the old westone

January 24, 2025January 24, 2025Leave a comment

The first sketch of 2025, but this one turns back the years, a very long way. On my last trip to London, I finally brought my old guitar back to California with me. Much to the relief of my mum I’m sure, since it’s been sitting in the back of her cupboard for years. This is my old Westone Concord I, which was given to me on my 14th birthday by my older brother. It was my first electric guitar – technically not my first actual guitar, since I picked up a really crappy acoustic at a car boot sale the year before for a fiver – hey it did the job, I learned my first chords on it and I learned how to change guitar strings on it. This one though was my first proper guitar, Japanese built, sleek and heavy with a very smooth lacquered wood finish and rounded edges, it was something to love. I didn’t want to put it down, and I rarely did. Between this and the drawing all the time it was a wonder I got anything done, though I did spend a lot of time in libraries reading language books and planning round-the-world trips. I never got that good at it, really, just enough for the sort of thing I liked. I could not and still can not play fiddly solos and do all that guitar hero stuff, but then I was never much into that sort of music. I played a lot of Beatles, Pogues, Irish music, and of course Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks. I started writing songs on this guitar right away. I wrote a lot of songs as a teenager, as you do. A lot of crap but also a lot that was immensely fun, something I’m well proud of. This was my only electric guitar for a long time, and over the years it got a little battered, the frets worn down (making it obvious I played the ‘D’ chord a bit too much) and the pick-ups and connections totally knackered. I also never had an amplifier; I would sometimes plug it into my mum’s stereo, into the jack used for a microphone (there would be a lot of karaoke singing at our family’s parties, lot of Irish songs going on), but I usually had to play with headphones on. At school though, whenever I got access to an amp, that thing would get turned up to 11 and a half. The sound it makes is dirty. A proper punk sound. I still have tapes of it, echoing through the school canteen, ending with the dinner ladies yelling at us. A friend had a small amp I’d use sometimes too when we’d get together to make really bad music. Bad, but great. I remember drawing this before, during my A-Levels, or maybe GCSEs, we studies a lot of still-life which was mostly bottles, vases and guitars. I always loved its distinctive shape. The Westone guitar did not make the cut when I moved to America. My main instrument was my big Hohner acoustic, and even that did not fly with me in 2005, I brought it over a year and a half later. So this one floated about in London, at my brother’s where my nephew played it, then one year it turned up at my mum’s again, and that gave me something to play whenever I’d come back. I’d always intended to bring it over some day, but airline allowance and everything, it was too hard. This time though I flew with Virgin which has a good policy on instruments (thanks Branson!), and I was expecting to pay the extra to have it checked in at the gate. No you’re fine, they said, it doesn’t take up much room, it’s not that heavy, and so I was able to bring it on as an extra carry-on, very easy. So, after all these years, I have all my guitars reunited. I do need to fix the frets, and the connections, maybe get new pick-ups (as long as they are as dirty a sound as the current ones), and maybe then learn how to play it better. Nah, I’m good! The Westone is back! It’s 2025, already a way worse year than even imagined, it’s time to rock out.

