| NIGEL SEZ Some thoughts on my predilection for circumlocution. And getting my first guitar. I suppose my comedic heroes would be the likes of Peter Cook and Vivian Stanshall although they went to fee paying public schools so their command of the English language would’ve be somewhat better than mine. When they used fabulous adjectives it would have been grammatically correct whereas with me it comes over more like Chris Eubank “I’m amphibious, I can use both hands…” Ah male propisms… I think there is a deep rooted fear in Britain of being thought of as pretentious so, nowadays we get over-educated dumbed down football hooligans from posh privileged backgrounds sounding like Estuary accented idiots. The thing is can’t NOT use elaborate terms and phrases. It becomes an addiction, you can become addicted to verbosity and I remember lines from films, “There is nothing that occurs to you that has not already occurred to me, that is the affliction I live with…”I Claudius… bits out of books…”You seem to have chosen marginally too august a setting…” Angela Carter, Wise Children. It’s a need to embellish that comes from enjoying how words sound, so the content isn’t always as robust as it could be BUT HEY! I’m trying. Also having come from a working class background, Big words became a conspicuous way of drawing attention to your self and marking yourself out from the rest. I’m not particularly gregarious but I can be very garrulous….So I used words as a flag of independence. FORMATIVE YEARS I was about nine years old and was off school pretending to be ill. I was lying around the living room pretending to be Superboy with my underpants on over my trousers, when a thing on the TV drew my attention…It was a documentary about Howard Carter’s discovery of Tuntenkhamens tomb in the valley of the kings. I learnt more in that one hour than I had in my whole time in school. This one episode convinced me that I should be a Rock n’ Roll star and I set about buying records with a shredders intensity. Soon I had amassed the complete works of David Bowie, Alice Cooper and Gloria Mundi (Two albums, one brilliant, one shite) and had convinced my Dad to get me my first electric guitar. It was the Christmas of my tenth Birthing day when the guitar arrived and I was as pleased as Billy O, It was a big, Off white, dirty cream coloured Fender style Stratocaster, way too big for me to play but it was a fecking guitar! I posed all day in the mirror, basking in my new found proto rock-god androgyny…Ah Simple times, simple times… Boxing day, Phil Pickens from down the next street turns up and says he wants the guitar back, says he wants to make some adjustments to it, make the action better…I reluctantly concede my sweaty grip on the guitar and off Phil goes…A week, two weeks, three, four, a month, two. And all the time I’m calling down Phil’s parents house…”Is Phillip in? Has he fixed my guitar yet? When will he be in? Okay, sorry to bother you again…” The parents of Phil eventually told me to stop calling and my dad didn’t seem inclined to do anything…The months past and one nondescript day I came home and my dad was sitting in the kitchen with Bob Watkins and he gestured to a thing in the corner of the room….LO, It was a guitar, I spun it ‘round and… Bugger! It had no strings. Bigger bugger. It had no bridge for the strings to sit on. I t was small, like half size, something from the catalogue – a real piece of crap. After another interminable couple of weeks my father made me a bridge for the guitar out of a bit of wood, but the strings didn’t sit correctly on a wooden bridge and it wouldn’t tune up. I did eventually master a single string version of Smoke on the water. Anyway, its all water under the wooden bridge and I did eventually sell my bike, some chest expanders and even my red Adidas school bag to a CMI Gibson copy from the local second hand shop. First riff learned? “Big Fat Mamma” By Status Quo – not on to boast about, but...Years later when I met Jack Bass (who incidentally played with Bo Diddley And Alex Harvey), I found out the truth about the guitar that disappeared. It turned out that Phil Pickens repaired guitars and a guy gave Phil the off white Strat copy to fix. Phil then sold it to my dad who then gave it to me for Christmas. They guy out on Boxing Day for his guitar and was somewhat peeved to discover that Phil had sold it! He then gave Phil a few taps which obviously encouraged Phillip to pop up to my house and get the guitar back. So, my first sojourn into the world of music was tainted with robbery, violence, lies and deceit, but was nonetheless a great start. |
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