February 4th: First time a Fender

The electric guitar that I had propped up in the corner of my living room has gone. It has gone back to the place that I got it from, the loft. I still have my first acoustic guitar in the corner of the room which has itself only been played a few times. My acoustic guitar still has the original strings on, the same strings for 12 years. This can’t be beneficial.

I have mastered three cords A, D and E. I am sometimes able to muster up a G. When it comes to Barre chords, forget it, I have neither the drive nor patience to master this.

In my head, I genuinely believed that the lower, softer, easier action would improve my guitar playing. This was, to me, a nice, positive, reasonable argument with balance and some evidence. The evidence being that, some bloke once told me that it was easier to play and electric guitar than an acoustic. Which is pretty much like saying that it’s easier to drive a brand new car than it is to drive an old banger. It all depends on your starting point. If you can drive, then you’ll be able to drive both the banger and the new motor however ‘ICAN’T PLAY THE GUITAR!’ ergo I could play neither the electric nor acoustic. But I wanted to learn, I wanted to be so cool and Weller-like and, God damn it, I was ruddy well going to teach myself. There was one flaw in me teaching myself guitar. I don’t know how to play. I would often pick up my guitar, dust it down, find it was out of tune, spend so long in retuning it that by the time it was tuned I had lost all interest in actually playing it.

I am sad to see my borrowed guitar head back to a lonely place where it will lay, untouched by human hands, just gathering dust and going out of tune, let’s be honest, it might have well just stay in my living room. I thank you!

The thing is, I wanted to be able to ‘play’ my guitar but I didn’t want to do the learning side of things.

I want to play like Weller. I have this amazing DVD where, Paul Weller is just sat on a stool, knocking out classic tune after classic tune, incredibly simply and seemingly easily. There is a crowd of 200 hundred people glued to his every sound and movement. One man, one guitar, one stage and 400 hundred eyes trained directly on him. That’s where I want to be. I don’t want to be playing repetitious chord changes. So I now just have one guitar that sits all alone, untouched and detuned.

Perhaps that should have been my goal, learn how to play the guitar. Yeah! Learn how to play the guitar then get a band together; tour the UK, then the world! Brilliant that’s next year sorted. Look out world! Here comes rocker Gav! Let’s get that guitar back, dust it off and tune it up and then..... What was I going to do?