Regent Sounds Studio, Denmark Street

September 5, 2024September 9, 2024Leave a comment

Another in the series of London drawings to hang on the wall. This is Regent Sounds Studios on Denmark Street, off Charing Cross Road. I’ve already posted about the state of Denmark Street in a recent post. So I won’t here again. I have drawn this before, a couple of years ago it was, in a panorama that included Wunjo next door. This was the actual place the Rolling Stones recorded their first album in 1964. This is what I love about London, you can just drop things like that. They recorded more music there, and so did many other famous acts. I like the guitars they have in stock, I never bought one from there though. If I had a big house, and a lot more money, I am sure I would be picking up guitars all over the place. My Instagram algorithm certainly things I should be, every other post is advertising this Fender Acoustasonic, that Danelectro 12-string, this Luna classical, that Meteora bass. They really want me to have loads of guitars. I probably need to get better at playing them, but I am ok, I like playing what I play. I can’t sing for Jaffa Cakes, but I don’t care, I grew up in a family where having a singalong in the back yard is totally normal. When we were back in London we took my Mum on one of them double-decker bus Afternoon Tea tours, it was nice, a lot of fun. They mostly played Abba while driving us around, but I had the idea (which I didn’t start doing by the way) that there should be a Cockney Singalong bus tour of London. That would be brilliant. Go round London for an hour or so, cup of tea and a few slices of cake, and everyone sings the old Cockney songs, “Let’s all go down the Straaaand, ‘ave a banana”. Interspersed with a bit of ‘istory of course, black cabbie knowledge really. I know a lot of people who drive the black cabs and they know a lot of the history. Seriously though it would be a good laugh and very popular. I don’t live there no more though, so someone else can have the idea. Even rig up a little piano, an ol’ Joanna. I’d have to play my guitar though, or my ukulele, I never learnt tinkling the ivories beyond what I taught myself on my keyboard as a teenager. Anyway. I wanted to draw this as another slice of London that meant something to me, and in fact I’ve put this one up for sale in the Pence Gallery’s Art Auction which will held be later this month if you are interested in bidding. Visit the Pence Gallery website for more information.

still alive on denmark street

July 20, 2024July 19, 2024Leave a comment

This is the acoustic guitar room upstairs at Hank’s on London’s famous Denmark Street. I love it in there, it feels like it hasn’t changed much since I would go in there as a teenager and early twenty-something in the 90s. The walls are covered with Denmark Street flavoured pages from old music mags, mostly Beatles ones, but the sheer number of guitars is incredible. Some of them aren’t that expensive, some of them cost a surprising amount of money for ones that are just displayed for anyone to pick up and strum on that old chair. I always watch my step. I was here with my son, who at 16 loves playing the guitar, and a guitar shop where he can just sit and quietly try things out is a little refuge in the busy city, and often a door into a new world of ideas. We weren’t in there too long, but I thought I may as well get my sketchbook out and start drawing anyway, so I drew the outlines of this scene until it was time to go (I drew all the smaller details while on the plane to France the next day, and coloured it in when I got home again). I would love to spend ages in there drawing every room, though I would also want to just sit and play guitars. I tried out a really nice Gibson acoustic. My son was trying out classical guitars and banjos. I wish I had space for many, many guitars. I am starting to think there is not such thing as too many guitars. Increasingly though there are fewer and fewer guitar shops on Denmark Street.

Why is Denmark Street famous? Historically this was London’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’, the busy hub of Britain’s songwriters and music publishers, musical instrument shops and recording studios. Famous names have been associated with here, the Beatles, Elton John, the Sex Pistols lived in a flat here, and the Rolling Stones recorded their first album here at Regent Sounds Studios, and music mags such as NME and Melody Maker were based here years ago. I always knew it as the place for guitars, and guitar shops would also line down Charing Cross Road as well, alongside all the bookshops making it my favourite part of London. It’s unquestionably the place with the biggest musical heritage in Britain, but slowly the tides of redevelopment have been pushing it all away.

Back in 2014, I went there to draw the row on the north side, and as you can see it’s still packed with guitar shops, music shops, and the 12 Bar Club is even still there. That was an interesting venue, so many greats have played in that tiny space. The last time I was in there was watching a friend of university play with his band, this is going back 20-something years. Macari’s in the middle there, I bought my beloved Hohner acoustic guitar not from that one but from their other branch on Charing Cross Road, around the corner, while I was on my break from Thorntons in Oxford Street on a dark December evening at the end of 1996, I still have that guitar with me in California. Both those Macari’s are gone now (but the company still exists, and they have a shop in Haywards Heath, which is a bit far for me; their website is macaris.co.uk, and, a side note here, looking at it I was surprised to discover that they used to be based on Burnt Oak Broadway back in 1958?! Right by where Iceland is now. That I did not know!). Below, the in-progress shot.

