my own voice?

I grew up in Cornwall in the 1950s. We had no TV, and pop music didn't exist. One incident stands out. In about 1957/8 my friend Roger Blewitt's dad bought a tape recorder. This was the latest must-have gadget and one day he showed me how it worked. He recorded my voice and played it back to me.

Was that really my voice? It sounded so strange. Those were the words I'd spoken but the voice was of a stranger. I couldn't get used to it. I never got used to it.
For the next fifty or so years I'd inwardly shudder when I opened my voice to sing.

I was singing in order to entertain people but I hated the sound of my voice. I thought it was out of tune, and the more I thought that, the more out of tune it became. Eventually it all came to a head when I was recording an album for a Christian record company in late 1995. Just as it had been 30 years earlier when the humiliation brought about by my inability to play the guitar spurred me on to learn to play and eventually to take lessons, so my humiliation in the studio caused me to find a voice coach and learn to sing.

I had six lessons from an operatic tenor, who gave singing lessons at his home. We'd sit in his music room and he allowed, no, encouraged his students to bring a cassette along so the lesson could be recorded. He'd take me through various exercises and scales, all the while encouraging me.
I'd then replay the tape and practice my scales as I drove around East Anglia (I was a delivery driver at the time). After a couple of months my voice was transformed. More importantly. I was transformed. My voice was still a little shaky from time to time, but I no longer inwardly winced. I learned how to warm my voice up, and not blow it out by trying to sing too loudly too soon. I felt comfortable for the first time in fifty years.

Recently my voice has changed again. Whether it was the illness I went through, I don't know, but my voice is different. I sing differently. I choose my songs more carefully. People tell me they like the sound of my voice, which is a surprise to me.

More old tat

Thinking back through the old gear I had I remembered briefly owning a WEM pick-a-back. 15 watts of amp into a single 12" speaker in quite a large enclosure.
The amp was fixed to the cab by two long threaded rods that passed through the amp into the cab. I seem to remember that the cab could be used either way up. The WEM logo looked ok either way and there were threaded holes on two sides.

After I bought the Commodore semi acoustic guitar from Traies he later sold me a Triumph amplifier. These must be quite rare because I can't find a picture of one anywhere on the net. Once again it was a transistor amplifier which meant it was quite light, but once again it wouldn't sustain or distort- great if you were playing lounge music (as I was for a while) but useless for da blooz.
Further internet research has revealed it to be a Triumph Silicon 100 model. I still can't find a photo but the descrption of two bulbs lighting the front panel tallies with my memory.

I used a whole variety of speaker cabinets, mostly home made. My friend Pete Jones played bass and we played together for a few years. He bought a second hand 4x12 speaker cabinet that was absolutely massive- bigger than a marshall cab. It contained 4 Goodmans speakers and sounded great. He used a Vox T60 amp. (see the picture below)
By a process of trial and error we built a number of speaker cabinets using Fane speakers like these

I used a number of home-made and second-hand speaker cabinets in the late 60s/early 70s. Eventually the Triumph amplifier had to go and I bought a Hiwatt 50 Watt amplifier- what a beauty!

It was £85 or so when I bought it from Selmers in Charing Cross Road. I used it with a beaten up old 2x12 cabinet. You can see it in this photo of Pete, Trevor and myself.

These days Hiwatt amplifiers fetch mega-bucks, but alas, when I joined the folk group referred to in another post, I sold to it to my works social club as they needed an amplifier and speakers and a mike for their bingo nights.

How many times have I done that? Sold my kit and then had to go out and buy more within a few months? Too many.

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.

Early days

Do you remember Radio Luxenbourg? In the early 60s I was given a transistor radio for Christmas. It was similar to this model
(picture from here:
http://www.roadtrip62.com/Post061311.htm
- which, incidentally, is a good read)

Radio Luxenbourg was to be found right at the end of the dial, on 208 metres on the Medium Wave. AM radio has some strange characteristics in that the signal travels further at night than by day-
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_broadcasting)
Radio Luxembourg took advantage of this and only transmitted in the evenings and at night. The signal used to fade in and out and I, (like countless thousands no doubt) would lie in bed under the covers and listen to the radio as they played the latest records. But not all of the record...

