I got my first guitar for Christmas at the age of nine. That was the year that Lennon met McCartney and Buddy Holly met his Stratocaster.
My new pride and joy was of somewhat humbler origins, being a "skiffle group special" low quality plywood contraption that was of East European parentage and gloried in the brand name 'Majolica' it cost the princely sum of three pounds! Nevertheless I loved it, despite the action being high enough to decapitate motorcyclists. The strings were reversed for my left handed "affliction" and I was off on my journey, steadfastly sticking to the wrong side of the road.
My first mentor with the guitar was a school classmate called David Metcalf. His guitar was a lot better than mine and he actually took lessons. He showed me how to tune it and even loaned me a chord book. Which I churlishly returned to him after a couple of days telling him it was no good. Although I was clever enough to reverse my strings I was too thick to realise the book had not been published exclusively for me. It eventually dawned on me and I devised a method which I believe helped me steal licks from other players in later years. I propped the book up on my mothers dressing table and watched my "right handed" reflection forming the chords. I still visualise in mirror image to my actual playing and I think it helps enormously jamming and doing fill in gigs with other (predominantly right handed) players.
I grew up in a coalmining town Ashington, Northumberland in the North East of England. The towns main claim to fame was that it had produced two footballing legends Jacky and Bobby Charlton and it had more licensed premises per head of population than anywhere else on Earth (true!) Ashington was an hours bus ride north of the nearest metropolis Newcastle-upon Tyne universally known to the locals as "The Toon" There were a lot of talented people in Ashington, both at drinking and at guitar playing and lots of times at both!
The next defining moment in my musical life again came about thanks to my schoolmate David. He invited me to meet his guitar teacher Bill. He was a big, gentle, unassuming character who chain-smoked, continually dripping ash on the most beautiful guitar I had ever been close enough to smell. It was a Hofner f hole arch-top with a DeArmond pickup and the sunburst finish was so shiny it hurt my eyes. That was it for me I was gone, smitten for life! I tagged along shamelessly after that. Just watching and soaking it in while David did the playing (and the paying). I was overwhelmed soon after when Bill did me the greatest kindness. He presented me with his old guitar and a tiny home-made amplifier to borrow "for as long as you need them" I don't know what made him do it but I will be in his debt forever. He had even reversed the strings for me and those fat slippery flatwound tow ropes felt like they were growing out of the frets after my Russian packing case.
Bills old guitar was a huge 'cello model almost as big as I was. He had sanded off all the finish and applied a thin clear coat of satin varnish. It looked stunning and this was years before the Beatles did a similar job on their Epiphones. I kept this blonde behemoth for ages and even did my first gigs with Bill and David playing tunes from the buskers songbooks. He never asked for a penny for all his kindness and was content to let me keep his guitar till I finally acquired my own. 'God bless you mate, I owe you everything.'
"les forques" 1963 and david metcalf 2006
In 1963 I persuaded my long suffering parents to buy me a "real guitar" The choice was made easy by the tightness of the budget and the extreme lack of left handed models on the market. I had thirty quid available to me and Fenders cost five times that much. All the American guitars were pipedreams to most of us in those days and so the majority of my peers played Burns, Hofners, Futuramas and the like. Japanese Guyatones and Antorias(later Ibanez) were also represented but the only available left handed guitar in my price range was the ubiquitous Watkins Rapier. It took 10 weeks to arrive and when it did it only had two pickups instead of the three I had ordered but it was red and it was there and that's all that mattered. The two quid we saved on the pickup financed the purchase of a very fetching tartan soft case! Within weeks of acquiring my new treasure I had joined a group of bespectacled schoolfriends and embarked on my musical career in earnest. Our equipment was rudimentary to say the least but to five pubescent youths it was wonderful. A leather covered Hofner Colorama kept company with a Levin Goliath while a gorgeous red Hofner bass that closely resembled a Fender Jazz was lost to our band along with its owner when school exams took precedence over rock'n'roll. Consequently I pioneered down tuning twenty years before Seattle and we carried on as four.