Ok, now look at that, from 2014, and look at the same scene now in 2024. Isn’t that heartbreaking? It is fitting that the black SUV in front resembles a hearse. Hanks is still there, down the street on the right (the photo curves even more than my panorama). Where is everything else, and what is in its place? About a decade ago it was announced that a lot of Denmark Street would be done away with completely, part of the redevelopment of the area for the new Crossrail (now the Elizabeth Line). Several older buildings nearby were demolished, such as the great London Astoria and the (even better) LA2, and it’s not all bad, the new Tottenham Court Road station is a lot more spacious than the old one. What price progress.

denmark st 2024

Below, this is what I drew a couple of years ago looking over to the south row of Denmark Street. Those places are all still there, though I was disappointed to find another couple I used to go into had now gone. It feels like Denmark Street is vanishing bit by bit, being eaten up by a world without character, and it’s not just Denmark Street. It feels like everything is going, old pubs, old shops, old ways of doing things, replaced by nothingness. It reminds me of the Never-Ending Story, where The Nothing comes and consumes all, replacing imagination with…nothing.

When I see a music shop, I see a place full of possibility. You might never be able to afford that guitar you really want, but you might find something you really love, as I did with my Hohner back in 1996, that cost me less than a hundred quid (on the wages of someone who packed boxes of chocolate on Oxford Street). You might not be able to play it that well, but every instrument is a gate into a more creative way of living. There they all are, waiting for you to unlock whatever is inside of them, or maybe it is the other way around. A kid who never gets to pick up a real guitar and try it out may never think to play one; we need independent guitar shops. The musician Yungblud (who I first saw in that series about Camden Town) wrote a song about Denmark Street called ‘Tin Pan Boy’ and said that it was the first place he picked up a guitar. I first took my son to Denmark Street two years ago, when he had never played a guitar before (and as I write, two years later, I can hear him upstairs with his electric guitar coming up with new chord progressions). The world keeps on changing, doesn’t it. But it won’t be as good as Denmark Street was.

i hear you’re a bassist now

May 30, 2023May 30, 20232 Comments

The number of instruments in this household is slowly rising. Just before Christmas I got myself an early present, finally getting a bass guitar, having never had one before. I played one a few times at school, but since then I’ve never picked one up. I am a massive Macca fan, so I decided to get the Höfner violin bass, with smooth flatwound strings. It’s light to pick up, being hollow-bodied, and shorter scaled so not massive. I would like to get a massive bass (though I’d have to describe myself as a Massive Bassist), a big heavy Fender, because they’re so different, but I have been really loving learning bass on the Höfner. I’m a beginner, for sure, but I learned a few riffs years ago and have been getting my way through a bunch of Beatles and Motown stuff as I try to learn bass lines. Got a lot to work on, especially regards technique – I know there are a few ways to play, and I still primarily play in a similar way to how I play guitar, but I’m slowly getting the hang of that bass plucking (though I tend to pluck at my guitar like a bass sometimes anyway). I don’t play with a big booming bass map, rattling the teacups of my neighbours, but I use a small practice bass amp that has a nice clean sound to it. I’m sure I have some work to do with setting it up properly, I might take it into a shop to help get it sounding just right. I struggled a bit with fret buzz, particularly on that top E string, and adjusted the truss rod and the bridge a little bit, though the latter is not easy on the Hofner. It turns out that when the weather is very wet, when we had all that rain, the sound is different to now when it’s dry and there’s a lot less moisture in the air (fret buzz has gone). I’m no expert, and don’t really see myself ever being one. I still enjoy my little Lake Placid Blue Squier Tele, I don’t actually plug it in very often and it’s my go-to when I need a quiet strum. I’m still not a particularly skillful guitarist, I have been improving a bit as I’ve been playing more but being all that good was never a high priority for me, I just like to play what I play. I’ve played guitar since I was 13, and my brother got me an electric on my 14th birthday (still have it, but it’s back in London, it needs a lot of work, and new frets, but is otherwise still a lovely little guitar). I still have my big Ibanez ArtCore that I got in 2006, though I never get that out of its case, and never really loved that guitar. I got some good sounds out of it for sure, but I guess I let it sit locked away for so long when I spent years not playing at all. I had gotten very self conscious all of a sudden years ago that actually I was pretty shit at guitar and didn’t want to even try any more. I rarely even picked up my acoustic, my beloved Hohner that I got in 1996 in Charing Cross Road, except to occasionally strum through a bit of frustration. I can’t say exactly what prompted this sudden dismissal of my instruments way back when, I had been writing some music and made some decent little tunes (decent in my head, anyway), but decided it was all a waste of time. It’s only in the past year or so, I think basically since watching Get Back, that I’ve said no, I want to play music again, and I don’t care who thinks it’s shit, it belongs to me. Also, a few years ago my wife got me a ukulele, after our first Hawaii trip, and I slowly started playing that and absolutely loving it. I’m not out there going to jam with others, play in front of people who are expecting cool bluesy licks and the sort of expertise you’d expect from someone who has apparently been playing guitar since 1989 to be able to muster up, but I never got that good when I was a kid, and I’m only playing for me as an adult. But I’m learning, my own way, and now I’m picking them up regularly, every day, and trying to learn new songs and lines bit by bit. It’s fun, music is fun, not something I’m making a song and dance about, but I really enjoy it. What I love about the bass is that I am approaching like an absolute beginner too, so basically everything is new, even if it’s not really. Plus it looks cool. I think at school I veered towards the guitar because I thought the guitar was obviously cooler than the bass, which was easy and plodding, and nobody could really hear anyway. Now of course we all know, the bass is bloody cool, and as a Beatles nut this one looks so cool. This is the start of a beautiful friendship (and, if I’m not careful, a beautiful collection).

