ten

This, I suppose, is where the story really starts - the day I bought that magazine called Little Red Rooster. It was the summer holidays, and Tony had gone to the Algarve for a fortnight with his uncle and his mum. I was at home with my brother and my mum. Dad had finally sobered up and got another job, as a sales rep for a biscuit company. It was not really the kind of job he wanted, but it was better than nothing and at least it gave him an opportunity to talk to people about biscuits.

Dad was not cut out to be a salesman. Firstly he was too scruffy and secondly he wasn't at all interested in money. He just didn't have that hunger for wealth that successful salesman require. Dad could never understand that selling is not about interesting a potential buyer in a quality product that they require, but simply about getting signatures on contracts by exploiting people's weaknesses; their vanity, stupidity, guilt, fear, avarice, sympathy, whatever. Dad said he could never persuade anyone to part with their cash unless he thought they really wanted to. So, it was surprising he made any sales at all. However, with his genuine enthusiasm for biscuits he just about did all right (although he never nearly matched the success of his colleagues who spent more time topping up their sun-bed tans than thinking about the product they were selling).

The top salesman in dad's team (if you can rightly refer to a collection of competing back stabbers as a team) was called Brian Phillips. Brian was all blonde highlights and gold plated bracelets, two-point-eight litre fuel-injection and heated leather seats.

Brian didn't give a shit about custard creams or chocolate bourbons, but him and dad still seemed to get on OK. I think the reason for this was that they were both manic. Brian was totally obsessed with selling the same way dad was totally obsessed with biscuits, and each was fascinated by the others unfathomable fixation.

Although I think mum secretly rather liked Brian Phillips, she always said rude things about him when he'd gone. "It's no wonder he has to work so hard," she'd sneer, "with all that he's put on his plate!" (which, according to dad, was two ex-wives, four kids, three girlfriends, five bedrooms, a time share in Malaga and a Rottweiller named Rex).

The good thing about my dad's new job was that my mum was able to give up her job in the chemist's shop and we started getting decent meals again. The arguments at home became less frequent and less severe and very occasionally mum was actually in a good mood. The bad point was that she was at home all day and able to nag us.

Mum's nagging was a particular burden during the summer holidays. She wasn't exactly what you'd call a sun worshipper, and when she got hot any little thing might set her off. Unfortunately, the one thing guaranteed to annoy her more than anything else was the sound of the guitar. I only had to strum a couple of chords and she'd be hollering up the stairs, "For Christ's sake shut the door if you're going to play that bloody thing," (which actually meant stop playing that guitar now or I'm going to smash it over your head).

Normally, when mum was in that kind of mood I'd go round to Tony's and play there. But, what with him being on holiday in Portugal and everything that wasn't possible, and I got pretty bored just sitting there. So, I decided to go down the newsagents and get a magazine about guitars.

The newsagents was just at the top of our road in a parade of shops that also included a fish and chip shop, a greengrocer, an eight 'til late store (which kept on changing it's name) and an off licence.

It was a typical kind of August day, hot and hazy, with wisps of cloud here and there and a light breeze which wafted a smell of freshly mown grass and creosote into my nostrils as I cycled up to the shops on my bike. Actually, it was John's bike, (mine having been nicked earlier in the summer). I wasn't really allowed to take it, but I did anyway seeing as he was round at a friend's house working through maths examination papers (the sad bastard).

When I reached the newsagents there were a few kids I knew from school milling around outside. They weren't really my friends, in fact they were a group of lads I didn't really get on very well with, but we kind of nodded to each other like you do. Then I hurried inside, partly to get away from that lot outside, and also because it was five to one and the shop was about to close for lunch.

In the newsagent's all the music and car magazines were up on the top shelf next to the 'adult literature'. And I'd just reached up for the latest edition of International Musician which'd accidentally got caught up in a copy of Playbirds, when Ted who ran the shop suddenly appeared carrying a crate of empty Corona bottles.

"Can I help you sir," said Ted. And I knew from the tone of his voice, what he meant was, 'if you're thinking of nicking a copy of Fiesta you better think again sonny.' Even though I wasn't really going to take one of those magazines I still went bright red and kind of stuttered.

