The next step

I'd learned how to play a few chords on the guitar and I had a summer job, so the next step was to get a better guitar. The first couple of guitars were rough old acoustic guitars, the same crap sound as mine, but with a better action. I was hamstrung as ever by the cost of musical equipment. Everything was relatively expensive compared to what you could earn.
My summer job paid 2/6d an hour- £1 a day, £5 a week. This was in 1966. When the Vox AC30 was launched a few years previously it was priced at £89 guineas- that is- £89 pounds and 89 shillings. There were twenty shillings in a pound so that was an extra £4/9s or £93 pounds 9shillings in total. An AC30 amplifier would cost me at least 18 weeks wages back then. Luckily there were cheaper amps around.
I never could afford an AC30- even more so now when good old examples change hands for over £1000.
I eventually saved up enough for a new guitar. It was a Hohner Club40 like this one. It cost me £15. Three weeks wages.

I managed to break the neck on it after a few months, so my next purchase was a Burns Trisonic solid. Like this-

(picture coutesy of the Burns guitar museum)
It came with the thickest most inflexible set of tapewound strings I have ever encountered and what was worse it was very neck heavy. I didn't keep it long.
Norman Traies of Traies Music in Portobello Road persuaded me to buy a new japanese semi acoustic- a Commodore. I can't remember but I think mine was a wierd greeny grey sunburst.

I had to keep this one. My parents signed the HP agreement so I had it for a couple of years until it was paid for. I did however play a few shows with it.

Amplifiers......
As I mentioned, amplifiers were expensive back then. A new AC30 in 1960 was over £90 and the average weekly wage was about £10. My first proper amplifier was a Hohner Orgaphon- an accordion amplifier (as was the AC30 originally) I bought it from Traies second hand. The original speaker had blown and was replaced with a Goodmans Audium 12" ( I think it was one of these)

I first used it with my Hohner Club40. With everything turned up to 11 it sounded awesome. A real fuzzy distorted sound just like (so I thought) Hendrix got. Yeah right.

I blew it up.

My next amplifier was a Burns Sonic 30 like this.

It was one of the first transistorised (solid state) amplifiers. It was so trebly only dogs could fully appreciate the finer nuances of the sound, and try as I might, it never distorted in the same way as the Orgaphon. I went and bought a fuzz box.

I doubt very much if the amp actually delivered 30 watts rms. It might have delivered 30 watts peak music power or some such hyperbole. There was no way that it was as loud as an AC30. For the next few years my mates and I were obsessed with volume (by that I mean loudness). We really thought that louder was better. It probably ruined any chance of me ever becoming a good electric guitar player.

To end this section- when I started working full time in September 1967 I worked for the Westminster Bank (later to become NatWest). As a 17 year old, my wages were a princely £370 a year, plus an extra £150 London allowance, making £520 a year.
My journey to work took me past a music shop in King Street Hammersmith. There in the window was probably the most iconic electric guitar ever made- a Fender Stratocaster. It was brand new and a bright pink in colour. Not the salmon pink you see everywhere, but a bright pink- something like this-

The price? £276. Yes that's right. More than six months wages. At around the same time you begain to see Marshall stacks being used. I saw Hendrix a few times and he used two. I went into a music shop in Kilburn and there were several Marshall stacks comprising an amplifier and two speaker cabinets on display. How much?

That'll be £420 to you sir. £420? Nine or ten months wages!
Imagine having to pay £15,000 for an amplifier stack today.
That's what it was like in the good old 60s.

I couldn't afford a strat, so my friend Pete and I bought a Watkins Rapier, then glued/screwed and extra bit of wood on the back then planed the body down to resemble the strat profile.

It fooled no-one.