back to where you once belonged

February 4, 2022February 4, 20222 Comments

I bloody loved Get Back. Peter Jackson has done an amazing job with all that old footage from the Let It Be sessions, it really was like getting the Beatles back for a little while. I have so many things to say about it that I can’t even say them, so I continue to re-watch it, to listen to other Beatles buffs talks about it, and then re-watch it again. It’s an absolute joy, compelling to watch. To say that it has re-sparked my life-long love of the Beatles is an understatement. At the same time, I was also recently given the massive new Paul McCartney book The Lyrics for Christmas, which I’ve been eagerly anticipating and listening to Macca interviews about it for the past few months. So I’ve not only been listening to all the old Beatles stuff but many of my old Wings and solo Macca stuff, which I loved so much when I was a kid. On top of that, I have pulled the old electric guitar out from under the bed, the one I bought in 2006 and haven’t played since about 2009, it has been locked away in its hard case under the bed like a spaceman in stasis. It’s an Ibanez Art-Core AFS-75, in black. It has been nice catching up.

The Beatles were the band that made me first pick up a guitar in the first place, back in the 80s. My friend and fellow Beatles-nut Ralph had a guitar, so I got one for a fiver at a car-boot, but it was a pretty crap acoustic, so on my 14th birthday my brother got me an electric guitar, a Westone Concord II. I need to finally bring that old thing back from England at some point and fix it up, give it new pick-ups, make it a project. That’s what I actually learned to play on, though I was never very good and couldn’t do anything fancy, just play chords and do the the odd bit of finger-picking. It was easy to play though, easier than my Ibanez, which might look and sound better but never felt completely right. I think I’m a bit intimidated by this one. I would write songs, so many songs, it was always about trying to create, come up with new tunes. Anyway in 1996 while working at Thorntons chocolate shop in Oxford Street I went out on my break and bought a Hohner acoustic guitar at Macari’s on Charing Cross Road, which from day one had a beautiful warm sound, and it still has. I have brought that with me, to Belgium, France and over here to California, and it’s my favourite guitar. I got the Ibanez after moving to the US – my second Ibanez, actually. The first one, a black electro-acoustic I bought in Cotati a week or so after my arrival, broke when it fell over softly onto the carpet. So I went out and got this one as a much flashier replacement. I enjoyed it a lot and even recorded a few new pieces with it. I love playing with music, even if it isn’t exactly sophisticated, I just love it. And then I stopped, for some reason I just stopped playing entirely, and wouldn’t even pick up my acoustic. This lasted for years, and I was off guitars. I wasn’t any good, so that was that. I got a ukulele a few years ago after our first trip to Hawaii and loved it, so for the past few years I’ve been playing that off and on, and I love it, the gentle sound. I’m still learning but it’s already one of my favourite things. So I started getting my acoustic out a bit more, but not wanting to disturb, played quietly or when people weren’t home. After watching Get Back, my old Beatles love made me want to just be strumming, all the time, so I was on the uke or the acoustic as much as I could. Certainly on our trip to Hawaii I played a lot of ‘Here Comes The Sun’, which was optimistic given all the rain we had. Then last week I remembered my electric guitar, hidden away under the bed like a secret. I dragged out its heavy hard case, unhooked the clasps, and released it from its plush blue bed. Now the next bit should be, “and then the years fell away as I played a melodic solo, my hairs standing on end, I was back.” But that would be completely false because I was never that good a player, and the truth is I never felt comfortable with this guitar. It was nice playing it again, but it still felt like it could never be fully in tune when playing