British Rock Guitar

The first 50 years, the musicians and their stories

Mo Foster

• Publisher: McNidder and Grace
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780857162281
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

The guitar has become the most emotive musical instrument of the last 50 years of rock and roll. From the early days when wannabee stars fashioned homemade guitars out of old tea chests, to today's sophisticated instruments the impact has been phenomenal. In this book, Mo Foster, one of the industry's most prestigious bass guitarists, and renowned producer, composer and session musician draws upon his own recollections and those of some of the greatest exponents of the rock guitar, from Hank Marvin to Eric Clapton and Brian May.

Once managed by Ronnie Scott, Foster has recorded and toured with many of the world's biggest musical icons including Jeff Beck, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Gerry Rafferty, Van Morrison and George Martin. In this insightful, passionate and humorous book Mo Foster has written the definitive history of the importance of the guitar in the development of British music over the last 50 years.

PART ONE: GROWING PAINS

1

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

Houses were quiet in the early 1950s: no all-day radio stations blaring away, and until 1955 there was only one TV channel, which transmitted until 11pm and which was off the air for an hour each weekday between 6pm and 7pm so that young children could be put to bed without complaint – it was known as ‘the ‘toddler’s truce’. The 24-hour broadcasting that we know today was unheard of.

At first we didn’t own a radio, a TV, a gramophone or a piano. You could hear clocks ticking.

Until I was about nine years old I wasn’t really aware of any music at all, unless one acknowledged BBC schools’ radio programmes such as Music And Movement, in which a disembodied voice might ask us to ‘play games with our balls’ or to cavort leadenly around the room, inspired by the music of tunes like Grieg’s ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’. I was quite a good troll.

In the fifties there were only three national radio stations available in Britain:

The BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), which was for plays and talks.

The BBC Third Programme (now Radio 3), which was for classical music.

The BBC Light Programme (now Radio 2), which was for the more popular music of the day. My parents seemed to prefer this station, a station which seemed – to me – to play mostly pointless drivel. The only pop songs I can recall on the family radio from that time were tacky novelties. Here are a few awful examples:

• “I’m a Pink Toothbrush”
• “How Much is that Doggie in the Window”
• “Shrimpboats Are a-Comin”
• “Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer”
• “Twenty Tiny Fingers”
• “Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat”
• “The Runaway Train”
• “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”
• “I Am a Mole and I Live in a Hole”
• “Bimbo, Bimbo, Where Ya Gonna Go-e-o”

Some I could just about cope with:

• “Sparky’s Magic Piano” (this was actually rather good and featured the Sonovox, an early vocoder)
• “Tubby The Tuba” (quite emotional in places)
• “I Tawt I Saw A Puddy Tat” (okay, it’s fun)
• “The Teddy Bears Picnic” (quite good really – nice bass-saxophone)
• “The Laughing Policeman” (nice tuba)

This is what we had to listen to at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings on Children’s Favourites in 1954! They certainly weren’t my favourites. It’s very weird to think back and realise that the only music that made any sense to me was hymns, which I would hear at school assembly every morning or – on special, but always bewildering occasions – at the local church. I loved the harmony and the bass-lines that were played on either the organ or the piano but I loathed the dreary singing and incomprehensible lyrics. To this day I can only be in a church as long as no one is singing.

In later years I began to envy American musicians who talked about listening to, and being influenced by, powerful local radio stations playing rock, blues, country, bluegrass, jazz, gospel, etc. Lucky bastards. For us in the UK all we had was the idiosyncratic Radio Luxembourg, and it would be a while until pioneering DJs such as Jack Jackson and Brian Matthews began broadcasting their wonderful programmes on the BBC in the early sixties. Eventually, of course, the pirate radio stations – such as Radio Caroline and Radio London – would come to the rescue.

RECORDER

One day, when I was nine, my primary school teacher, Miss Williams, brought a “descant” recorder into class, played it for a couple of minutes and asked if anyone would like to learn to play and form a recorder consort. I was mesmerised. My parents didn’t take much persuading to buy one and, having presented it to me one afternoon on a pavement somewhere in Wolverhampton, were amused that in my zeal 2to open the white cardboard box, I had read the label a little too quickly and proceeded to thank them profusely for buying me a “decent” recorder.

I became fascinated with instruments that I saw in marching bands – such as the trumpet – which had music stands shaped like lyres fixed to them. Inspired, I carefully bent a convincing music stand out of stiff wire and fixed it to the end of my recorder with Christmas Sellotape (it was white with lots of holly and berries, and the occasional robin). I was quite pleased with it, even though it was totally unstable, and the music kept falling on the floor.

