I was once in a Blues-Rock Band

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As a teenager in the late sixties, I was drawn magnetically to the blues - not the unpolished American acoustic Delta blues but its English, electric blues-rock offspring: Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff.

As a teen, I practiced on my first acoustic-guitar-with-electric-pickup in my bedroom until my fingers calloused - blasting the house through the valve-radio amp; at university I played lead guitar in a four-piece band with a second-hand Fender Stratocaster, covering Cream, Free, Hendrix, and the standard electric blues repertoire.

We once opened for Free, blew up the university amp, and had to borrow theirs - an act of stunning kindness.

I actively disliked The Rolling Stones (pretentious strutting, I reckoned) and Pink Floyd (just pretentious).

I wanted directness and authenticity - delivered with craft and extreme volume. Unfortunately I wasn't really that good.

Now, in my seventies, I have a renewed appreciation for the virtuosity and diversity of Led Zeppelin and the stage impact of Rory Gallagher; I listen to Walter Trout, and sometimes to Ally Venable, Joe Bonamassa, and the Zac Schulze Gang.

And, as I practise blues fingerstyle, my callouses have come back.

Diary: Guitar for Dummies

Recapturing those rock-n-roll years ..

My first stringed instrument was an old family mandolin, which I was given as a young teen. I would try to play the blues in my bedroom with John Peel on the radio. Later I saved up for a stylish acoustic guitar with pickup, which I could plug into the back of the valve radio (the 'ext mic.' socket). How my parents thrilled to Eric Clapton's solo from "Sunshine of Your Love" screaming through their house.

I wanted to be a lead guitarist, and at Warwick in my first term I acquired a strat from another student who was just terminating his own rock-god aspirations. I played in a student band and we once warmed up 'Free' at the student union. They were kind enough to allow us to use their amps after we blew up the union's Marshall - turned out it couldn't be turned up to eleven.

But I was not very good - my deficiencies not sufficiently obscured by generous use of the fuzz box and wah-wah pedal.

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Where did the guitar pictured above come from?

I forget, but it's been occupying the loft for many years now. Still, reading about Joni has awakened my inner music-artisan. My skills were always idiosyncratic, the bane of the autodidact. I can play a lead line and the usual chords, but fingerpicking I never learned: way too 'folky'.

Thankfully, the demeaning book also pictured above has a chapter on it, and I am instructed to spend half an hour a day in practice.

Maybe this afternoon.

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Down from the loft, I tuned the guitar and tried a few chords. My finger placement was very rusty and those callouses had long gone - I winced at the imprint of steel strings.

My plan for Monday is to encourage Clare to play three-chord, 12-bar background (A, D, E7) on piano so that I can do some (acoustic) lead. But really I should cast such indulgences aside and hunker down with a solo "House of the Rising Sun" - work away at that fingerpicking.

They say Eric Clapton's career bloomed once he discovered he could sing. Sadly, if that's what it takes, my second career is DoA .. a cat ran screaming from the garden.

Funeral Music

Let me recall to you the case of Paul, the husband of a relation on my wife's side. Paul was a middle-manager in the nuclear power industry and a staunch Catholic; in fact he was a member of the Catenians. Slightly shy in person and middle-class, Paul was socially awkward - he may even have been a little bit 'on the spectrum'.

In December 2006, Paul unfortunately died. His Funeral Mass was well attended and solemn, the priests (more than one) gravely peregrinating around the large, echoing church. As the ceremony ended the presiding priest announced that Paul had chosen the accompaniment for our exiting the church en route to the grave.

At this point, a ghetto blaster was produced, as if from nowhere, and a cassette inserted. We departed the building to the jarring, amplified sounds of ABBA's "Thank You For The Music".

I was delighted. Paul had managed, in the end, to subvert the formalities with the power of kitsch. At that moment I decided that I could never match this. Put me down instead for the aria from the Goldberg Variations (by Murray Perahia please!).