open chords (I felt the same back in 2006), I’m mentally used to the fretboard on my old electric, and I’m still sounding beginner-level clunky when it comes to riffs and scales. I feel a bit unworthy of such a fancy looking guitar. I think I’d hidden it away for so long because I thought, well I might just sell it. But then, you know what, I found that I could do a few things, and why not learn, why not take this time to improve? So that’s what I’m going to do, play it more often, try things I wasn’t able to do before, see what comes out. I got some new strings, I’m going to put them on this weekend. It feels like a new guitar, to the point that I feel surprised when I listen to the old recordings from 06-07, I did actually play it more than I thought. And I even drew it back then – see below, along with the chords of a tune I wrote called ‘Angry Words’ (ironically I didn’t write any words to that one, the tune was all in the lead riff). So now ‘m watching a lot of YouTube videos on doing this and that, and it feels like starting over, like an absolute beginner. Just like a sketchbook and pen, I loved having a guitar in my hands when I was growing up, it made me feel that little bit safer.

angrywords

the bedroom days

May 26, 2020May 26, 20201 Comment

A couple more on the iPad drawn in the bedroom, or the Bedroom Office as it now is. Both drawn before we got our living room back (which was over the weekend, hooray!) so this was also the dining room and watching tv room. It’s also where I draw and write (haha, I hardly ever write at the moment), and it would be where I do my Lego animations but I’ve not done those in a while either. I felt like installing a running track around the bed and using it as a gym too. With all stuff from downstairs shelves all over the floor it would have been more like a hurdle track. Ah well, it’s where we are right now. I notice from some of my fellow sketchers in Europe that things are slowly beginning to open up there, and I think that they will here too soon, but extremely cautiously. Well most of us, some aren’t. I also can’t wait for the shelter-in-place to be over, because then the walking and running paths around here might not be so busy, people might stay in more. I don’t know, I want to go places, get on a train and wander about the City, but I don’t know how we’ll all feel. I have a nice mask. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of going on week-long hikes along the national trails of England, as if that should ever happen. I used to think about that sort of thing when I was young but never got around to it, except my time in Cumbria when I was 17 doing the Outward Bound thing. In the meantime, stay at home, it’s very hot outside again in California. These two sketches were done on the iPad, sat on the bed, the one below while watching Revenge of the Sith (I do love ‘Sith’, one of my favourite films), the one above while monitoring an online seminar/workshop for our department. The bookshelf was moved from downstairs during the flood but I am going to keep it there as I like having books close by my bed. I have already moved the dvd shelf downstairs and replaced it with my old collection of Fighting Fantasy books. And right now, I’m watching the Bundesliga, as football has returned to Germany, albeit in empty stadiums. Unlike the quiet first round of games, the Dortmund-Bayern game has crowd noise pumped in, and the tv cameras are angled to show as little of the empty stands as possible. I’ve watched so many old World Cup games lately it is nice to watch some actual real new games. I feel like a teenager again, when I would rarely leave my room, just stay in there drawing and watching football or Star Wars or reading. Still on top of the recent flood which left us without a living room for a month, one of the cats got sick and was in hospital a couple of times, he’s recovering now the poor thing, but he did wee all over my side of the bed one night. Go home 2020 you are drunk! One thing all of this disruption and time at home has given me is time to go through things and organize stuff, get rid of what I don’t need, and one day I might get started on that.

