‘Can I borrow that, Paul?’
It’s a cheap three-quarter-length Spanish my younger brother got for Christmas and if there were any justice in this foul world it would belong to me.
I remember the moment he unwrapped it on Christmas Eve, the surge of resentment. Why were they buying him a guitar? Guitar was my thing. And I am desperate for something like this. Desperate for a starter guitar to learn on so that when the day finally arrives when I own a beautiful gleaming electric like the one in the guitar shop, I can strap it on and instantly reel out killer riffs.
True, this desire of mine was not an especially well formulated one before the moment Paul tore back the wrapping paper. Neither had there been any discussions between Mum and me about guitars—not since the row when I demanded a Vox Phantom VI Special.
She used a lot of bad-sounding words then I didn’t understand, like ‘mortgage’, ‘bankrupt’ and ‘bailiffs’, but her excuses were facile. Surely, unless the woman is entirely incapable of managing household expenses, there must be money left over for essentials like a Vox Phantom VI Special? I mean, we live in a detached house on the good side of the park, and I go to grammar school, where I was sent with a new leather satchel and a cricket bat of such superior quality that an older boy promptly ‘borrowed’ it for his net practice.
So the subject became too hot between us, and I never got round to asking for something a bit cheaper to start on: a starter guitar—but surely she must have known I needed one? Aren’t mothers supposed to telepath things like that?
As I reach for the instrument, Paul signals acquiescence by the faintest of nods and carries on watching the Monkees on TV—oblivious to the massive irony of what he is doing. Or not doing. The Monkees play a bunch of kids who want to be pop stars: here I am taking actual steps towards being a pop star while all that he, the owner of the only guitar in the house can do is sit there on our G-plan sofa watching TV like a slug. I take it upstairs and begin shaping my hands to chords from the Burt Weedon Play-in-a-day Book, reflecting on this contrast between Paul and myself; a difference that I feel licenses me to an act of appropriation similar to the older boy’s with my cricket bat. The next time I feel like playing the guitar I don’t ask, I just take. Pretty soon it begins to look a lot more like my guitar than Paul’s. It’s a thuggish logic, I recognise: the toy belongs to he who can play with it properly, he who loves it best. But it turns out I love it quite a lot.
* * * *
The truth is, I don’t really remember how I learned to play guitar. At least, my brain doesn’t. My hands still know how to make the shapes and hit the strings. I can play. So clearly there is a residue in ‘muscle memory’ (if that really is a thing) from learning—but I have no conscious memory of the process by which I learned. What went on in that bedroom, exactly, during all the hundreds of hours I spent compulsively repeating a riff or a chord sequence over and over again, varying it with each repetition by tiny, barely imperceptible increments until it finally approached adequacy? The flow state is mysterious. But … Play in a day: did ever a book’s title hold out a falser promise? You can’t learn the guitar in a day. It takes hours and hours. Weeks and weeks. Years and years.
Luckily, I have an obsessive streak a mile wide.
I was spending less and less time in the sitting room anyway watching television with the family. The crunch point was when Mum brought tea for my father and grandfather and all three of them promptly fell asleep after just a few sips: moments later my grandfather’s jaw sagged and his upper set of dentures, expanded by the hot liquid, fell onto his lower plate with a loud click. I slipped upstairs and started strumming.
The three-quarter length guitar fitted neatly against my body. Its nylon strings weren’t hard to hold down. Soon I was developing for this thing the sort of feelings I had only previously experienced with bikes and go-karts; a sense of speed and freedom, allied now to a new sense of entry into an expansive, self-created world.
At school I was learning proper grown-up classical music with a slightly unhinged teacher called Gerwyn Parry who told stories about Handel in a lugubrious, Welsh-accented voice. For a while it seemed that I might go that way: I remember writing a couple of bars of actual music—a tune I had made up—and staring at it afterwards in wonder. I even started learning the ‘cello. But to be honest, I never got on with the thing—it was huge: it dwarfed me. And it had no frets, so how the fuck were you supposed to know where to put your fingers? Meanwhile my nightly practice on the guitar, picking out tunes heard on radio or records, was building an ability to play by ear that outpaced my struggles with learning to read ‘the dots’—with the result that I never learned to sight-read.
This didn’t stop them putting me into the school orchestra, however, where I spent most of the time miming. A skill that was to come in handy later on, when I finally got to own a beautiful gleaming electric guitar of my own, and to tote it on Top of the Pops.