There was a chance meeting with someone last weekend (the screenwriter Sally Wainwright, she of "Riot Women" and "Happy Valley") who talked about making the cast of her latest show learn their band instruments - and also undertaking to learn something herself - to prove that it can be done in a short space of time by folk with little or no musical training.
This was me - way back in the early 1990s when the band "Seedy Backslash" somehow erupted into life, mostly as a way of bunking off work, but also as a way of "being in a band" which had always been a dream of mine.
I started off playing a really shitty set of digital drums as the band didn't have a drummer. In fact no, I started off with a fish-skin drum (like a tom-tom) that my boss had in his house. This wretched stinking antique was the only thing we had to keep a rhythm, and was usually drowned out by the rest of the band who all had loud amped-up instruments, and our thunderous bassist Nonny would usually drown all of those out as well.
Spotting a classified ad posted by a student for a guitar for sale, I figure 40 quid sounded like a bargain for an electric guitar so I went and had a look. That was the first time I saw the Biscayne Baby, a guitar made by Palmer in the 1980s. Mine looks more or less like the one in the photo (though mine had all its pickups altered, and the lead jack is on the bottom edge of the guitar). It was sleek, it was black, it sounded OK when I plucked at its strings. Cash was hastily swapped for guitar and I went on my merry way.
Back then I had no idea at all how to play a guitar so I hopped down to a local bookstore and picked up Usborne's "Learn to play guitar" book - a book clearly aimed at kids, but a book that clearly showed how to figure out where to put your fingers on the fretboard to play a selection of open chords.
The Biscayne Baby was a bit of a well worn old gal, so my first few attempts to play chords resulted in a horrible buzzy noisy mess. It took a very long while before my fingers calloused over enough to press the strings down in the right way and I never mastered the art of barre chords, but I started to make some pleasing noises with this thing - coupled with a metric ton of effects pedals and other paraphernalia when our band started doing pub gigs for the first time.
The BB looked great though - black as the darkest cup of coffee, fitting for a band that thrashed out punk versions of various songs (including a raucous but slightly weirdly mellow version of "Jilted John"). Best of all it meant that I got to crawl out from behind that wretched fish-skin drum and be at front and centre on stage (I even sang, I must have been mad).
Life got in the way. We all got other jobs and the band gradually drifted apart. I did carry on with another mob (in fact a band called "The Anthill Mob") for a short while but it never came to anything, and then I moved around a lot at the close of the 90s so BB ended up in a cupboard for most of the late 90s, noughties, eleventies and 2020s.
But after last weekend I dug her out. She still looked OK but clearly her strings had not stood the test of time. I wondered how much it would cost me to get a headphone amp, a set of strings, a guitar tuner and a string winder. Answer? Less than 50 quid (I remember back in the day spending a small FORTUNE on guitar-related stuff, including 2 other guitars which sadly seem to have been lost in those various moves).
I ordered the stuff and it arrived last night. I sat there for a while, slightly in shock that I was considering taking up the guitar again with so much else going on but I tried to remember how to restring and tune a guitar and started taking poor BB apart. I remember what used to happen when I got strings stuck in the danged innards of the guitar but thankfully in my more grown-up life I have a decent set of tools and very quickly stripped out all the manky old strings.
I then cleaned the whole thing - something I never did back in the day. The top bridge unceremoniously fell off (only held on by a couple of blobs of glue, Palmer weren't exactly all about "build quality") so that had to be fixed back on before I began the painful process of sticking the strings back in and retuning the thing.
Modern digital tuners (including the one I bought for the shockingly cheap price of £7) are amazing. Clip it to the top of the guitar, pluck the string until the chosen chord shows green, job's a good un) which meant the guitar was properly in tune and sounding fantastic in a very short space of time.
Then it was time to see if I could remember how to play a few chords. I managed D (I mean who CAN'T play a D) G, A and C before my brain said "You think I can remember this stuff after over 35 years? Not a chance mate!) so clearly I better go looking for that Usborne book again (or more likely, something I couldn't do 35 years ago, follow some tutorials on the internet).
But it was satisfying, ASMR a go-go to bring that old guitar back to life. It did make me wonder whether I'll stick at this long enough to pick up something more modern (again I'm gobsmacked at how cheap electric guitars are now, even the fabled Ibanez ones that I used to cast a lustful eye over in my youth). So let's see where this goes. I definitely missed it.
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