On the morning of December 25th, 1986, watched by my Mum and Dad, I unwrapped a large, quadrangular cardboard box on the floor of our living room and lifted the lid. There lay a brand new electric guitar. It was a Marlin Sidewinder, black with a white scratchplate and a maple neck. It was the number one budget guitar of the time – perfect for the beginner – and enough like Knopfler’s Fender Stratocaster to fill me with feverish excitement. And it was mine.
In my Christmas stocking that year, I found a vital tool that would set me off on the road to guitar proficiency – a Dire Straits chord book, with charts showing me how to play all the songs featured on the ‘Alchemy’ album from start to finish. My parents barely set eyes on me for the next three months.
Borrowing one of my brother's old amps (a large, Yamaha transistor combo with two ten inch speakers and wheels that my friend Toby would christen "The Beast"), I would spend all my spare time in my bedroom, learning the chords to ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’, and then attempting to play along with the record. I would occasionally lose my place, get my fingers tied up in knots and frustratedly pace over to the record player and return the needle to the start of the song. I diligently and faithfully worked my way through the entire chord book until I could play along with all the songs. This exercise improved my speed between chords, and gave me a sense of rhythm and timing.
Pete then delighted me by working out a basic version of my ‘holy grail’ of guitar parts: the riff from ‘Money For Nothing’. He patiently showed it to me, and I made this my main project for a number of weeks, employing a cheap, nasty distortion pedal (also borrowed from my brother) to simulate Knopfler’s Gibson tone. I played it loud, and I could often be heard blasting out of my bedroom window into the road below for passers-by to hear.
On one such occasion, I was interrupted in my practise by a holler from outside.
“Oi! Jon!” I heard a young, slightly husky voice shout, and I moved to the open window to peer out. It was a couple of kids from up in the village whom I vaguely knew. They hung around together a lot, these two - building go-carts, flying model aeroplanes, climbing hills... that sort of thing. They occasionally joined in the football or cricket that went on up at the playing field, but they weren’t as sporty as me, Nick Pearce or Martin Whiting, so they were never really part of the hardcore gang. I was reasonably friendly with them, though, and was happy to exchange words from my bedroom window.
“Was that ‘Money For Nothing’?” asked Hugh Coltman, an excited, wide-eyed expression aimed at me from under his mop of thick dark brown hair. Jess Davey stood beside him, grinning a big, toothy grin.
“Er…. Yeah!” I replied, slightly surprised to discover that I’d been playing to an audience. Jess asked me to play it again so that they could hear the whole thing, so I did. I didn’t execute it with the dexterity of my hero, of course, and this particular performance was probably a little more stuttering and stammering due to the added pressure of performing. But it was recognisable, and when I had finished, Hugh and Jess went on their merry, Frodo-and-Sam kind of way, seemingly impressed by my skills, which were developing at a swift rate.
Still, Knopfler’s lead breaks occupied a galaxy far, far away from the one I was taking my maiden flights in. When it came to playing solos, I just didn’t know where to begin. Whenever Pete came round, I would pester him to teach me how to play some lead guitar - just a few notes to start me off. He was reluctant, mainly because he had better things to do, but also because he wasn’t that great a lead player himself. He also knew that I would only want to learn how to play like Mark Knopfler, something he warned me against at an early stage.
“What’s the point of playing just like somebody else?” he asked me once as he stood in the doorway of my bedroom, watching my desperate attempts to master the opening phrase of the first ‘Telegraph Road’ solo.
I looked at him, blankly. What’s the point? WHAT’S THE POINT?! Was he mad? Couldn’t he hear what I was hearing? Didn’t he want to be able to do what Knopfler could do? What’s the POINT??!!!
“If you can only play like Mark Knopfler,” he continued as I bit my lip, “who’s going to want you in their band?”
This was of course, perfectly valid reasoning, and very sound advice. But I didn’t care about playing with anybody else at that stage. I didn’t want to be in a band. I just wanted to be able to emulate my hero in every note he played. I shrugged at my brother’s words and grunted, dismissively. I didn’t want him to teach me any lead guitar any more. I just wanted him to bog off and leave me alone.
“You should listen to somebody else,” he suggested. “Listen to some Eric Clapton.”
And with that, he bogged off and left me alone.
Upstairs in ‘Our Price’ in Bath, I was combing the ‘C’ section of the vinyls. In 1986, Eric Clapton had released ‘August’, an album with which he had achieved some chart success both in the UK and the States. His was a name that I knew, but had always associated with an Old Grey Whistle Test appearance I’d seen years before, on which he’d played boring old country music and worn a checked shirt and a waistcoat - not really my scene. He looked a bit cooler on the cover of ‘August’, and I had heard the single ‘Behind The Mask’ several times on the radio, enjoying its sharp, sparse guitar breaks. Pete had also informed me that he played a black Fender Stratocaster which looked a lot like my Marlin, and that won him some kudos in my innocent mind. So I bought ‘August’ and soaked it up, eagerly. Then I bought ‘Behind The Sun’, and then, as was my wont when discovering new music that I liked, I decided to delve into Clapton’s history. In a move of gargantuan proportions that would completely change the way I played and listened to guitar music, I bought the earliest Eric Clapton recording I could find: John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers.
The Blues didn’t have to try very hard to win me over. I was attracted by the sheer pain and misery of it all, perhaps because these elements were distinctly lacking in my own life. I liked the raw, rough and ready emotion that its protagonists spewed forth into my life, and I loved the fact that they seemed to be throwing their whole mind, body and soul into their performances. Furthermore, The Blues held an attraction to me which no other music genre held: I DIDN'T KNOW ANYONE ELSE WHO LIKED IT.
Liking the Blues made me different. In my eyes, it made me impossibly cool. While everyone at school was listening to Transvision Vamp and rattling on about Wendy James’ tits, I was trawling the record shops for Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, BB King and anyone else that Eric Clapton talked about in interviews. When a famous jeans manufacturer used ‘Mannish Boy’ to advertise its range, a clutch of my schoolmates approached me to ask if they could borrow my Muddy Waters albums, and I felt blissfully superior. I felt even more superior when they returned the albums saying they only really liked ‘Mannish Boy’, and even that ‘went on a bit’. They were philistines.
Watching television late one Friday night, I stumbled across a music show called ‘Wired’ on Channel 4. They were interviewing a young American guitarist called Stevie Ray Vaughan. He wore a floppy cap and a light brown suit to match, and sat on a stool demonstrating his guitar skills with a rendition of Freddie King’s ‘Hideaway’. On his beaten up Fender Strat, he gave a mesmerising performance of his own ‘Rude Mood’ instrumental, and I watched slack-jawed and mind-blown. Who was this guy? How had I failed to discover him until now? His guitar sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, yet he was talking about Clapton and his heroes as major influences.
The next day I went out and bought Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Live Alive’ album on cassette, and Knopfler and Clapton were duly shunted to the sidelines. I bought the entire SRV back catalogue and absorbed it all. How many other guitarists were out there that I had yet to discover? I had to do some research. I bought Hendrix albums, Led Zeppelin albums, Santana albums, JJ Cale albums. The realm of the guitar was a land of more soundscapes than I had ever imagined, and I was exploring it like a kid in a sweet shop.