This is the part of the website where I ‘big myself up’ as you young people say, and tell the story of how I’ve got to where I am. Now I’ll be honest with you here - I’m not very good at this sort of thing, as anyone who knows me will no doubt confirm. It’s great (in some ways) when people say things like ‘you can really play that thing, how come you’re not rich and famous?’ as it’s better than them saying ‘if you practiced a bit more you could be nearly as good as my mate one day’ but I suppose it reflects the fact that I’m lousy at saying that I can play the guitar and have done a few things that could be seen as being impressive. Case in point - that last sentence. Shouldn’t it say I’m really good at playing the guitar and do things that most people (including myself when I was a lad) can’t even dream of? See what I mean?

So for better or worse I’m going to try to write about my playing here. Let’s see how we get on...

I always liked music as a youngster. I was born in 1961 (yeah I know, I’m well past it) and so can remember The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix... well, I think I can anyway. I sometimes wonder whether I’ve superimposed them onto my young memory although my Mum always said that I liked them, and if she said that then it must be true mustn’t it? Anyway my first encounter with a guitar came sometime in the early ‘70s when my cousin Gary began playing one. I thought it was amazing to look at, and it sounded even more amazing when he played it, and I can say without pretension that I wanted one then. It would be a while - maybe a year or two - before my Mum and Dad bought me one for Christmas. Initial euphoria gave way to horror when I discovered that you didn’t just pick it up and play it. Faced with the prospect of things like ‘practise’ I put it away and went back to attempting to be a footballer, or something.

In the meantime I watched the likes of T.Rex, The Faces, Slade and David Bowie on ‘Top Of The Pops’ and spent my milk round money on their singles. (For the benefit of any young people who have strayed onto this site by mistake a ‘single’ was a 7 inch diameter vinyl disc which was played on a record player. They were a lot of fun.) Then, one day I came in from school, turned the television on and was confronted (and I don’t use that word lightly) by a band with the unlikely name of Dr. Feelgood playing live on a programme called ‘The Geordie Scene’. I’d heard of them - sort of - and they were a scary looking bunch to say the least. They reminded me of the bad guys that you saw on ‘The Sweeney’ (a popular television programme among us teenage herberts at the time) and were absolutely nothing like the squeaky-clean pretty boys and girls that were increasingly prevalent replacements for my beloved glam rockers on ‘TOTP’. They looked fantastic, sounded even better and I had to find out more about them. This didn’t prove to be an easy task, as the next day my class mates were nowhere near as excited about them as I was. Nevertheless I somehow discovered that the clearly-mad guitarist was called Wilko Johnson (a weird name, but he looked like he was a weird guy, with his short hair and constant jerky movements) and that their singer was called Lee something-or-other, which I liked as I spent half of my time at school being taunted for having a girl’s name. I decided that this was the band for me, and saved up for what seemed like several hundred years to buy their monolithic, monophonic, monochromic masterpiece of a first album ‘Down By The Jetty’. In the meantime my class mates were, to use a term popular at the time, ‘getting into’ bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and we started to lend each other albums as we couldn’t afford to buy everything that we wanted to hear. I liked their albums although I thought some of the songs went on a bit; most of them weren’t as keen on getting into mine.

Around this time I remembered that there was an acoustic guitar somewhere in my perpetually untidy bedroom, and I decided to attempt to learn to play the damn thing. Initial experiments proved encouraging, and I was further enthused by the discovery that a guitar teacher lived around the corner from us. I remember walking round there one evening and knocking on the door. When it opened I blurted out something like ‘I, er, I hear you teach guitar’. The chap who had answered the door looked a bit taken aback, but then smiled - ‘I try’. His name was Tony McMahon, and it turned out that he was a classical guitar teacher. It also turned out that I had a nylon-strung classical guitar, which I decided was fate telling me to learn guitar from this man despite the fact that I actually wanted to sound more like Pete Townshend than Segovia. Still it was a breakthrough from my point of view, and before long I’d scraped enough money together to add to some birthday money and buy myself an electric guitar and amplifier. I was ready to rock. Sort of.

