Early Rock.


A ten-year-old child has no right to look this passionate with a guitar. 


What makes it worse is that ten-year-old is me. What makes it worse still, is I’m not even playing the thing; I’m just holding it. My left hand isn’t fingering a chord or knocking out a solo, it’s resting on top of the strings. To top the situation off, I’m wearing my school uniform, clutching a guitar bought in Argos. There’s nothing rock ‘n’ roll about this photograph; it’s just a junior school kid posing with his dad’s acoustic in the dining room, with a 12-inch copy of Chesney Hawkes’ The One and Only visible in the background. If anything, it’s anti-cool. 

 
To be fair to myself, I played a little bit of guitar back then. The only problem was I didn’t know how to tune it. I’d accidentally stumbled across a slide tuning where the open strings would sound as a major chord, and would move a barred finger up and down the fretboard as I sang my own primitive compositions. My earliest song was called No Regrets, which I can still remember to this day - though it was nearly lost in the mists of time, when my junior school head teacher Mrs Edwards offered to retune the guitar and my special, one-off tuning disappeared forever.

At least I’m sporting a Beatles moptop. Maybe I wasn’t pulling a guitar-face though; I could have just shat myself. 

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