Guitar Gods in Beds. (Bedfordshire: A Heavenly County). Mike Buchanan
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the arse. He joined the Army during the Second World War, and was immediately posted to the Far East. He saw three weeks of action, then he was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore and spent the rest of his days as a Japanese POW. He actually worked on the bridge over the River Kwai. He told me all sorts of grim stories about his life at the time. Of the relatively small number of survivors, he was rated by psychiatrists as being in the minority of POWs who might be considered ‘sane’. But in fact he wasn’t really sane; he had been cowed by the terrible experience. Thereafter, he always had an awful fear of people in positions of authority, as you’d expect.
When he came back to England, my dad worked as a labourer on the building of the RAE, the Royal Aircraft Establishment, at Twinwoods Farm Airfield near Clapham. It was the same airfield from which Glenn Miller had flown in 1944, heading for Paris. He was due to play a series of concerts with the band he led, the US Army Air Force Band. But of course no trace of the airplane, pilot, or two passengers was ever found.
Most of the labourers at the RAE were paddies. My mum was working in the canteen, and that’s how they met. It was a particularly unromantic affair. My dad said to her in the canteen, ‘If you fancy a drink, love, I’ll be down The Angler’s Rest tomorrow lunchtime, playing darts.’ That was his idea of a chat-up line.
When the RAE was finally built, my dad got a job as a stoker in the boiler room, working 12-hour shifts. But there was actually very little work for him to do. Maybe once or twice in a shift they’d have to turn a tap on or off. The boiler room became known as ‘Rest Camp’.
I was the first of their five sons – the reason they got married, you might say. I’m now 56, Pete is 55, Brian is 48, Steve is 46, and David is 44.
Dad died in 1981, when I was 30. He had all sorts of illnesses, including Parkinson’s – although he never got the trembling side of it – but pneumonia got him in the end. He got very forgetful, even forgot the dog’s name. It was terrible.
Mum did all sort of jobs to bring some money in, like cleaning at Texas Instruments and other places. She’s still alive, functioning perfectly well at 78 or 79. She still lives in Oakley, near the first house we had there.
I was born in Bedford Maternity Hospital in 1951. The first place we lived in was a bus on a caravan site called The Folly, by The Fox & Hounds pub in Clapham, near Bedford. There’s still a caravan site there, but in those days it was much more basic.
When I was a year or two old we moved into a double wagon, a showman-type double caravan, in Carriage Drive, Clapham, between North Brickhill and Kimbolton Road in Bedford. There was a Catholic church and nunnery near there at the time. After a year, the farmer who owned the land where our caravan was situated wanted to use it for something else. So he towed the caravan to the edge of the Clapham golf course. I distinctly remember assuming, at the age of three or four, that the setting for the Rupert the Bear books was the Clapham golf course. The nuns were very kind and compassionate. They would give us a lift to school. Not many people in those days had cars.
I remember Pete and I waking up in the caravan in the middle of winter and it would be perishing cold. There was ice on both the inside and outside of the windows. My mother would put her blancmanges and jellies in our bedroom to set.
When I was five, I started going to my first school, Clapham Voluntary Primary. It should have been called ‘Involuntary’, really! In those days you’d stay in one school for the duration of your schooling. But the secondary system was introduced when I was 11, so I ended up going to Lincroft School in Oakley.
My parents weren’t really musical, although my mum would sing arias from operas. I didn’t like opera then, and I still don’t. The first connection with music I can recall was to do with the BBC Light Programme. When I was about five or six, Pete and I would have to go to bed before the newsreel, at the end of The Archers. But before The Archers, there was a programme called Smoky Mountain Jamboree. Bob Foley remembers it well. We really loved the programme – it was full of bluegrass and hillbilly music.
In 1958, when I was about seven, we moved to a house in Clapham. It had a plaque outside which said it had previously been the village dog compound. As a kid I wasn’t embarrassed. In fact I was really proud of it. There’s an Asian shop there now.
Apart from an early interest in music, my other passion was motorbikes. 1958 was a good year for British motorbikes. England was top of the league for hot motorbikes then. Everybody rode bikes. I was only seven, but I’d gawp over fences at the bikes, and would press people to give me a lift on the back of them.
When I was nine, we moved to another delightful dwelling, a pre-fab in Prince’s Street in Clapham, which was a real notch up after the dog compound. But they’ve all since been demolished. In fact, they’ve systematically demolished every place we ever lived in.
Do I have any resentment about being brought up in poor circumstances? Of course not, why would I? It’s like if you’re brought up in India, and you’re in a totally impoverished state, you don’t know, do you? I mean if you’re not in agony . . . I was recently listening to a recording of Mississippi John Hurt, and he said that when he was a boy he had nothing but his mother. And I thought, ‘There’s something really brilliant about that statement.’ We live in a desperately materialistic world now, don’t we? For all the toys . . . I mean, I feel like I’m rich, though by modern standards I’m not at all. But I’ve got too much, too many choices. Who needs more than one bloody guitar? If you only have one, you play it and make a bloody good job of it, don’t you? Has my upbringing made me the person I am? Who knows? But there’s no doubt that material wealth does nothing for anyone spiritually.
I really wanted to play the guitar when I was about nine or ten. I’d listen to bands like The Shadows on my 78rpm wind-up gramophone. My first record was Wake Up, Little Suzie by The Everly Brothers. I was really jealous of the boy next door, who was a spoilt only child, because he had a Dansette which played 45rpm records. It had an auto-changer, which was cutting-edge record playing technology at that time.
I begged my mother to buy me an old record player which played 45rpm records, and she bought it. It didn’t have an auto-changer, so it wasn’t quite the swish thing that the kid next door had. My first 45rpm record was Kon-Tiki by The Shadows. You wouldn’t believe how many times I must have played that. To this day, I still love that record.
I just had to get a guitar from somewhere. When I was about nine, I saw a plastic Elvis Presley guitar that had four strings. Why the bloody hell it had only four strings, I don’t know. It cost ten bob. I pressed my mother to buy it, and she did. I’d play it, then Pete would have a go. I tended towards rhythmical things, while Pete would tend towards melody. That’s interesting because it’s exactly where we’ve ended up, with me playing mainly acoustic guitar and Pete playing lead electric guitar.
There was a girl at my school whose father was a Teddy Boy. He’d been playing guitar in a jazz band. He nicked one of the guitars and was offering to sell it for a fiver. Now I had 30 quid left by an aunt, which in those days was a small fortune. It was held in a bank account, but I needed my mum to sign a bank form before I could get hold of any of it. I asked her if I could withdraw five pounds to buy the guitar, but she said I couldn’t. She thought it was a very frivolous use of so much money.
So I had to develop a plan to get the money. Now we’d got into a routine whereby – quite unknown to dad – we’d give mum two pounds a week to help with the household bills she frequently incurred. In exchange she let us bunk off school one day every week. I spontaneously arrived at the idea of blackmail. I told her I was going to let dad know she was letting us have days off school and that we were paying towards the household bills with our own money, unless she agreed to help me withdraw five pounds for the stolen guitar. So that’s how I came to get the money for my first decent guitar.
I went to the Teddy Boy, who lived in The Folly caravan site in Clapham, where we had lived ourselves. He gleefully parted with the guitar, because a fiver was a lot of money in those days. You must remember that a fiver would have been half of my dad’s weekly wage at the time.
So I had a good guitar. Pete was green with envy. In those days I’d ‘open tune’