For some strange reason, they'd only play the first two minutes of a song, then run an advert. I suppose they thought that this would make people go out and but the record. When the Animals released their version of "The House of the Rising Sun" there was uproar because it was about 5 minutes long and Luxembourg refused to play it in its entirety. It's one thing to play Adam Faith's "What do you want" in its entirety- at just 100 seconds (1min 41 secs to be exact) it must be one of the shortest records ever, but 5 minutes?



As an aside, the idea of the three minute pop song came about because of the limitations of the new fangled phongraph disc at the beginning of the twentieth century
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_%28music%29

As well as the Animals "Rising Sun" single, Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" was over 6 minutes long and CBS put it over two sides of the record, causing uproar from his fans, who demanded that the record company put it on one side of the disc in its entirety. They also badgered the radio stations and demanded that they play all of the song. This was in the US of course. In the UK we had the BBC Light Programme or Luxembourg.

Happy days. These days music pervades every aspect of life. I can remember a radio dj a few years ago describing his/her show as the "soundtrack to your life". Every TV shoe is stuffed full of incidental music that bears no resemblance to the subject. Daytime TV is the worst. The presenter mentions going to the Isle of Wight and the Beatles "Ticket to Ride" (geddit?) starts playing. My life is not a movie (although Andrew Loog Oldham in his excellent book "Stoned" described his life as such a thing).I do not want a music soundtrack to my everyday life thank you very much. God save us from this.

It's hard to imagine a time when the only pop music on radio was the two hour Sunday afternoon "Pick of the Pops" with Alan "Fluff" Freeman, plus a couple of hours on a Saturday morning with bands playing live in the studio.(Saturday Club with Brian Matthew)

24 hour non-stop music? No chance.

Pirate Radio changed all that. If you tuned your transistor radio from 208 down the dial, there were a couple of pirate radio stations in the 190s. They broadcast during the day as well, and they tended to play the less well known records. I heard Johnny Cash singing Dylan's "It ain't me babe" on Wonderful Radio London.(The Big L) I don't recall hearing him on the BBC Light Programme ever.

We moved from Cornwall to London in 1962. I was 13 that Christmas. I wanted a bike but my parents were concerned about the level of traffic (which was a fraction of what it is today btw) and persuaded me that a guitar was a better option.

I received a guitar that Christmas. The strings were very heavy and about an inch off the fingerboard. It was impossible to hold down a chord. For the next few years I learned the Shadows walk, the Pete Townsend arm windmill and how to strum. The tuning was arbitrary. Most of the time I couldn't afford strings. To give you an idea- in 1965/6 I was getting ten shillings a week pocket money (50p). One week I bought a leather belt- two inches wide and with a solid brass buckle. It cost me 9/11d (49 and a half pence) and I wore it for ten years. It was great value.
The cheapest set of guitar strings at that time were Cathedral brand. They cost just under £1- two weeks pocket money. No wonder I kept the strings on until they rotted away.
It's hard to comprehend how expensive musical intruments were back then. My cheapo guitar cost £4/12/6d, a lot of money. When I started work five years later in 1967 I was earning ten pounds a week. Assume an average wage of £200 a week, that cheapo acoustic guitar, unplayable as it was, cost the equivalent of £100!
These days you can get a perfectly playable acoustic guitar for about £70-80, and a cheap electric guitar for not a lot more. What's more, they're playable, and even the youngest smallest boy can play them.
I was sixteen or seventeen before my fingers were strong enough to hold down a chord on my guitar.

Here's a confession. I was shamed into learning to play the guitar. In the months before I left school one of my classmates brought his guitar in to school. It was a Martin Colletti like this one. My guitar was an inferior version of this.

He could play and I couldn't. I didn't like him much and it hurt. I was stung into action. I swallowed my pride and asked him for the chords to "house of the rising sun". (it's surprising how many guitarists of my generation started off by learning that song)
I managed to buy some strings and got my battered old guitar in tune(ish) and set to work. My fingers bled. The skin stripped off and was replaced by callouses. I practised and practised. After three weeks I could play it backwards and forwards. In doing so I discovered something. By using different combinations of the chords I'd learned, I could play loads of songs- dozens of songs! Hundreds of songs!