After devouring tutor books I and II, I later listened to the radio with increasing interest as I picked up by ear the instrumental hits of the day, including “Cherry Pink Mambo” and “Swinging Shepherd Blues” complete with bent notes. Was this blues recorder?

SUMMER CAMP

My father was a PE teacher at a boys’ college in Tettenhall, near Wolverhampton, and every summer during the 50s we would take a succession of trains to Salcombe, in Devon, where 120 boys and seven or eight teachers with their families would spend a pleasant two weeks under canvas in a farmer’s field near a sandy bay. On particularly wet days everyone would assemble in the central marquee to be entertained with a sing-song, or by anyone with a talent for playing a musical instrument.

One boy played the accordion; he was good and had a fine repertoire of folk tunes. I was seized by the desire to accompany him in some way, but this momentary eagerness was rendered futile by the realisation that the only instrument I could play convincingly was the descant recorder, and then only from sheet music. The damp throng would certainly not be interested in hearing my unaccompanied selection from Swan Lake. Nevertheless, the seed of desire to be part of a music-making team had been planted, although for this to happen convincingly I would have to wait for the advent of rock ’n’ roll… and the guitar.

VIOLIN

A little later I was given a violin, a shiny instrument in a drab black case which had been handed down to me by my grandfather. By now I was eleven years old, the top recorder and violin player in the school. I would play violin concerts accompanied by my teacher, Miss Williams, on the piano. In my innocence I thought I was pretty good, but I was sadly deluded and, after one particular recital, I went to the back of the hall where an older man was engrossed with a machine that had two spools on top. This was the first time I had ever seen a tape recorder (there weren’t many around). Having rewound the tape, he pushed a button and I was surprised to hear the ambient sound of someone playing a violin rather badly, and with a pitching problem in the higher registers, about 100ft away. It became obvious that the offending violinist was me: I had experienced my first lesson in objectivity.

I studied violin privately for a while with a proper music teacher, Mr George Schoon at Tettenhall College, and even joined the Wolverhampton Youth Orchestra for about half an hour. But when I graduated from my primary school in Wolverhampton to the village grammar school in Brewood, Staffordshire, the long bus journeys involved meant that it was impossible to continue studying. Sadly I had to give up the violin.

In 1956 I arrived at Brewood Grammar School – where I would spend the next seven years – and discovered to my dismay that there was no music department and no orchestra; music was not even on the syllabus. In retrospect this was an unforgivable omission: we could study Latin, art, and agriculture – but not music.

The few token music lessons we did have were chaotic and pointless, and consisted of the class being cajoled into singing obscure folk melodies. I have this memory of the teacher leaning on his desk and staring into the middle distance, bored shitless as he picked his nose. Mercifully, this terrible waste of time and energy lasted no longer than a year.

3

CHAPTER 2

THE OUTBREAK OF SKIFFLE

“I think I was about 15. There was a big thing called skiffle. It’s a kind of American folk music, only sort of jing-jinga-jing-jinga-jing-jiggy with washboards. All the kids – you know, 15 onwards – used to have these groups, and I formed The Quarry Men at school. Then I met Paul.”

(John Lennon)

When I was 13, my schoolfriend Graham Ryall and I went cycling and youth-hostelling around North Wales. In those days there were strict rules about vacating the hostel in the morning, and as we were leaving a hostel one Saturday, I remember hearing a couple of older boys pleading with the warden to let them stay and hear the BBC radio show Skiffle Club (which became Saturday Club on 4 October 1958, and was at that time the only thing worth listening to apart from Radio Luxembourg). I had no idea what they were talking about.

Skiffle, however, was a short-lived phenomenon. Although its widespread popularity lasted only 18 months, it served both as an influential precursor to the forthcoming rock ’n’ roll craze and the catalyst behind many a British youngster’s discovery of active music-making. Like punk 20 years later, skiffle was of critical importance to British rock ’n’ roll, but was forced to endure a love/hate relationship with the music business. Inexperienced would-be musicians loved skiffle because they could at last approximate a melodic or rhythmic sound with makeshift instruments and without any real skill, but purist aficionados of “good” music detested it with a vengeance. Some journalists were wont to label the style “piffle” – and that was when they were feeling charitable.

Mike Groves

As a skiffle player, Mike Groves of seminal folk group The Spinners encountered a polite line in bureaucratic etiquette when he applied for his Musicians’ Union membership: “I was the first washboard player to join the MU. They sent a nice letter to thank me for joining but didn’t think they would be able to place a lot of work my way.” In households up and down the country, mums would be baffled by the constant...