In the meantime I’ll draw round the house. Tomorrow our local sketching thing Let’s Draw Davis will have a virtual get-together, less of a sketchcrawl and more just the show and tell bit, showing what we have drawn while stuck at home during this whole thing. I had an idea over the weekend that I might put a video together of my stay-home sketches, and the I thought I could do a series of YouTube videos giving a tour of Davis through my sketches, focusing on a different area or theme each time, make about 8-10 of them. Summer project.

Sketching Sudwerk

May 5, 2019May 5, 2019Leave a comment

Last week I was invited to lead a sketching event at the Sudwerk Taproom in Davis. Now I used to go to Sudwerk in its previous incarnation, as a restaurant and beer garden, and I sketched it a few times. The restaurant is closed now, and the current owners operate a popular tap room with am interesting rotation of beers, but still keeping the old Sudwerk classics like the Marzen, which I always liked. No longer sold in big litre glasses though, but my diet (see previous sketch) probably means I should lay off those anyway. We had a number of other sketchers there with us, it was a nice relaxing evening, I gave some tips on sketching places like this, and I drew a few of the things that I saw about there. It was a nice evening!

modern art makes me want to rock out

September 26, 2010Leave a comment

Last Friday I went out to the far western edge of Davis, to the fourth annual Stonegate Art Fest. It’s an exhibition of artwork – paintings, sculptures, photography – put on by the residents of the Stonegate area. I went to see the work of my colleague Rahman Azari and his wife (both are excellent artists), and do some sketching, and also spread the word about the upcoming Davis sketchcrawl on October 16. I met some interesting local artists and spent a lot of time talking, so only managed two sketches. I drew the guitarist (Kit Sodergren), who played an acoustic set; he was playing “If I Fell” by the Beatles as I sketched this. The other drawing is called “Stradipearius”, a piece by Eric Nelson which was part of the ‘box project’ the stonegate artists were invited to do. Each was given a small wooden box and asked to create something from it, with diverse results. Afterwards, I cycled home, through a Davis which is now full of people and new students, past frat houses which are ‘rushing’, and a downtown full of music and the excitement of the new school year. Summer is over*, and Fall is here at last.

(*when I say Summer is over, I say it while it’s like, 95 degrees outside)

the e street strummer

November 20, 2009November 20, 20098 Comments

He stands outside Chipotle and Peet’s Coffee n E Street, busking on his twelve-string at lunchtimes when I am there, sounding like Dylan, Nelson, Haggard; his music is very nice. He has one of those harmonicas you can play while guitaring; no cymbals at the knees though. Very distinctive with his long white hair, moustache, sunglasses; he has a long feather in his hat. One of the characters of Davis. He was singing a song about watercoloured wine while I was drawing this, munching on my burrito. It was cold outside; November is really kicking in. The Fall Colours have just exploded all around us, the trees have suddenly turned the colour of flames, and there’s no way I’ll keep up with them.

strings of fear

June 25, 2009June 25, 20093 Comments

#13 of 30. Still no name for this series. I must get on that. This is my acoustic guitar, the one I bought twelve years ago in Charing Cross Road. It’s lived in a few countries.