I was on my way. I'd left school by then, so never had a chance to show my rival that I could now play better than him. He'd kicked sand in my face, and I never had the chance to kick it back.

Revenge is a powerful motivator. It fuelled my desire for years.

Captain Swing- part 2

In my last post I'd brought the story to the point where we'd given ourselves a name- "Captain Swing" and we'd started playing a little further afield.

I first saw Jasper Carrot at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1972. I enjoyed his songs, especially "Bastity Chelt" and this song "The Twelve Days of Christmas"



The band that played the sessions numbered anything between six and sixteen musicians, but we settled on a core of five players for the folk club slots. These were George (a Scotsman)on vocals, Rod Sherman (an Englishman- more on him in a moment) played flute and sang, Another Scotsman called Willie played concertina, yet another Scot by the name of Fin on guitar, and myself on mandolin. Yes- three Scotsmen and two Englishmen.
So it was quite a surprise when we were asked to take over an Irish group's two pub residencies while they took a holiday.
They were called the James Connolly Folk Group- after a leading member of the 1916 Easter uprising. That's right a staunch Republican, pro-IRA band....
and we were either Scots or English.....

We had four dates a week to fulfil. Friday nights and Sunday lunchtimes were at the Hop Poles in King Street, while Saturday and Sunday nights were spent at the Willesden Junction Hotel in Harlesden. Both pubs were 100% Irish, and the troubles were just starting...
I had a PA and Willie had a Mini Clubman. Somehow I managed to fit the PA in his car, but we had to tie the rear doors shut as the speakers were too long, and we drove to the Hop Poles. I can still remember the atmosphere as we walked in and started to set up. All that was missing was the chicken wire in front of the stage. The barmen all had baseball bats under the counter and seemed all too ready to use them. Gulp.
I resolved to keep my mouth shut, keep my head down and just play. They let us live and we were back again on Sunday lunchtime. The Willesden Junction Hotel had a much larger music room with a stage in the corner, and it was packed every night.

We settled down and for the next four weeks we were an Irish band playing Irish traditional music- even though we were three Scots and two English. It was quite an education.
Part of that education included learning that many "traditional" Irish tunes and songs carried political overtones. Some tunes were Republican, while others were Loyalist, and you took your life in your hands if you played the "wrong" tune in the venue.

We played a lot of Irish tunes and songs, but also a lot of Scottish tunes and songs as well. We also included a few shanties courtesy of our flute player Rod Shearman. He was the oldest member of our group and had spent a lifetime at sea.
He was a songwriter and we sang a few of his songs and shanties in our set.
He died in 1984 but here's a picture I stumbled upon

Here's link to a site about his songs
http://www.chanteycabin.co.uk/Rod%20Shearman/Rod%20Shearman.htm

I stopped playing with Captain Swing early in 1974 when we moved from London to Northampton. I enjoyed playing traditional music and I included a set of jigs and reels in the repertoire of the next two bands I played in.

I thought I'd said goodbye to folk music...but then-

We holidayed in the far North West of Scotland in 1977. We stayed not far from Gairloch in Sutherland and one evening we visited a pub in a tiny hamlet called Badachro. There were three musicians playing in the corner of the bar and we sat listening to them and enjoying the beer. Eventually I went up to them and asked if I might play a tune for them. I managed to remember enough of a tune and drunkenly stumbled through it and was rewarded with another pint. We got chatting and they seemed familiar, I asked if they'd ever played in London and yes they had.
It's a small world. We'd played together in a session in Kings Cross a few years earlier.

Fast forward to 1989 or thereabouts. My all-time favourite band Fairport Convention were on tour and they were playing a date in Northampton, just down the road from where we were living in Kettering.
Imagine my joy and pleasure when my all time favourite band played one of Rod Shearman's songs "London River". It just brought all the memories back.

I started this series of reminiscences with the words of a Richard Thompson song that has become their signature tune.
"If you really mean it, it all comes round again".
This year, almost forty years after I first stumbled upon the session at the Duke of Clarence in West London, I started attending the local open mike evenings in the area. To cut a long story short, I met up with a couple of local musicians I'd known for a few years and started to play at the local session at the Dukes Arms in a small village near Kettering. The tunes I learned back then are coming back out and bringing pleasure to a whole new audience.

