I had my first guitar at the tender age of nine – most likely a birthday present from my parents, though my memory's a bit hazy on that. I do remember the guitar clearly though, and where it came from – Kempster Pianos, a now defunct music shop in Witney, in the county we’d only recently moved to, Oxfordshire. The girl next door, six years older than me, offered to teach me some chords, and the first song I learned (in a very loose sense, since I don’t remember ever practising between lessons, and as a result, never stopped struggling with the F chord) was ‘Blowin' in the Wind’. She was a bit of a hippie and I looked up to her. Everything she said ended with ‘man’, as it did for hippies everywhere in those days, but I didn’t realise that, so when she kept on about ‘Fleetwood Mac, man’ I thought that was their name – Fleetwood Mac Man – and even when I later came across an album by Fleetwood Mac, I simply assumed that by then they must have dropped the ‘Man’ in their name for some reason...
As I say, I don’t remember practising very much at that stage, but I must have done, at least a bit, because a few years later, at 13 or 14, I played guitar in the concert my form put on at school. I accompanied two friends who were performing a song as Big Jim Jessop and Fat Belly Jones, the hippie cowboy characters created by the Two Ronnies. Too shy to sing myself at that stage, I was happy just being the strummer – though I think I may have dared sing (or maybe shout) the last line (‘…And nor were her knees!’) to our self-penned comedic song, ‘Knock-Kneed Nell’.
Anyway, I shall always be grateful to my 15-year-old hippie neighbour for having had the patience to attempt to teach me C, F, G7 and Am, and yesterday I had the opportunity to pay her kindness forward in the most apt way I can think of – by teaching my neighbour’s nine-year-old granddaughter the chords she needs to play the song she wants to learn: ‘2002’ by Anne-Marie (neither song nor artist were known to me, so thank goodness she brought a CD with it on, and thank goodness, too, it turned out to be a rather straightforward 3-chorder!).
That little girl went away happy (according to her grandparents, she couldn’t stop smiling afterwards) and eager for her next lesson, and I went away happy too – at the memories teaching her brought back, and at the new-found confidence showing her a few chords has given me, so that if anyone else asks me if I teach guitar, I can now actually say, ‘Yes, I do, man!’
As I say, I don’t remember practising very much at that stage, but I must have done, at least a bit, because a few years later, at 13 or 14, I played guitar in the concert my form put on at school. I accompanied two friends who were performing a song as Big Jim Jessop and Fat Belly Jones, the hippie cowboy characters created by the Two Ronnies. Too shy to sing myself at that stage, I was happy just being the strummer – though I think I may have dared sing (or maybe shout) the last line (‘…And nor were her knees!’) to our self-penned comedic song, ‘Knock-Kneed Nell’.
Anyway, I shall always be grateful to my 15-year-old hippie neighbour for having had the patience to attempt to teach me C, F, G7 and Am, and yesterday I had the opportunity to pay her kindness forward in the most apt way I can think of – by teaching my neighbour’s nine-year-old granddaughter the chords she needs to play the song she wants to learn: ‘2002’ by Anne-Marie (neither song nor artist were known to me, so thank goodness she brought a CD with it on, and thank goodness, too, it turned out to be a rather straightforward 3-chorder!).
That little girl went away happy (according to her grandparents, she couldn’t stop smiling afterwards) and eager for her next lesson, and I went away happy too – at the memories teaching her brought back, and at the new-found confidence showing her a few chords has given me, so that if anyone else asks me if I teach guitar, I can now actually say, ‘Yes, I do, man!’
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