"Ha-have you got any gi-gi-guitar magazines please? I ca-couldn't se-se-see any up there."

"Guitar magazines?" said Ted rubbing his chin with his hand, the way you do if you think someone's talking bollocks. "Which one were you after?"

Now I must have known the name of at least half-a-dozen such magazines, but with Ted staring at me like that, I couldn't remember a single one of them. I felt so awkward and embarrassed I felt like turning and running out of the shop. But, just as I was about to mumble my excuses and go Ted's face suddenly lit up.

"Hold on a minute," he said. And he poked his head beneath the counter muttering to himself. "Now where is it?" After a couple of moments of rustling he emerged clutching a copy of a magazine with bright red lettering on the cover. "I don't know if this is what you're after? Someone ordered it a couple of months back and then never came into pick it up. I don't suppose they will now."

I sidled over to the counter and took the magazine from him. On the cover, beneath the words Little Red Rooster was a pastel portrait of this really odd looking guitarist (which later turned out to be DB Daniels). And I distinctly remember as I touched that magazine for the first time I shivered all over. I don't know if that was because the cover was rather slippery and felt strange beneath my fingers, or because of that odd portrait of DB, or because I was feeling nervous anyway. But whatever it was, holding that magazine made me feel really weird. I just wanted to put it down and go. But I was so embarrassed that Ted'd thought I was going to nick one of those girlie mags that I decided I'd better buy it.

The magazine only had a dollar price on the cover, so Ted charged me a quid for it. I paid with a pound note (which were still about in those days), then Ted popped the magazine into a brown paper bag and escorted me to the door of the shop. He turned the sign in the window from open to closed and locked the door behind me as I stepped back out into the midday sun.

As I got onto my brother's bike, one of the lads who were milling around outside the shops came over to me. His name was Jason Bannister. He was only in my year at school, but he was a bit of a fat bastard which made him seem bigger than me. I didn't like him very much coz he was always creeping up behind you and giving you a dead leg with his knee, and stealing stuff from your desk and that kind of thing.

"Lets have a look," he said making a grab for the brown paper bag.

"Get lost," I muttered, clutching the bag to my chest with one hand and holding on to the handlebars of the bike with the other. Justin stood in front of me and all his cronies gathered round.

"You've got one of them dirty mags ain't ya?" said Justin.

"No I haven't," I said.

Justin tried to grab the magazine from me, so I held it up in the air above my head.

"Give it 'ere you wanker," he said pushing me in the chest, and one of his mates, Brian, came round the back of the bike and snatched the bag from my hand.

"Oi give it back," I said getting off my bike, and chasing after Brian. "Fucking give it back you git."

Brian threw the magazine in its brown paper bag, sideways like a Frisbee, to this other kid called Matt, who had goofy teeth and awful acne. Matt greedily pulled the magazine from the bag.

"Hey, it's all about fucking coons," he said, his face falling.

"It's not," I said, catching up with him.

"Black bastards," said Justin looking over Matt's shoulders. "What do you want that for?" he asked.

"It's about guitarists," I said. "Go on. Give us it."

Matt ran off with the magazine.

"Come on," I said.

"Oh, give it back to him," said Justin. "Fucking traitor."

Matt threw the magazine in the bin along with the can of coke he'd been drinking. There are still stains on the cover where a dribble of coke spilled on it. And incidentally that lot, Justin, Matt and Brian, are still thick, ugly, racist bastards. People like them make you so angry sometimes. But they ain't really worth worrying about. They're like a bad fart really. They get up your nose a bit, but ignore them and eventually you forget they're there.

Still, I suppose we all have our prejudices. I'm what you might call a 'guitaracist'. I tend to categorise people into guitarists, whom I'm happy to spend time with, and non-guitarists whom I tend to be indifferent to (unless, of course, they are female and attractive). But my prejudice is, I guess, more harmless than most. Actually, in that Little Red Rooster magazine there was a long interview with this guitarist called Curtis Cline, which kind of summed up the whole issue quite nicely.

