You won’t be surprised to learn that I didn’t know much about Life, The Universe and Everything at the age of 10. Of course, the fact that Douglas Adams had yet to write the eponymous third instalment of his ‘six part trilogy’ may have been a contributory factor. My primordial preferences consisted mostly of egg and chips, kicking a ball about erratically with my mates and the noise that Hank Marvin made as Wonderful Land beamed down through the transistors of my tiny Kent radio Egg and chips was favourite, to be fair. But some time after I had nagged my parents to fund lessons, I began to realise that there might be two distinct worlds operating in the guitar galaxy. Gorgeous radiophonic tones assailed my ears, played with an effortless facility by Hank B as he tripped the fret fantastic. Meanwhile, back on Planet Plectrum, I was struggling with a student model f-hole acoustic guitar with an action as high as Hendrix and strings as wide as Del Boy. Even my guitar teacher’s German manufactured Hofner Committee, a thing of beauty in its own right, couldn’t convey the drama of Man Of Mystery.
And for a sound reason, every pun intended. The chaps in these old fangled ‘groups’ like Billy J Kramer And The Dakotas, Gerry And The Pacemakers and no-hopers The Beatles were playing American guitars, admittedly in glorious black and white. The prime suspects seemed to be branded Fender and particularly, Gibson, although others like Gretsch, Guild and Rickenbacker featured too. Slowly the fog of fretting began to clear. I learned that these USA imported instruments were subject to crippling import tariffs as ‘luxury goods’ and hence unavailable to the pocket money based economy that I was operating at the time. I’d never seen one in real life, or Hackney as we called it back then.