DOWN SHAFTESBURY AVENUE

To adapt a phrase from Philip Larkin, electric guitars began in 1973. Which was rather late for me... after all, they’d been around for thirty or forty years by this time and, some would argue, had already passed their peak of popularity and quality. Nevertheless, 1973 was the year in which I first decided that the one thing I needed in my life was an electric guitar. My diary for January 1^st of that year includes the entry: ‘look at Höfner guitar in Yardley’s (I actually included the umlaut, an early sign, perhaps, of obsessive attention to detail; although like many others, I still pronounce the name to rhyme with ‘softener’ rather than the correct form, ‘Hurfner’ ).

January 1^st was not then, as it is now, a public holiday, and the shops in Birmingham were all open. Yardley’s, at the foot of Snow Hill, looked like it had been there forever, and certainly had some history going back to my dad’s days as a young musician in the swing era of the late ’40s. The shop had adopted the successful pattern of London’s Sound City/Drum City, of having two adjacent stores, one catering to guitarists and brass/woodwind players, whilst the other focused on percussion.

Having parked the car on the site of the former Snow Hill station, it was just a short walk downhill to Yardley’s. On entering the shop, I was immediately confronted by hanging racks of electric guitars, the first I had ever encountered other than on television or in photographs. The majority were semi-acoustics, of around ten to fifteen years’ vintage, and none was particularly expensive. They certainly looked cool to me, though.

We were there because my dad had decided that I could have my first electric guitar, but part of the deal was that it had to be a semi-acoustic, hollow-bodied instrument that could be played without the need for an amplifier. It was simply too much to pay for both guitar and amp at the same time, and I would have to wait until Christmas of that year before I could finally plug in. My dad had decided on a budget of around £30 for the guitar, which might not sound like a lot, but is equivalent to around £350 today. Within this price range, a surprisingly wide range of guitars was available. Fortunately, I liked the look of the big-bodied semi-acoustics (‘cello-built’ as we called them), with their arched tops and f-holes, and the single-pickup Höfner we’d found looked like a decent instrument. It was hanging in a row of similar guitars that had doubtless played their part in kicking off the ‘Brum Beat’ boom of the early 60s, now cast aside in favour of the more fashionable, and much more playable solid-bodied models that players had come to favour. By contrast, on the opposite wall was a row of higher-end instruments from Gibson and Fender.

My dad had tipped me off as to which were the better brands of guitars, his knowledge gained from years of working alongside guitarists, primarily those of the jazz fraternity, who would naturally have favoured big bodied, f-holed instruments. My 1973 diary has several memoranda pages at the front, and on some of them I wrote down the names of various guitar makers, for future reference: Guild, Gibson, Gretsch...

I’d made my first inroads into the sometimes bewildering world of the electric guitar – so many models, so many features. How to choose? Over the coming weeks, I tried various semi-acoustic guitars in the shops of Birmingham, including a ‘Kay’ branded instrument that had what looked like a small crane attached to the bottom of it. This, I discovered, was a tremolo arm, and when pushed, all manner of cool vibrato effects could be achieved, by anyone with the know. Alternatively, it simply sent the guitar out of tune...

Elsewhere, I saw a guitar with the frankly uncool name of ‘Baldwin’, a white electric solidbody with twelve strings (insane!) hanging on the pegboarded walls of Ringway Music, a store that would provide me with my first electric guitar. It also provided my first close encounter with a brand that would become much more significant for me in later years: Gretsch. The instrument in question was, in fact, a bass, dating to around 1963, with a huge hollow body and a headstock that could have been chopped off and used as a table tennis racquet. The thing was enormous. But it also struck me as faintly risible – because instead of actual f-holes, this guitar had them painted onto the body! Painted on! Even with my limited knowledge of guitars, this struck me as a bit rubbish, and not quite right.

From our initial trawl of the shops, the aforementioned Höfner was looking like the best bet. It wasn’t the most respected brand in the world, but it seemed solidly built, and I liked its natural blonde finish. My dad enlisted the help of a fellow musician in making the final choice, and on his say-so we were guided towards a large-bodied Shaftesbury semi-acoustic, from Ringway Music. The die was cast and the Höfner was history. In retrospect, it would have been a much better buy, its current value being more than double that of the guitar I ended up with, but hindsight is a wonderful thing...

Not that the Shaftesbury was in any way a poor substitute. In fact, when presented with it, I soon came to regard it as a much better looking guitar than the poor old Höfner: it had two pickups, gold plated parts, mother of pearl inlays and a red sunburst finish: ah, sunburst – a new term had just been added to my guitar vocabulary – and how cool is a word like sunburst? It’s like something from science fiction...

The Shaftesbury was, I later learned, a copy of a Gibson model designed as a signature guitar for jazz player Barney Kessell. His name had previously been attached to a rather kitsch guitar with 50s kitchenette decor manufactured by the Kay company, best-known for their budget instruments, so it must have been a relief to him when the Gibson endorsement came off. The Shaftesbury copy was very well made, probably in the legendary Japanese Matsumoku factory, and, as a kind of stamp of quality, bore a plastic panel on the reverse of the headstock saying, in raised lettering, ‘Rose-Morris sponsored instrument.’ Rose-Morris was an importer that shipped guitars into the UK from various sources, and the Shaftesbury name was a brand they applied to various Italian and Japanese-made instruments. The same model of guitar was also available under a number of other, eastern-sounding names, but Shaftesbury, with its associations of London’s West End, sounded resolute and reliable. The player who chose it picked it, amongst other things, for its unusually thin neck, which put him in mind of his own guitar, a Gibson Super 400. As a learner, I’m not sure this was altogether a good thing for me, as I quickly became accustomed to my guitar’s narrow neck when perhaps something wider and flatter would have forced me to work harder at those chord shapes. The Shaftesbury was intended as a present for my upcoming twelfth birthday, although I was allowed to play it from the day of acquisition – which, for the record, was Saturday February 17^th, 1973.

The guitar itself was a very high quality take on the original, and has aged better than many bona fide Gibson examples that I've seen. The pickups, though clearly not a match for Gibson's own, were nevertheless humbuckers, and the materials used in the construction were evidently of a high quality, with an ebony fingerboard, mother of pearl inlays and gold hardware. For an instrument of such vintage, it remains in extremely good condition. Action is low, the neck is straight, and there are no buzzes or issues of any kind save for a few crackles on the input and the selector switch. Of course, the guitar was never played in anger, and by the time I'd started actually gigging, I'd moved onto other models, which goes a long way to explain its fine condition. Today, examples of these Matsumoku Gibson knock-offs tend to go for between £500 and £750: a big advance on the £30 it cost back in 1973, but a fair price for such a high quality instrument.

So, the deal was done. I had my electric guitar, and before the end of the year, would also own an amplifier through which it could be played. I had no need for another guitar, nor thoughts of wishing to acquire any more. All of this would change... in the fullness of time.