Captain Swing

The sessions continued each week down at the Duke of Clarence, with guests sitting in most weeks. I can't remember all the artists who played with us but
(NAMEDROPPING ALERT!)
Eddie & Finbar Furey were regulars, as were another band called The Exiles featuring a fine fiddle player called Aly Bain. We started playing at other pubs in the area, including one just around the corner from Notting Hill Gate, another in Barons Court and various parties and benefit dos across North London. We even played a couple of festivals.
I particularly remember the Chelmsford Folk Festival in 1972. I managed to borrow a tent from the local scouts and nearly killed myself carrying it. A heavy canvas tent with wooden tent poles and big enough to sleep ten. I took a couple of friends along and we had a great time.
The organisers lost their shirt on the festival. I'm not sure how many they thought would turn up, but we ended up with a couple of thousand there. Even that was too much for the toilet facilities. There was a huge queue every time I walked past, and the only time I managed to find the toilet block empty enough to have a good wash and brush up was at seven in the morning.

Once we arrived on the Friday night and pitched the tent we set off for the beer tent, where we promptly got a session going. Aside from a few hours on Saturday night where we trooped off down the road to the village pub and had a session there, we stayed in the beer tent all weekend. As usual the circle expanded as more and more players came and joined in.
I recall Al Stewart (oops- name drop again) turned up and borrowed a guitar and attempted to get everyone playing rock and roll. Imagine- the best selling singer songwriter with his album "Bedsitter Images" having sold hundreds of thousands- sitting in the midst of a bunch of whistle and fiddle players and singing Little Richard. Too bizarre.

One of the acts on stage on the Saturday was blues singer Jo-Ann Kelly and her bass player turned up in my musical career a few years later when he joined my rock band Left Hand Drive.

I don't remember many of the acts, after all- I was in the beer tent most of the time. Two acts did stand out though.

The first was The Strawbs. They were just about to hit the big time with their song "Lay Down". Their keyboard player Rick Wakeman had just left them to join Yes, and had been replaced by Blue Weaver, who I'd last seen with Amen Corner a few years before. Three or four years later and he was a member of the Bee Gees band and played on most of their disco hits.



They'd just brought a new guitarist into the band,and founder member Tony Hooper was relegated to playing congas. He left soon afterwards, and the band split a year or so later. Their bass player and drummer had a few hits with their band Hudson-Ford, including a cool song called "Pick up the pieces"

The other band I enjoyed was Steeleye Span, with their new guitarist Bob Johnson. A few months later they'd added a drummer and went on to superstardom.

This track is from their 1972 album "Below the Salt" and features Maddy on Spoons


I drank so much that no matter how much I drank I was still sober. We trudged back to London on the Monday morning and it was back to the boring day job, made bearable by the fact that I was out with the band five or six nights a week. We had a few invites to play folk clubs and we decided we needed a name. I don't know who came up with it, but we became "Captain Swing". I know that there have been other bands with that name, but between 1972 and 1974, that was the name we went under.

We played support for a few artists you may have heard of. Jasper Carrot? He was a very funny folk singer when we supported him in a club somewhere in North London. I think we supported Cyril Tawney as well, and we played loads of benefits for the left wing newspaper The Morning Star.
It's true what they say- anyone who's not a socialist in their twenties has something wrong with their heart. Whoever said that went on to add that anyone who was still a socialist in their thirties had something wrong with their head!

