Guitar Gods in Beds. (Bedfordshire: A Heavenly County). Mike Buchanan
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way’ to tune a guitar. A local band had seen me play and said I needed to tune it properly, but I didn’t listen to them.
When I was 12, the family moved to a house on Station Road, Oakley. My youngest brother still lives in the same house.
A year or two passed, and eventually Pete cottoned on to my trick. He too blackmailed mum into releasing five pounds from the bank, and bought a crude electric guitar.
Pete and I never received any formal music training, or read sheet music or anything. We just played and learnt everything by ear. The local band – The Dell Vikings, or something cringy like that – were older than us, maybe 16 or 17. They saw Pete and I play, and were impressed. So when they bought some new equipment, they very generously gave us their old amplifier, a Linear 30-watt affair with a couple of speakers in it. We thought it was fantastic.
Then we bought the Bert Weedon book, as everyone seems to have done in those days. I distinctly remember reading, ‘These chords will seem impossible to you now, but soon you’ll be able to play them easily.’ I thought, ‘Well, I doubt that!’, but of course he was right.
We met up with a kid who played drums, who lived just down the road. A red-haired kid, Andy Mason, he worked in the chip shop on Saturday mornings. He now runs an agency for musicians. I say he played the drums, but he was particularly fuckin’ useless at them. He had the nickname in the youth club of ‘Chi-chi-boom’.
Pete’s mate Ray Nicholson played bass guitar, although he wasn’t much better musically than Chi-chi-boom. And so we formed a band, The Vultures. I chose the name by opening a dictionary at random and blindly sticking a pin into the page. Maybe The Eagles did the same. We were 13 or 14. Pete drew a picture of a vulture on the bass drum.
By this time we’d moved out of the pre-fab and into a house in The Close – number 12, I think – in Clapham, behind where the new shops are. That was the first proper house we’d ever lived in. We had a nice big back garden and we’d practise there. It drew the heat a few times. People would complain and get the cops round. Some people liked our music, but mostly they complained.
We then used to play down the youth club. First of all we played at the Methodist Junior Youth Club, where kids up to 12 or 13 went. Someone gave us an old applecart and we’d put our amplifier in it and walk to our early gigs. I wish to God I had a picture of that, that would be epic. Some of the older kids would come to the junior club just because they loved to hear us play. Most of them were bikers. But after a time we only went to the youth club for older kids.
The song that always got the best reception for us back then was Smokestack Lightning. We’d get to a point where we’d play to a wild crescendo and roll about on the floor like we were having fits. The kids thought that was fantastic. We were soon playing all sorts of places and were billed as ‘the youngest group in England’. We played at the Bedford Corn Exchange when I was 12 and Pete was 11, on the same bill as The Pretty Things. 1963, I suppose.
The Bedford Corn Exchange, The Granada, and The Empire used to put on big-name bands. The Beatles, The Who, the bloody lot. The people who ran these places were local, and where there was a chance to put on a local band to warm up the audience, they took it.
We’d also get gigs at working men’s clubs. I remember being offered beer at one of the clubs when I was about 12. It seems ridiculous now, but in those politically incorrect days you could do almost anything you wanted to. To me it seemed the ultimate sin to drink beer, and I would only drink orange squash.
We’d see a band called The Odds in Bedford. I still see one or two of the guys around. They used to play at the Drill Hall, and we’d sometimes play with them. We got around a bit and started to get really good.
I left school as soon as I could, at 15. Pete went to the Pilgrim’s School in Bedford and was expelled. I did all sorts of shit jobs after I left school. I worked on a farm in Clapham. I must have had 20 jobs in the first year after I left school. I just wasn’t cut out for ‘normal’ jobs, with shifts and so on. At an early age you don’t realise that while you’re not cut out for certain jobs, you may have some other talents to exploit. Everyone was moaning at me about my lack of work ethic and all that. But of course in those days you could go and get a job anywhere in ten minutes. You didn’t need a bloody degree to land some second-rate fuckin’ job. The sort of jobs you need a degree for nowadays, I could have landed back then by turning up on the doorstep. But I wouldn’t have wanted them.
By the time I got to 16 or 17 Pete and I didn’t play together much anymore, apart from the odd party. I left home at 18. Pete and I lived in a real slum for a year, a shithole of a bedsit dive at the top of Goldington Avenue, Bedford. Pete never paid any fuckin’ rent. I always had to find the money. I worked in a junk shop at the time.
Pete and I were pretty boys in those days, with long hair, and we shared a bed in the bedsit. In the same house, which was basically a doss house with shared facilities, there were a load of wild Irishmen. They were hilarious. At first, they thought we were two queers living together. But when they found out we were brothers and our mother was Irish, they were fine with us.
The Irish guys would have fights, throwing each other out into the snow in their underpants. It was unbelievable, really wild. They were roadbuilders, and they befriended us. They’d run out of food mid-week, then come to us. Now we didn’t have much ourselves – maybe a few tins of beans and a bit of bread – so we fed them. When the weekend came and they’d had their pay-packets, they’d give us tons of money, beer, fags, and so on.
At this point ‘Donkey Knob’ Spinelli enters the scene. What’s that? Will he object to his nickname being used in the book if he reads it? Well, would you, if that was your nickname? I didn’t think so. Not only did Donkey Knob have the biggest cock you’ll ever see, he was the tightest bastard known to mankind. At this time, he was the only person in our circle with a car, a Jag. I think his parents were fairly well off. He was quite a good drummer. I wasn’t so wild about his singing, though. He went on with Pete to play with Brand X, Phil Collins, and all that lot, so he was fairly talented.
A guy called Pete Hampton then figured quite strongly in my life. He wasn’t a musician, but he had hundreds of records and he loved blues. He kept bringing me into Carousels in Bedford and other music shops where you could go in and listen to music in the booths. He told me I was a good guitarist and should learn to play ragtime music.
A few people were by now starting to say I should try to earn some money through music. Now at that time I had very little money. I was completely brassic in fact, and still living in the shithole at the top of Goldington Avenue. And so it was that I realised I should really try to knuckle down with my guitar playing, and learn the ragtime songs that Pete Hampton would bring me. I did it all by ear. You couldn’t buy books on ragtime music.
At this time in The George and Dragon pub in Bedford they had a club, Club Mezz. It was a jazz club, but then a friend said he was going to open a blues club there on Friday nights. I thought that was great so I turned up on the first night, but there was nobody there. It turned out that the guy had not arranged anything in the end and the event had been cancelled, but nobody had told me. I wasn’t very happy.
Now at this time I’d been playing the odd gig with an Italian band. You wouldn’t want to play in an Italian band; they’re so traditional. They wouldn’t allow you into the wedding because you were English. I mean, God help us. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their van and all the amplifiers. So I called Pete and we quickly cobbled together a band with Donkey Knob to play the first Friday night, which should have been arranged by the other guy.
There weren’t many people the first Friday, but through word of mouth the place was packed the next week. Bingo. The gig was a knock-out, and we called those nights ‘The Blues Club’. Two or three weeks after we started, another local guy, Bob Carter, started playing there regularly too. By the time it was taken over two years later by a local businessman, Angie Russo, it was really throbbing. But what got me was that after six months the bloke running the event, Dave Balfour, had the cheek to demand entrance money from me. I said, ‘Fuck off, Dave, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even have a fuckin’ Blues Club.’