One track, first played - I think - by John Peel, was 'America', by The Nice, and Scrobs was blown away - well, he would have been, had he not been tucked up in bed with the wireless about six inches from his left ear, and smoking a Players Gold Leaf...
This was something fabulous! Great music for a twenty-year old, and a cert for 6s/6d down at the record shop in Hastings!
Wind back a few years. My lovely sister was given a lot of 33rpm records for her twenty-first birthday, and one of them was West Side Story. We played the lot on our new 'steeeerio', and I just loved Bernstein and Kostal's music. It was magical, and unbelievably vibrant.
Backward a few years and more, now at school, there was always an annual House Music competition. There was a set song, where everyone (about seventy of us blokes), would bawl some awful song planted on us by the Director of Music, (or occasionally known as the choirmaster), and then there would be a podium for anyone to add to the points for each house, to get the 'prize'.
Scrobs was the first to take a rather cheap guitar, in front of three-hundred other boys, and play a tune. I'd asked a chum (who was tone deaf), if he'd accompany me, but eventually, he realised that he was hopeless, so, a bereft Scrobs decided to do the whole shebang as a solo piece.
Bugger me, I had to combine all sorts of notes to make 'Tonight' sound anything like a recognisable song, but luckily, it worked, and I beat some Welsh Junior Assembalist youth viola player to the prize - much to his annoyance, but he was a bit of a prat so who cares!
So now, as President Trump is bringing so much value in the USA, with profound hard work, dismissal of the awful bbc and cnn etc, the great ol' country is alive and kicking, and I put it all down to the fact that I won a 7s/6d Boots voucher for winning the strings section in the house music!
6 comments:
Scrobs...making America (and Kent) great again, well done I just knew it wasn't trump alone.
All praise to the mighty O'Blene. Well done, and so you should be! Have you ever re-tuned your guitar to modal tuning? There are several variations on this theme but I think the one I used was D-G-D-G-B-E and you can get some lovely sounds from it.
My only childhood musical claim to fame was when I sang contralto in the school choir when we performed Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols" at the opening of a new church. As it's all in old English we snickered a bit in the first run-through, but then we really got into the spirit of it to the extent our music teacher said it was better than his record. I must get the CD to bring back old memories.
Well done - sounds as if it was a good experience in the end. I'd have needed much more than a
7s/6d Boots voucher to play any instrument in front of three-hundred other boys.
Thudders, I knew a real musician like you would be first!
Weren't they great!
Emerlist Davjack still rocks!
Goosey, I've never restrung a guitar like that!
I read somewhere what you can do, but as all my 'songs' were 'Every good dog goes baking everywhere', I stayed in that particular lane!
I was up in the roof recently, and my 12 string was forlornly perched on one side (hurts to hold down twelve strings these days) and I may give it to someone - maybe my old school...
Just have a go because there's very little re-tuning needed and the sound you get is quite "deep". My tuning whats'it was "Every good day Gordon buys elephants" and don't ask me why because I haven't a clue. Back to the guitar and radio music, when I had a sleep-over with my friend Viv we used to listen to Radio Luxemburg when you had to continually nip out of a warm bed to re-tune it via a brown Bakelite knob. Later on I got a radio for Xmas and listened to Radio Caroline North and I tried to play along with whatever they played. The first song I ever managed to do was "Elusive Butterfly" where I put my finger on part of the strings then I took it off - ha! PS - when I was in infant school, why was I always given the castinets and never ever a drum??
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