The Craic- Part Two

I think the sessions at the Duke of Clarence were held on a Wednesday night, and the pub was absolutely packed every week. As well as the nucleus of the "band", which usually comprised of George McColl on vocals, Rod Sherman on flute and vocals and a whole bunch of other musicians, some of whom I knew by name, others only by sight. On a good night there'd be fifteen or sixteen players in a circle, with a couple of tables for the beer glasses and the ashtrays (yes- remember when you could smoke in a pub?)in the middle. There was a primitive PA attached to the walls- a couple of small speakers usually used for playing background music, and George would have a mike nearby. Not that he needed it. He had a really strong clear tenor voice that could easily be heard over the loudest hubbub. I was in my early twenties. George would have been in his late 30s. He wore a denim suit with wide lapels and platform boots (remember them?)and a huge ginger afro. You wouldn't forget George if you'd seen him. He owned a T-shirt printing business based in a dingy cellar in Ladbroke Grove. He produced the limited edition T-shirts for Paul Mccartney's LP release "Red Rose Speedway". Later on he would design and print a very limited edition of the band's own T-shirt- once we'd organised ourselves enough to need a name.
The Duke of Clarence became my local for a while. They had music on other nights. I recall an experimental jazz band had a residency on one night. They had a female singer who's improvised vocal utterances sounded like they'd been produced with the help of sugar tongs to a particularly sensitive part of her anatomy. It was OK but it'll never replace music.
Another night of the week saw a folk band perform. They reminded me of the Incredible String Band at times, but then they played traditional Irish instruments like the uillean pipes. I liked them, but I can't remember their name.
The other residency belonged to a duo by the name of "Starry Eyed and Laughing". I saw their first few shows and to be honest was surprised when they got a recording contract with CBS and moved on to greater things. You can read their story here:
http://www.starryeyedandlaughing.com/Starry_History.htm

I settled in with the band, playing acoustic guitar. Occasionally we'd have a mandolin player sit in with us and I was intrigued by the instrument. He kindly let me have a play and showed me two chords- D and G, and once I'd mastered them I could play the intro to a song. This is it:


(sorry about the advert at the beginning)

I was working at Cadby Hall next to Olympia at the time and just across the road in North End Road there was a second hand record and musical instrument shop. One day I noticed a mandolin in the window so I dug deep and bought it. (It was only £15 but that was about as much as I took home from my job, and I had my board, food and beer to pay for)
I used to sit next to my friend and watch his fingers as he played, trying to memorise the tune, then try to replicate the tune when I got home that night. I got it wrong more than right, but then the day came when I wanted to show off my new prowess on mandolin.
I don't know how many there were that night. I know we had two fiddles, probably two concertinas, two guitars, a flute and probably a tenor banjo. (I can't remember for certain)What I do remember is producing the mandolin and anouncing that I'd join in when they played the one tune I thought I knew.
Well, the tune came to be played and off I went. I hadn't realised how fast they played it. As they got to the end of the second line, I was just reaching the end of the first.....
By missing chunks of the tune out I managed to get to the end at the same time as the band and after that baptism of fire, I had enough confidence to attempt a few more tunes and to build up my repertoire.
This clip probably best illustrates that first performance of mine:
From Woody Allen's film "Take the Money and Run"



That first mandolin succumbed and I bought a replacement from Traies Music Shop in Portobello Road. He kindly fitted a pickup in the soundhole and I used that instument for years afterwards. It was a cheap Eastern European model would a lousy action, but flat back mandolins were rare back then. I did see a Gibson mandolin in a small music/antique shop off Portobello Road, but the price was prohibitive even then. I'd have been too scared to take it to the local for fear of damaging it. What's the point of having an instrument that's too valuable to play?

I can still remember that first mandolin tune, but I never knew its name- until a day or so ago. It's called Spanish Cloak. and here's a charming version by a Japanese band that I found on the internet. Fancy that- a band of Japanese musicians playing traditional Irish music!

If you really mean it, it all comes round again- Part One

"If you really mean it, it all comes round again" is part of the lyric to "Meet on the Ledge", Fairport Convention's anthem from their seminal album from 1968. More on Fairport another time, but suffice it to say that they have been one of the biggest influences on my music since I started playing properly back in 1968.

This tale comes from 1971-2. I was in a rcok band at the time. We started off calling ourselves Sessantanova (Italian for 69 and yes, it has the same meaning), but by the time we entered that year's Melody Maker Battle of the Bands contest at Acton Town Hall we'd changed our name to Mother Denton's Diary. We won the first night and were invited back later in the week to the area final. Alas, we were blown away by the band that went on to win the contest outright. They were called "Listen", a six piece, jazz fusion/prog rock style outfit with a male and a female lead singer. I'd seen them a few times at the Greyhound in Fulham Palace Road and they were good. Very good. Too good for their own good to be honest. I saw them a year or so later playing cabaret in a small pub in North Kensington. It was the only way they could make a living.

