What Goes Around Comes Around

This is quite a long story, with two intwined events that played out…..  but it goes to show……

I was walking past a guitar shop in London today and I saw a young shaggy haired guy looking in the window at the guitars hanging there and it was one of those moments you sometimes get – I don’t know if you’ve experienced them – where you feel somehow transported back in time for a second and all your senses, smell, feel, sound, seem to connect with a time from long ago and you’re there – in the actual moment – back there when it was me buying my first real guitar.  It was a Rickenbacker bass, I’d saved up for it and it was me staring into that window with a sense of excitement and a similar expression to the one on the face of the shaggy haired boy.  It would be a bit too much to say I felt a sense of destiny as I stood there that day, it was actually more like I was trying to summon up the courage to actually go in the shop and point to the guitar hanging on the wall and hand over my money……

When I look back it feels now like a scene from a  shadowy black and white movie…. a scene which I’d found myself in a few times…..

Now before that, before I got to buy a proper grown up Name brand guitar like a Rickenbacker, when I was still at school, I actually made my first bass guitar myself. Yes, handmade it.  The body was shaped like a fender precision but, here’s the thing – it was perspex, see through and it took hours and hours of cutting and polishing and loving care to make it perfect.  I think I got the idea from seeing Kieth Richard playing a perspex Dan Electro… anyway, that was the actual bass I learnt on – and all the while I never had a six string guitar… I always played and wrote everything on the bass…..

Roll forward a few years in this movie….. Me and the grown up Rickenbacker meet up with young Mick Jones.…. he is working in a bookshop in Camden Town to save up to buy a real grown up guitar too… and eventually he gets together a handfull of ten pound notes..  so I went with him to the guitar store in London’s Charing Cross road where he pointed to the dark brown Les Paul Junior guitar hanging on the wall and gave the man his hard earned roll… and that guitar was the one Mick went on to use to write and record all those early albums……

Well you probably know some of the stories about the band we tried to put together back in 1975, the unfortunately named London SS… the band I believe Karma wouldn’t allow to work out and we went our separate ways, at least in terms of bands.  So Mick decided to work with one of the people who had auditioned for us – he was called Paul Simenon and Mick was going to teach him to play bass….

But he didn’t actually have a bass… so I gave them my original, lovingly crafted perspex bass guitar…..

Paul of course spray painted it black and splash painted in a Jackson Pollock style all over it and wrote the notes on the neck to help him – and that’s the one you can see in the early pictures…

Meanwhile me and the Rickenbacker went on to meet Billy Idol.… and I still never learnt to play a six string guitar properly….

Roll on 30 years and Mick and I are in a band together again, this time getting it right and Mick suggests that I should play six string Guitar instead of bass so we’d be the two guitarists and we’d just get a rhythm section… Now the weird thing is that in all these years of being in bands I’d only ever played bass and never got around to having an acoustic or a six string to properly learn..

Anyway as a way of returning the Simenon favor,  he said he would give me to learn on, yes you guessed it – that original Les Paul Junior – the one I went with him to buy all those years ago…..

Now the only thing was he’d actually leant it to some charity exhibition a while ago and not collected it…… and so I needed to collect it from the shop where they were keeping it ……the guitar shop in the  Charing Cross road…….

So there I was, thirty years later, standing outside looking in, getting up the courage again… I went in and pointed to the now legendary guitar and said I’d come for it and the man took it off the wall and handed it to me… And I got that same shiver.

Only this time leaving the shop with that same guitar, as I walked down the street, I noticed that there was something different about its case – there, stenciled on the side were two words………. “The Clash”

Well I took that guitar home, and I’m still using it to practice regularly – after all I’ve got thirty years catching up to do…