Early Conventions
“There are many things in favour of the guitar. When you’re a young chap it’s portability, the fact you can have it around when you’re at the beginning of the learning curve. Somebody can show you exactly what they’re doing and you can try it yourself just by passing it over. That doesn’t work with a piano. When you’re a young lad growing up in the 60s, the guitar was kind of a token. You were part of some social experiment, but it seemed like a young person’s instrument in the way that the violin or so forth couldn’t possibly be. It was a cool thing to have.”
Connecting Up
“A number of my peer group had guitars and we would play Beatles songs and the hits from the Mersey bands, and it was all done by ear. I didn’t form a band or join a band until I got my way into Ashley Hutchings’ little black book. I knew Ashley because he’s about five years older than me and I came across him initially at the youth club in Muswell Hill, where he would occasionally turn up on a Friday night with a band.