Then I heard Eddie And The Hot Rods. In my teenage mind they were like Dr. Feelgood only faster and therefore better. I practically wore out my copy of their ‘Live At The Marquee’ EP as I sat in my room reading music paper reports of up and coming bands with weird names like The Sex Pistols and The Damned. Suddenly all my mate’s Pink Floyd albums sounded a bit daft. It was time for punk rock to rear it’s spiky head in my little world, and it couldn’t have arrived a moment too soon. I still liked The Beatles, the Who and all my old glam singles, but when ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’ and ‘New Rose’ came out it was time for action - or so I thought. I was very shy (I still am sometimes) and so was not exactly over-qualified when it came to going out into the big bad World and meeting like-minded would-be rock ‘n’ rollers. Instead I asked around a bit a school and found that there were a few other musical instrument owners (none of us really qualified as ‘players’ yet) and eventually I found myself attempting to get a band together with them, although half of the band wouldn’t entertain the idea of playing songs of an even vaguely punky nature, while the rest of us weren’t interested in very much else. We eventually cobbled together a few songs that we all agreed on, even managing to write a couple of our own, and played a couple of school assemblies and even played an evening show around the time that we all left school. It wasn’t much - no trust me, it really wasn’t - but at least I was on my way, discovering that my innate shyness seemed to desert me when I stepped onto a stage. That was lucky don’t you think? 

So - what happened next? Did I :-

1. (a)leave school then join a band and make records, play gigs and earn a fortune?
   

2. (b)go to university then join a band and make records, play gigs and earn a fortune?
   

3. (c)get a job at the E.M.I. electron tubes factory in Ruislip?
   

The correct answer is of course (c) so five points if you got that one.

It was probably the biggest mistake that I could have made. Don’t ask me what I thought I was doing. Looking back now I might have thought that it was important to earn some money so that I could watch bands and buy guitars; what actually happened was that I got so chronically depressed that I came close to pulling myself apart. Not good frankly. All that kept me going - make that all that kept me alive - was watching bands and learning the guitar. The only consolation was that I was beginning to get good at both.

After a just over a year stumbling through each weekday desperate for the evenings or weekends when I could go to see a band rather than endure eight hours of torture I went to see Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band at The Wembley Arena in the Spring of 1981. A friend had a spare ticket so I decided to go along. In many ways I wasn’t expecting much - I really liked some of his records and he seemed to be a good bloke in interviews but as I say I was at a low ebb and was all too aware of how things could let you down. Besides, I’d seen The Clash - how much better than them was he going to be?

Nothing prepared me for the show that I saw that night. It changed everything. EVERYTHING. It took a while to sink in, but the three-and-a-bit hour blitzkrieg wrenched me out of my torpor. Now at last it really was time for action. I finally faced up to the fact that the 9-to-5 World was not for me, so I started to plan my escape from it, saving up my wages instead of squandering them, learning more about music theory from Tony so that one day I could teach guitar myself and, maybe most importantly, I stopped dreaming about being in a band and got on with the job of finding one. Somehow this gave rise to The Others - if ever there was a bunch of outsiders it was us. We wrote a few good songs but with hindsight spent far too much time getting out of our heads and being caught up with dodgy women to ever be a serious musical prospect. Well, I certainly did anyway. But it was something I felt that I had to do.

I left E.M.I.’s at the end of 1983. In many ways my time there has never left me. On the one hand it haunts me, on the other it inspires me. It was awful, but when I get down about what I do I think back to those dim dark days. Never again.

After a few months of doctors wanting to send me for psychiatric analysis I ended up on one of those ‘keep-the-dole-queues-down’ schemes that our beloved governments come up with from time-to-time. Compared to the hell I’d been through it was a walk in the park, but I knew it was only for a short period of time and it gave me a bit more planning time. The Others had fizzled out but I’d met a few musicians and like-minded souls; more importantly I’d gained a bit of confidence (something that’s generally in short supply in my little world) by being in a gigging band. I was also getting the hang of putting musical ideas together. In the spring of 1985 I formed The Price, a band that in various forms would last until early 1994, and that still occasionally reforms today. We made some records, played hundreds of gigs and met some great people along the way. We never achieved any real commercial success, but we made a lot of people happy (including ourselves sometimes) and still get talked about in good terms, which can’t be bad. It wasn’t all plain sailing - but life never is.

Talking of life - away from the music something had happened that had a massive effect on me and my family. My Mum developed Motor Neurone Disease. We all watched helplessly as she went from being an active, outgoing person to a housebound invalid virtually unable to talk or do anything for herself. By the time The Price imploded I was spending an increasing amount of time at home helping my Dad to look after her. My next musical move would have to reflect this responsibility, and I began teaching guitar as well as starting a songwriting project with local would-be rock star Nikk Gunns. We played a few gigs here and there and wrote over a hundred songs, some of which were very good but none of which the World will ever hear unless Nikk suddenly gets a record deal. A waste of time? Not at all, not from my point of view anyway. I also indulged my love of rhythm and blues that began with The Feelgoods all those years previously by playing in The Informers - well, I’d learned all those Wilko riffs so it was a shame not to make use of them.

Then, on February 7th 2001, my Mum died. It had been a long haul - she’d suffered from MND for something like 18 years and probably coped better than you, me or pretty much anyone else would have. I still don’t know how she did it, but she did. I still miss her, both as the Mum I remember as a lad and as the person who showed such tremendous spirit in the face of adversity. Wherever she is now, I hope she’s ok.