(Mother Denton's Diary in about 1971.Me, Trevor Denton on drums and Pete Jones on bass)

Anyway, and moving on....Mother Denton's Diary only played a few shows. Most of the time we set up in Trevor and Pete's flat on the Goldhawk Road in Shepherd's Bush and jammed and jammed and annoyed the neighbours. None more so than one evening when the government was having to instigate power cuts to various parts of the city because the power generation workers were on strike. We looked out of the window (the flat was upstairs) and across the road was darkness. The petrol station was closed, the pub was closed, the shops were closed, the side streets were in darkness. But in the upstairs flat in Goldhawk Road, the lights were on- all of them, the amps were all on 11, and we were rocking!
Les was first of all a drinking friend. He was also the most talented musician I have ever played with. Guitar or piano- he could play anything. He was entirely self taught and he should have had a future in the music business. However, he had one weakness- he liked a drink. A good pint was more important to him than a job. Jobs were plentiful back then. If the Labour Exchange got on to him he'd get a job and last maybe two weeks before he'd had enough and sling it. Allied to the drink and his uncertain employment history was the fact that he'd been blacklisted by every hire purchase company in the land. He'd join a band but needed a guitar and amp. He'd get one on HP, pay a couple of installments and fall behind. Eventually the guitar was repo'd.
When we met up he'd managed to buy an old strat and an AC30. Both were a bit beaten up but he didn't pay much for them, and at least they wouldn't get repossessed.
Boy could he play. He could play anything after he'd heard it once. He had great style, great feel, taste and a superb vibrato and sustain. He had all the licks and tricks. So why hadn't he made it?
It turned out that he'd been a member of a fairly successful blues band in the mid 60s. The band shared management with another up and coming band named Savoy Brown. Eventually the management decided to put all their efforts into pushing Savoy Brown, and in true time honoured fashion the first my friend knew about it was when he read in the music press that Savoy Brown had just signed a big record deal and were off to the States to tour. Did that drive him to drink, or was his drinking part of the decision making process? We'll never know, but that's how he ended up with my band.
We had a gig at a working men's club in Watford. We hired a van, loaded the kit and sat around for hours waiting for him to show up. When he did eventually turn up he was drunk as a skunk. Anyway we drove to the venue where Les discovered that the lager was half the price he usually paid, so that was it. He managed to stay upright and not pass out, sitting on his amplifier, but that was the sum total of his contribution that evening.
We didn't get rebooked. Loads of reasons, mostly to do with our lack of suitable songs and being too loud for the venue.
Around this time I left home and moved into a bedsit a few hundred yards away, in Minford Gardens, just behind Shepherds Bush Green. There were loads of pubs fronting the green, some with Irish Showbands and one on the corner of Goldhawk Road next door to the BBC TV Theatre that we'd frequent, partly because the beer was drinkable, partly because they had live bands, and partly because they had a stripper every Sunday lunchtime. They also had a small theatre upstairs, and many of the performers from the BBC TV Theatre would also drink there. I recall standing next to Bruce Forsyth and his then wife Anthea Redfern as he held court.
No, I didn't speak to him. I was far too cool (shy more likely) to do that.
At the other end of the green there was a large roundabout and next to it was a small pub called the Duke of Clarence. I'd played there a few times a couple of years earlier when I played in a duo with my guitar teacher, but the pub had changed hands and character when I visited it again.

I walked in and what I heard changed my life forever. There was a bunch of musicians sitting in the centre of the room, around a table. Around them were a bunch of people who'd sing along, and maybe add a song of their own. I'd discovered a session. I loved it. I loved the way they ignored the stage in the corner and sat with the people. I loved the music they played.
By now my favourite band Fairport Convention had embraced traditional folk music and had almost single-handedly created folk-rock. Perhaps that influenced me more than I cared to admit. Anyway, a couple of weeks later I plucked up courage and asked if I could sit in. Some weeks there were only five or so, but most weeks there were at least a dozen musicians playing, so one more guitarist (albeit one who didn't know anything about the music, how the songs went, nothing), one more guitarist just added a different flavour to the mix. After a few more weeks, something had to give.

