While my guitar gently… screams

I love music. Okay, so I’m a musician so in most cases this is an obligatory thing, but I often while away the hours reflecting on what made me fall in love with it. I’d love to say that my parents took me to see a recital and I just pointed at the cellist and in some gargled baby-speak said ‘I want that one’ (at the age of say 3, not as a teenager, obv.). I’d love to say I spent many of my hours as a youth playing vinyl discs of Beethoven and listening to Wagner’s operas, learning the sultry tones of the instruments and yearning to play the cello. But I can’t.

You see the thing is I loved rock music, and I think I’d have played any instrument that was thrown my way. My very earliest memories are of sitting in the corner of the living room with headphones on, listening to my parents’ record collection on the wood-sided hi-fi. I must have played John Ottaway’s JetSpotter of the Track to death, along with Billie Connoly’s album that had ‘If it was’ne for ya wellies’ on it, on a fantastically green cassette. I quickly progressed to Pink Floyd and Sabbath, although few of my peers believed I had such good taste at that early age. I was always listening to music. I was the first kid in school to get a walkman, and listened to Status Quo and the Rolling Stones. I even had a hat with a radio built into it.

I listened to music when I was walking, working, even riding my bike around the estate via a radio fitted to the handlebars, but it was the guitar that was the symbol of my love of music. It had the power to bring people together, a a symbol of the rebelliousness and anti-‘the man’ attitude that’s been with me all my life. Whether it was Keith Richards thumping away at the Rhythm of RnB (in it’s true sense), or the gentle strumming of Ottaway, somehow if you were onstage with a guitar you instantly became a hero. As Radiohead once sang, anyone can play guitar. And it’s true. University halls of residence are full of them. No self-respecting twenty-something alpha-male would be without one. Everyone can strum a chord on a guitar.

I keep a guitar in the corner of our living room, and even it’s basic shape seems to hold some latent force, a potential energy to lift spirits and give power to its beholder. I have 3 guitars, an acoustic, a bass and Telecaster copy. Each fits a mood. I have the bass when I want to feel funky, playing Stevie Wonder basslines or jazz bass. The acoustic is for my meandering hippyish days when I can play folk or political songs, and the electric to relive the grunge bands of my informative years.

Although I’m a much more accomplished cellist than guitarist, for some reason my relationship with the guitar always seems, if not stronger, clearer. Don’t get me wrong, my cello is my most treasured posession, but the guitar allows me to truly be me, or rather to be someone else. I can play music I connect with somewhere in my stomach. I can strum the chords and feel the anguish of the composer. I can be Neil Young strumming away with the pain of a drug-addicted friend with The Needle and the Damage Done, or I can be playing to a full Central Park with Dave Matthews’ Satelite.

So there you have it. I love music not because of the cello, the instrument I have spent years studying and on which I base my career, but because of the guitar. Is this a bad thing? I’m not quite sure…