So there I was, a few months away from my 40th birthday. What now?

In the few weeks after her death I took stock. I had built up a reasonably successful guitar teaching career but wanted to get back out and play live. Time to see who and what was about.

One of the old friends that I contacted to tell them about me Mam leaving the building was Leeson O’Keeffe, who I’d met back in the late ‘80s when our band played with his bands The Shout and Genius Freak. We ended up in the pub (as usual) and by the end of our evening together I’d said that if he ever needed a guitarist he should get in touch. Actually I probably said something like ‘ef yoo evah need a guitar player anytime giff me a coll’, but that’s neither here nor there - one way or another six months after Mum died I found myself in Ireland with his band Neck supporting The Undertones, followed by some gigs in New York City in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Just making up for lost time? Not really - I’d never describe any of the time I spent looking after Mum as ‘lost’. However it was time to play the guitar again, and one way or another I’ve been doing it ever since. I played for Neck for another couple of years including shows at The Glastonbury Festival and supporting The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Shane McGowan and the Popes and Stiff Little Fingers among others, until one day a guitar pupil of mine came in clutching a leaflet from a theatre show he’d been to see. It was based on the Blues Brothers films and he’d enjoyed it so much that he’d decided that he’d like to try learning some of the songs from the show. When I looked at the leaflet I recognised one of the surrogate BB’s as Pete Tobit, who I first met back in the early 1980’s and who I’d not seen for several years. I rang the agency number on the leaflet, they gave me Pete’s number and within a couple of weeks I found myself playing guitar in Dave Finnigan’s Commitments (Dave played Mickah Wallace - you know, the mad drummer who head butts everyone - in the film) somewhere in Huntingdon. I went on to play many gigs with the band, which eventually morphed into the band from the afore-mentioned Blues Brothers show, and I soon began playing with them too. From there I met and started depping in the likes of The F.B.I. Band and in their other guise as Utter Madness, as well as a few unbelievably enjoyable gigs with tribute bands The Sex Pistols Experience  and The Pistols - things were getting busier...

Then in July 2007 my phone rang - it was Dave Ruffy, who I first saw playing in The Ruts back in punkier times. He’d been told that I could help them - they were about to play a reunion show as a benefit for guitarist Paul Fox who was suffering from lung cancer, and with Paul too ill to rehearse they needed someone who could stand in for him. (I’d met all the band as a teenage fan and had known Paul locally for many years, to such an extent that he even produced The Price’s second single ‘So What About Love?’) So it was then that I found myself in a rehearsal room the very next afternoon with Dave Ruffy on drums, Segs on bass and the mighty Henry Rollins replacing the late Malcolm Owen on vocals - it’s still something that I can barely believe actually happened, but happen it did. Further incredulity followed when I was not only invited to play on the upcoming new Ruts D.C. album ‘Rhythm Collision Volume 2’ but also to play 4 live shows with the band supporting The Alabama 3 at the end of 2011. At the time of writing the album is due to be released and more shows are planned - I’ll keep you posted as they say.

I also play occasional acoustic guitar with ex-Adverts / Explorers / Cheap singer and songwriter T.V. Smith who I first met back in the 1980s. This came about when The Price played an acoustic show with T.V. and he invited me to join him for a couple of songs - we enjoyed it so much that we learned a full set which continues to develop as and when we get chance to play together. They’re always great gigs to be part of, as in my not-so-humble opinion he’s one of the greatest songwriters of them all.

And then there’s The Upper Cut, in which myself and my old mates Roger and Terry from the Informers join ex-Chevrons singer Terry playing what we normally describe as ‘Sixties and Seventies rock, soul and rhythm ‘n’ blues’ - great stuff, in other words. And all those Wilko riffs that I mentioned above now get an airing in The Flying Squad, who really must get some more gigs one day. I also have a (very) sporadic acoustic trio called The Rikardo Brothers with Pete and Alan from local rock ‘n’ roll legends The Good Old Boys, and probably some other groups that I’ve forgotten about, as well as working on an album based on John King’s book ‘The Prison House’ with the author himself. Oh and I make the odd (sometimes very odd) appearance on Music Scene Investigation, in which I join the panel in listening to and commenting upon material that’s been submitted for review.

You know it’s strange - I never think what I do is particularly interesting or exceptional (although as I say in the introduction to this piece I’m always dreadful at talking about myself and my playing) yet reading back through this I’ve got a lot to be thankful for and a lot to be proud of. I consider myself very lucky to be able to play music at all, let alone to be playing it with the people that I play it with and in the places that it sometimes takes me too. I’ll never take it for granted, and I hope to be doing a lot more of it in the future.

L.H. April 2012