To be honest, I'd grown bored with the rock band. Even though we prided ourselves on our spontaneity as we improvised pieces lasting up to half an hour in length (as was the fashion at that time), to my ears it was getting a bit predictable. I felt I had nothing more to give. I had reached the limit of my ability on electric guitar and it was time to try something new. My friends were fed up about it. i tried to tell them about my new love, but they wouldn't have it. Musical differences is how they describe band break-ups, and that fitted us to a T.

Within a couple of months of throwing my lot in with my new found friends I was camping at the Cambridge Folk Festival and enjoying the craic. The band set up in the beer tent and we ran a session from early morning until late at night. We even took a turn on the main stage but I was too drunk to remember anything about it.
For the next couple of years we played about six nights a week around West London. We played for beer mostly. We played for the craic. We had a nucleus of five people- George was the singer; Rod played flute and sang some of his own songs; Willie played Anglo Concertina; Finn played guitar and I played mandolin- yes- mandolin.
More about that next time.

In the beginning...

Blogging isn't like writing a book. Reading a blog isn't the same as reading a book either. Blogs always have the latest post uppermost, so you have to find the first post if you want to start at the beginning of any story.

So how shall I tell my musical story? From the beginning? Or should I just dip in and out as I recall events and episodes?
I already have half a dozen blogs. Why add another? It's because men tend to live compartmentalised lives. I have a part of my life where I work, and another where I play. Another compartment involves my family and in my case another involves my health issues. At various times I've been involved with church, and I've also restored steam locomtives and helped set up a railway museum.

Why the variety? Is it boredom? No patience? Always wanting to see what else is happening? It's said that a woman uses the TV remote to see what's on TV, while a man uses the remote to see WHAT ELSE is on....

So where did my story begin?

For a start I'm not from a musical family. None of my family are at all musical. I never had any great urge to perform or go on the stage, yet a huge part of my life has been devoted to music. My first memories are of growing up on a beach in Cornwall. The post-war building boom had yet to get started and the only place my parents could find to live was a small wooden chalet with no electricity, running water or toilet. Yep, oil lamps and chemical loos.
When I was four we moved into a house and we got a radio. I recall my mother singing Rosemary Clooney's song "This old house", Guy Mitchell's "She wears red feathers and a hula hula skirt", and another called "where will the baby's dimple be?". Television finally arrived in about 1958, but it was a couple of years before we could afford one, so my exposure to music was limited.

However, I do remember the skiffle boom. Suddenly, out of the blue, all the teenage boys on our estate began making guitars and tea chest basses and performing in their front gardens. I was in the third year at primary school (so would have been 8 or 9) when the headmaster brought an older pupil into the classroom to play to us. He had a real guitar and played "O my darling clementine" to us. His name was Gary Rickard and his band The 3 Rs had won a skiffle competition in the county. I wonder what happened to him? By an amazing co-incidence another classmate of mine from Primary School, Dave Jenkins, still lives in Cornwall, plays nice jazzy acoustic guitar and runs the open mike night at the Star Inn in St Just, the last town in England and more than 300 miles from where I sit and write this. I must ask him if he remembers that day back in 1958?

By the time I took my 11 plus and started at the grammar school in Penzance I'd learned the words to a couple of songs. The first was "Only sixteen" which I'd heard on "Thank your lucky stars" sung by Craig Douglas. I'd also heard "FBI" and "Frightened City" by the Shadows. Elvis was in the charts when I was in the hospital having my tonsils removed. The song was "Wooden heart".

Did you see what happened just then? I was able to link an event with a song that was playing on the radio. That simple fact is what makes music memorable.

Another memory that set me apart from the others in my crowd:-
One day my form teacher asked the pupils who their favourite singer was. Hands went up when he asked "Elvis?". Hands went up when he asked "Cliff?" or "Adam (Faith)?"
My hands stayed down. At that time my favourite singer was Helen Shapiro, and this was my favourite song back in 1961.



Fast forward 50 years and I shared a bill with Helen Shapiro at a gospel music concert. Now who'd have thought that?