in my first semi-pro band (or "group", as we called it then). The Saturday job was a drag, but I stuck it out and saved up another six pounds for a used 30 watt Linear Concord amplifier, which looked like a birdcage with knobs on. With my initials in self-adhesive gold letters on the guitar, and a pair of Hank Marvin glasses on my face, I was in business.īack home in Kingsbury I plugged the Guyatone into the "crystal" input on the back of an old Philips valve radio, and the unfortunate neighbours suffered through endless stumbling versions of "Apache", "Runaway", and "Johnny B. I bought a second-hand Guyatone (!!) guitar, complete with strap, plywood case and a great long cable, for £17.10s. I managed to scrape together £18 after about eight months, and made a beeline for Ivor Mairants' Music Centre in Rathbone Place, just off Oxford Street. I wanted to save up for an electric guitar. We moved to London a couple of years later (1961) and I soon found a Saturday job in a department store for twelve shillings a week. It didn't sound that much better than the tennis racquet at first, but it looked much much cooler in the mirror. (I should have sued that bloody Bert Weedon for false representation.) I started plinking away for hours on end. (Or so I thought.)Īs soon as the shops opened again after Christmas I went out and bought new strings, a plectrum, a guitar sling with a tassel (it looked more like a curtain pull) and a how-to-play-the-guitar book called "Play In A Day", by Bert Weedon. I had been practising assiduously in front of the mirror with a tennis racquet, so this was going to be a walkover. It had two broken strings, an action like a cheesecutter, and didn't tune for spit, but I was as proud as punch of it. He got it from my Uncle Les (Mum's brother) on Christmas Eve, for four pounds. I nagged my parents incessantly for two years before Dad finally capitulated and bought me a second-hand Egmond "Six-Five Special" acoustic guitar for Christmas, 1959. (Today I really wish that I had kept it up.) But when Norman brought a borrowed guitar home one day - a big old Höfner archtop, as I recall - I was hooked straight away, and lost interest in the piano practically overnight. His wife "Auntie" Myrtle, herself an accomplished pianist, was helping me with my piano studies (I had been taking piano lessons since age 5). "Uncle" Norman played piano in a semi-pro trio. The first guitar I ever saw, apart from on the TV, was at my "Uncle" Norman's house. My love affair with the guitar began when I was 9 years old. My earliest infant memory is of sitting in my high chair in the kitchen, with Mum washing up at the sink, singing away. Mum, though, had a lovely voice when she was young. But I must have inherited whatever small musical talent I have from him through my mother, because hardly anyone in the family on my father's side was particularly musical. I never knew him, as he died when I was about 3. My grandfather on my mother's side played the banjo and mandolin, and I'm told he was never happier than when working with his hands. Very often I would go to sleep with the hard-to-dial-in, interference-saturated sounds of Radio Luxembourg "on 208 metres in the Medium Wave Band" crackling away in the earpiece of my Philips "transistor". My mother had 78's of Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock" and Tommy Steele's "Singin' The Blues", amomg many others, which she often put on the "gramophone".
The only child of an ordinary, hard-working young English couple, I grew up in a small town in Gloucestershire with the sounds of early rock'n'roll all around me. With Eddie & Tony Juracka, Mosebacke, Sept.