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.