Don't Look Blurred

Wow, I think the first person to acheive the status of being the pinup 2 posts in a row since the famous Hammond incident. Yes, Ben Haggar is again gracing this here page with his presence. The story goes that he invited me to Leicester to see Laura Cantrell live. She's a sort of country/bluegrass singer songwriter type and she was great. The band consisted of guitar x 2, an upright bass and mandolin. Some serious licks and twiddles were heard for the entire night. Superb songs about freight trains and subway trains, lots of songs about trains and of course some other cool stuff. The big bear of a man on lead guitar would spar with the mandolin player inbetween topics such as Lee Harvey Oswald and whiskey drinking lovers. A good time was had by all.
So after our night of hillbilly debauchery the sun rose over the scaffolded steeple of Leicester cathedral. We woke and drifted from coffee shop to coffee shop taking in the sights of student accomodation as far as the eye could see and the canal/river. Having spotted a nifty looking music shop on the way to the gig the night before, we decided to retrace our steps. I introduced Ben to the jingle-jangle sound that is the 12 string guitar while some local tracksuited troubadour improvised some crappy lyrics about listening to me play. Sounds cool but he was probably more scarey than cool. Later we decided to test out something a lttle more powerful and hobbled of to the booths with various equipment in tow. As I am sure you can make out from the picture Ben is sporting a beautiful cherry red semi acoustic Gretsch. A fine guitar if ever I saw one. Unfortunately it didn't really cut the mustard sound wise. Maybe this was simply my lack of nuiance on the instrument. Anyway the image harks back to a period of my work which as I am sure those who saw it could only label as the 'shakey' period. The complete inability to tak a photo where anything was in focus. The regression was probably more due to the failing batteries in my camera disabling the flash function. However this photo has a certain charm I think. You know the wild man of rock .....err.........well rocks. You could imagine some beatnik freight train inspired noise eminating from both mouth and amp. A modern day Woody Guthrie do I hear? Hark the herald angels sing praise to god a new genre is born. More info to come on how you yourself can help in the creation of this new phenomenon.
After spending about what was probably an hour in the booth taking advantage of the lovely lyres we departed.....to another coffee shop.
And It's a hard life for a man with no wife, lord, its a hard life God makes you live.
Fin