![]() It’s generally feared that waiting lists for “non-critical” surgical procedures might soon extend to several years. It seems that most of my other projects require some elements to be spray painted, and I need better weather for that. A simple bolt-together job, although technically less ambitious than most projects I’ve undertaken, will give me something to concentrate on while I wait for the weather to warm up. Fender Neck and body – the starting pointĪnd my cataract wrecked vision is still limiting a lot of what I can do. It’s the story of the Blues, of Rock and Roll…įor me, the whole process is as much about musical appreciation, as it is about the design technicalities, the sound, or even “the look” of the instrument. For decades now, popular music has evolved as each generation has taken what has gone before, and changed it subtly with their own experience of the music and technology. Trying to get to grips with the same, (or similar),instrument, in roughly the same style – I think that’s how the whole thing gets passed down from generation to generation. Ultimately however, the best bit is always taking the finished instrument, and then learning a song or two, in (whatever approximation I can achieve of), the style of the original artist. Tracking down and sourcing individual parts, which echo or reproduce significant elements on the original, has it’s own fascination too. The research involved along the way is almost as rewarding, in itself, as finishing and eventually playing the finished instrument. Surely – if I wanted “the look” that badly – I could always just go out and buy it off the shelf?īut building “replica” or “inspired by…” guitars is, for me, much more about trying, in some way, to get closer to the artist and the actual practicalities of making their individual “sound”. But then it’s not as if original examples of Fender, “Wilko” Teles aren’t already readily available on the second-hand market. Click here to buy it for £15.In theory – this should be just about the simplest project I’ve ever undertaken. This book – rough, ready, distinctive, touching – surely helped.ĭon’t You Leave Me Here is published by Little, Brown (£18.99). The final sections show a man not sure how to move on, but trying his best to find out. Take his reaction to being asked to present a lifetime achievement award to Elton John, who gave the award straight back to Johnson: “Well, these final months have certainly been packed with incident,” he quips. Sadness lifts from him during his illness, a time when Johnson felt “intensely alive”, and his humour also bubbles through, which is often wonderful. Here, he throws his hands up, showing all of his flaws. The section where Irene dies, however, is full of raw, affecting sentiment, especially when Johnson watches his sons “sat together under the trees… I wondered what they were feeling”. Johnson and Lemmy had “trouble over a woman” in the mid-1970s, he says, in a fine section full of punk’s great and good, including John Lydon, but there’s no sign of any marital guilt. ![]() ![]() She’s the glue that holds this story together – the title an obvious nod to his grief – and she sounds a remarkable person, tolerating as she did her husband’s myriad indiscretions. There’s a woman at the heart of this tale too: Johnson’s wife, Irene, who died in 2004. “I wanted to present Dr Feelgood straight, simple and as it really was,” he writes of his group’s 1976 No 1 live album, Stupidity, at one point. When he describes the devastating Canvey Island floods of 1953 (“our house was in the sea”), his post-university jaunt to Kathmandu (“I had £60 stuffed down my Y-fronts”), and his post-Feelgood career as one of Ian Dury’s Blockheads (“somewhere along the way we picked up this character called Spartacus”), he does so without any descent into myth-making – a rare, attractive trait in rock’n’roll memoirs. Offering up a cracker of a tale, before going off on a tangent, he adds enough “anyways” and “sos” to make the more dramatic revelations relatable. Johnson writes like the Mythical Bloke in the Pub speaks.
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