Derek(Rhy-Jar)Shaw, the Colorama player had a mate called Barry Coulson. He was one day younger than me and was the best drummer for miles around. An absolute genius! Although he was only our age he was playing in one of the towns top rung bands and actually earning money. The Scorpions played regularly, changed personnel regularly and made us youngsters jealous regularly with their lead player, the very slick Brian Davison, playing the house down on his Gibson SG Special. Bass player Sammy Morton owned a Fiesta red Fender Precision and they had a van, a driver and they made us sick with envy. Barry poached me away from my little band of schoolboys to form a new version of the constantly changing Scorpions (a strangely appropriate name) Ashington wasn't very big but it had lots of places to play and could and did support five or six local groups. Human nature being what it is these groups of volatile young egomaniacs would frequently succumb to bickering and squabbles and break up. This would result in a domino effect throughout the town as the "gene-pool" of available players was limited. Players would be pinched from another band to join a faction, creating a spot for somebody else and so it went.....Barry was my passport into the big-time. I was seduced into joining the "gene-pool"
former kalidos roadrunners travellers strangers and wanderers pictured before and after the advent of colour photography!
For this 'supergroup' I decided to really push the boat out and equip myself with a 12 string. So I foolishly traded my Rapier on a German Hoya. It was right handed and I had it converted, disastrously as it turned out, by an over confident but clueless counter-hopper called George. I will never again play anything but a purpose built left handed guitar in my life. Scorpions Mk99 lasted about six weeks. Barry bailed out after a couple of gigs and we struggled on with another former Scorpion on drums. The audiences dwindled as did our enthusiasm and it mercifully fell apart. Barry Coulson died, still in his teens, when his Mini Van collided with a bus in the rain. His band was the best local outfit going around at the time. We'll never know how far this young mans talent could have taken him. Rest in peace my friend.
I was contemplating my stalled career while having an illegal pint in the Portland Hotel when I was approached by a middle-aged man of 23. His name was Lyal Anderson and we regularly swap insults to this day. I didn't know him from a bar of soap but he said he wanted to form a band and knew that I played. Never one to knock back the offer of a drink I let him buy the beers while we talked about who we knew and who we could pinch. Lyal was a guitar player as was I and he also had a mate who was a guitar player so we already had a problem. That got solved real quickly as neither of us could think of an available bass player we could both live with and, as I detested my wretched 12 string ,I didn't take much persuading to ditch it in favour of a pale blue Watkins Rapier bass, a model that had just been released at the not too painful price of 45quid. While I was waiting for this to arrive Lyal borrowed a very nasty Rosetti Bass7 made by a Dutch company called Egmond. It was absolute shite but beggars can't be choosers and I was happy to have anything to learn on while we put the line-up together. I remembered a guy who lived close by who played piano and used to talk about buying an organ and joining a band. His name was Geoff Batey and sure enough he had a brand new Hohner set up in his lounge room when we knocked on his door. One more member of the gene-pool! That made Lyals mate one too many guitar players again so sadly he didn't make the cut. Mick(Nero)Curtis the drummer from my very first band joined up despite his mothers warnings that I would jump ship on him again and we enlisted another ex- Scorpion Robin Dunn as our lead singer. The Kalidos were born.
The name came from one of Robins post-Scorpion bands that had become The Road Runners and included former Paragons, yet more ex-Scorpions and goodness knows who else. "Revolving Door" would have been appropriate for an Ashington band in those days. Over the next couple of years we had a ball. We optimistically went into debt buying big crocodile skin Selmer amplifiers and a succession of clapped out old vans. Incredibly for the time we managed to have only one line up change in that time. Lyal decided to get married and take his girl off to Canada to live. I don't blame him, she was drop-dead gorgeous! (still is). The gene-pool provided Lyals replacement. A local hearthrob called Brian Filmer filled the spot. He was already a mate of mine, a former bandmate of Robins and played a Vox Phantom. He also had the longest hair in town, the most women after him in the county and the weirdest sense of humour in the world. He was perfect[urra].
Eventually and inevitably the band imploded. Mick and Geoff played in another local outfit together, Robin took up his guitar again and got into acoustic music and Filmer cut his hair and joined the airforce. I traded my Watkins on a Gibson EB2 and played with yet another two ex-Scorpions for a while and then proceeded to drift through a succession of heros and zeros from Lynemouth to London till 1969 when I pulled up stakes and headed for Australia.