"One of the greatest things about rock 'n'roll is it brings all different people together. You know you can't be a racist and a guitarist. Sure you can be a racist and pick up a guitar and play hell out of it, but until you get your soul in shape you ain't a real guitarist you're just some piece of shit who happens to be able to play, know what I'm saying. If you're a real guitarist it doesn't matter who you are. You get a group of real guitarists in a room plug them all into an amp and you've got yourself a walking, talking definition of harmony, true harmony.

See, if you're a real guitarist no one gives a damn who the hell you are, what you do or where you're from. Size, age, colour, they don't mean a thing. You just tune your guitars up, plug in and start playing, and there's just one sound, one big sound coming out of that amp. You're all guitarists together, you take it in turns to play rhythm or lead or whatever and it all blends in.

Another thing, contrary to what I've heard some say, you don't have to be a man to play guitar. I know some shit hot girl guitarists. They could almost play me under the god damn table (not quite, but almost). See, what you've got inside your trousers don't matter, it's what you got inside of here [thumps chest]. You could be a Martian with green skin, three heads and five tits but once you've plugged your lead in that jack plug, you're just a guitarist like all the rest and all any other guitarist asks of you is that you turn down your volume control a little when it's their turn to solo."

I may be biased because Curtis is a kind of friend of mine now, but I think he's a really clued-up kind of guy. I admit, he often sounds like he's talking total bullshit, but he's actually very sincere and if you listen carefully, a lot of what he says does make some kind of sense. Over the years, I've read his interview in Little Red Rooster many times, and although it is a bit corny in places, I still think the message he's trying to put across is pretty cool.

"Now, blues is like the guitarist's mountain peak. It's what every true guitarist aspires to; playing the blues. The thing about the blues basically is that its different to other kinds of music. How you play the blues is like a test of whether you understand the guitar or not. It's got to come from inside you. It's not about making as much noise as you can or playing as many notes as you can in the shortest space of time. No, it's about talking with your guitar.

You can recognise different blues guitarists, the same way you can recognise different singers, because they all have a different voice. From the first few notes of a guitar solo you can tell whether you're listening to BB King's guitar Lucille, which is a solid body Gibson in the 335 semi-acoustic shape, or Buddy Guy who plays a Stratocaster or Lowell Fulson or Stevie Ray Vaughan or old slide players like Elmore James and Robert Johnson. Whoever it is you can tell because they have their own voice.

Now that voice, the sound a particular guitarist makes, might be influenced by what kind of guitar they happen to be playing and it might be influenced by the styles of other great players, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, whoever. There may be influences there, but the voice is more than that. It comes from inside you. It's part of your personality. It's like you're talking and you've got something to say.

When you play the blues you don't read it from a sheet of music. Sure, you've got to know a little bit of theory, you've got to know a minor scale, and a major scale and a seventh chord (and a ninth chord and a sus four if you want to make your playing sound a little jazzy), just like you've got to know how to spell and where to put the commas if you want to write a letter. But essentially blues music isn't something you can write down. It has to come from inside you. It's like talking or singing. When a blues guitarists plays they're not thinking, 'I've got to put my fingers there and then I've got to pluck that string like that.' They don't think of that at all. The music comes straight from the soul and out of the guitar. Now it might travel through your head and out of your fingers but that is not where it comes from. There is a difference.

Now some people think all blues music is the same and that you only have to know three chords to play it. And I suppose in a way that that is true. But there are all kinds of different blues. There's fast blues and slow blues, and major blues and minor blues, and the kind of blues you play with a bottleneck and the strings already tuned to a chord. There's blues you play with a ten piece band in a big concert hall and blues you play alone in a field in the middle of nowhere. You can play the blues to a shuffle rhythm or a rumba. You can play it just natural or through an amplifier. You can play blues on a home-made guitar strung with any kind of wire that makes a sound when you pluck it. People even used to play the blues on one piece of wire nailed to the side of a shack.

