11. Electric Guitar 1967

‘Let’s get sweets,’ says my friend. We’re walking home from school and we’ve reached a parade of small shops by the park near my home.

‘Hold on, I just want to look in there.’

‘In that junk shop?’

His mistake is understandable. It looks like a junk shop. It has the same down-at-heel, functional look; with its harsh strip-lighting and window display screened off by perforated hardboard. But this is no bric-a-brac emporium. What this shop sells is not spurious antiques and suburban rejectamenta, but guitars.

‘Are you going to get one?’ says my friend, after we’ve been parked in front of the window for some minutes.

I snort derision. As if I, an eleven-year old schoolboy, could walk into this shop and walk out with one of these fantastically desirable pieces of hardware. As if. Secretly I’m flattered that he thinks I might be that type of person. Secretly I’m flattered he thinks my parents might have that kind of money—or if they did that they’d let me spend it on this type of thing. True I live in a detached house on the more affluent side of the park, while my friend lives in one of the cramped, tree-less streets to the North—a difference of which I have become more aware since I accidentally passed the Eleven Plus and got into our slightly snobby grammar school. But it seems risible to me that he should therefore imagine I can have anything I want. If my parents wouldn’t buy me the Johnny Seven gun after which I lusted for most of my primary school years, they’re hardly likely to fork out now for a Vox Phantom VI Special, the thing in the window that is currently fixing my interest.

I stare at it, enthralled. To its right is another Vox electric, a teal teardrop-shaped model like the one played by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. But it’s the Phantom that obsesses me; polar white with an odd irregular polygon of a body, like something off the set of Thunderbirds. As well as a formidable array of the usual rotary knobs, it also had a baffling row of push buttons, which look more like something you’d see on a vacuum cleaner. I have no idea what all these knobs and switches actually do, but there’s no doubting that this is superior technology. With a machine like this, with all its controls, its three pickups—and even a tremolo arm—you could take on the world: you couldn’t help but become a massive pop star. Everyone would love you.

When my friend finally gets bored and shades off home, I’m only dimly aware of his saying goodbye. I stare and stare. And come the next afternoon I’m back here again to continue staring.

Of course, just as you’re never aware when you place your first bet on a horse or accept an unaccustomed bump of cocaine that you are potentially laying the foundations of a long-term habit, I had no idea of the significance of what I was doing. Even now, more than half a century later, I can’t pass a guitar shop without checking out what’s in the window; a fact to which members of my family will wearily attest: there are streets in my home town of Brighton none of them wants to walk down with me for fear that I’ll lapse into trance state.

I very rarely actually enter the shops though, much less try out the instruments. My guitar-buying days are over. It’s other reasons that draw me at this stage of life. I love the stories that second-hand electrics tell, and for that reason I prefer the smaller, shabbier shops, the odder-looking guitars and the more obscure marques. I like to speculate about the musos who might have owned these instruments, the music they played on them, and how their once-sleek Arabian steeds came to end up here, in the knacker’s yard of musical instrumentation, a backstreet guitar shop. From experience, there is usually something wrong with them: warped necks, obsolescent electrics, botched repairs, inappropriate additions and restorations … and if they were any good, my inner cynic says, they wouldn’t be in this shop, at this price. But there is a romance to them, a poignancy. Like rescue animals. Were they mistreated by a callous owner, or thrown out on the day after Christmas? Were they unwanted gifts? More likely the owner just ran out of money—but many will have been rejected simply because their looks fell out of favour. Guitar shop windows are barometers of fashionable taste, the Vox guitars I stared at on my way home from school being just a case in point.

English guitars had their heyday in the Beat Boom of the early Sixties, when the US-made Fenders and Gibsons everyone really wanted were next-to-impossible to get your hands on. As the Sixties progressed things changed and American guitars flooded the market. Homegrown was out. No matter how many knobs it had, if it wasn’t a Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Martin or Rickenbacker, you probably weren’t going to see it on Top of the Pops. That was when the backstreet shops began to fill up with the logos of Vox, Burns and Hofner—coincidentally, just as I was getting into staring at them.

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The year I started at my grammar school, Westcliff High School for Boys, was a bit of a pivot point for other things too. 1967 was the Summer of Love, and even if the full import of this moment in cultural history was less than clear to an 11 year-old boy in Southend-on-sea, the signs were definitely there. I remember as a special favour being allowed into my older sister’s bedroom to listen to her new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and to pore over the lyrics on the back cover of its gatefold sleeve with her. A girl in the neighbourhood took to wearing a small bell round her neck (prompting my brothers and I to follow her down the street making moo-ing noises). By Chalkwell station someone took a pot of white paint and wrote a slogan along the sea wall that you could see in its entirety only if you swam out. Treading water one day, inhaling quantities of Estuary, I read: ‘WHEN THE MODE OF THE MUSIC CHANGES, THE WALLS OF THE CITY SHAKE’. There was pirate radio: there were drug busts and obscenity trials. Leaders in the Daily Telegraph made my grandfather vibrate with rage. Meanwhile, the portable transistor radio sets that were beginning to be omnipresent in the streets, parks and at the beach, played the hit of the Summer, A Whiter Shade of Pale, wherever you went. We skipped the light fandango.

I remember watching Gary Brooker of Procol Harum singing it on Top of the Pops, and being struck by his diffident, non-showbiz affect. This was no Tommy-Steele-all-round-entertainer. He bothered less with putting on a show than the Beatles or the Stones. He actually looked quite depressed, which I sort of liked. Together with the inexplicable but oddly evocative lyrics and the churchy Hammond organ on the track, this non-performance made a deep impression on me.

Around this time I had a memorable dream. I was on the beach and it was a sweltering day. Out at sea, near but not so near that I could swim out to it, was an island where all the cool people were; the teenagers and the twenty-somethings in bathing costumes, with transistor radios wedged under their ears. They were dancing and laughing. All wore sunglasses. I saw that the island was on the move, having somehow slipped its moorings, like the lily-pad on which Thumbelina escaped her ugly toad-suitor. As I sat alone on the mainland with my towel and my Tupperware box of sandwiches, it floated past me and away, seeming to stand for something ungovernably desirable, impossibly out of reach.