In the 70s when you wanted to play guitar and came from a poor background your entry level guitar was a cheapo Japanese thing by a company like Satellite This is what I did. £60 got me this black Les Paul which I thought looked great, even though the body was probably some sort of plastic.
The action was high and it really hurt my fingers and I wasn’t quite sure how to tune it. But did I say it looked great? £60 was a lot of money, so I didn’t have money for an amplifier, which was probably just as well. I used to lean the head into the door frame because it resonated and slightly amplified it.
I took that guitar to college, because did I say it looked great, which was probably the most important thing to me. And the first time I actually plugged it into an amp was during a ‘gig’ for something called the Anti-Music Society, which was a loose group of people dedicated to creating noise that couldn’t be called music. It was the sort of art happening that you get involved in at 18 years old. I don’t know whose amplifiers they were but they sounded wonderful to me
I clambered on stage and we all played whatever we wanted in a loud cacophony which people actually stood and watched. I chose to play the Smoke On The Water riff and the drummer played along like it was ‘real’. It sounded great, loud and rough. I even thought people liked it. Everything else was shamelessly chaotic.
Then the jack lead on the cheap guitar started to cut in and out giving the sound a sort of hiccup. As Phil the ‘singer’ shouted words and the drummer thrashed around, it really was a vortex of atonal noise that shattered the air.
I suppose we were on stage for maybe 10-minutes before no one could stand this torture any longer and we wound it up. The idea was to be noise terrorists and I think we achieved that.
Later, I joined a more conventional band with a lecturer who had played with John Mayall and got a proper guitar - an Ibanez - but more of that later