However, whatever, wherever they play, blues guitarists all have a common aim. When they play they're trying to communicate something they feel deep down inside, something that words alone can never say, something that only they can say with their guitar. Sure, it's usually something sad, but it makes them feel good.

It's like this; if I've had a bad day, if I fall out with my girlfriend or I lose a job or have an argument or I see something sad in the street or on the TV and I get home feeling lousy, what I do is I pick up my guitar and I play. And it does make me feel better. I let all those sad and bad things out through the guitar, and gradually my playing moves from minor to major and I smile through the tears.

Some people say blues is sad music and maybe it is. But it's sad music that makes you happy. If you're feeling bad. You play the blues. Let the guitar cry and you feel glad. It's like praying in a way. To me the guitar is a pathway to God. It's the way I get in touch with my soul.

If you play the blues, I mean really play, then you know what I mean. If you don't play blues guitar and you're sitting there thinking he's talking a load of shit. Then all I can say is learn to play and after a time you'll understand what I'm trying to get across here.

They say to play the blues you've got to live the blues, and you might think that I'm too white, too rich, too middle class to be a real blues man. You might think that I cannot possibly have lived enough, have suffered enough, have experienced enough to really play the blues. But I truly believe all of us whoever we are experience things in life that touch us deep inside, and the world never ceases to shock us and excite us and to sadden us and bring us joy.

OK, so living in our cosy little towns, with our dishwashers and our mobile phones and our satellite TV now, maybe our mountains of joy may not seem to be so high and our oceans of woe may not seem to be so deep, as they were for the folk who loved and lost, and laughed and cried, and lived and died in the Mississippi Delta sixty years ago. But, even now, in this age of high technology, beneath the surface deep emotions are forever stirring and sometimes, just sometimes they escape and terrible and wonderful things do happen that stir you up and give you the blues."

Now I found that story and the interview with Curtis Cline all very compelling, but I took it with a pinch of salt. However, Tony (being Tony) took all that stuff as gospel. Tony had always been fairly intense about his guitar playing, but after he'd come back from Portugal and read Little Red Rooster he became fanatical about guitars. He read that magazine from cover to cover, over and over again, and kept quoting little phrases from the Curtis Cline interview like they were verses from the bible. I guess, somehow it all just hit a chord inside of him somewhere.

Now, also in that copy of Little Red Rooster were all these blues solos written out in tablature. Tablature is similar to conventional music except that instead of five lines like you have on a normal treble stave, there are six - one for each string of the guitar. And instead of black dots being used to tell you which note to play there are numbers which correspond to the position on the neck of the guitar where you should put your finger. For example, if there's a number thirteen on the third line down then you know you've got to put your finger on the thirteenth fret of the third string, and so on.

It all sounds quite easy, and, sure, if you don't know much about scales and stuff then tablature is easier to interpret than regular musical notation. However, if you've never read music before, it still takes a bit of getting used to.

Now, I swear, Tony (who'd hardly read a note of music in his life) borrowed Little Red Rooster one weekend and come Monday morning, he'd not only mastered the intricacies of tablature, he had learned all the different blues scales and riffs that were in that magazine. Not only that, he could quote word-for-word the entire life story of Dumb Boy Daniels. It wouldn't be over the top to say that that weekend changed Tony's life. And from that moment on he never wanted to do anything but play guitar.

The speed with which his attitude changed reminded me of this man who used to live down our street. Number eighteen it was (I remember because there was a huge magnolia in his front garden). He was not at all a religious man, but one sunny April afternoon he was out on the drive washing his car and it started to rain, and the sky was suddenly filled with a massive rainbow. He knew all about the theory of refraction and how the water separated the different wavelengths of light to produce those colours. He knew all that. But as he stood there in the gentle warmth of the sun and the fresh rain, surrounded by all those magnolias and that rainbow, he suddenly heard God speak to him. God told him to give up his job as a Cordon Bleu chef and spread the Good word. So, he merrily marched off to theological college, and now instead of serving asparagus tips he serves the church. Soon after he'd qualified as a vicar, he moved from our street. So, I'm not quite sure where he does his preaching now. But wherever it is I bet they have one hell of a harvest supper.