In 2026, it will be an amazing FIFTY YEARS since my best friend, John Yellowlees, and I set up in business together. John, aka "Stone" or "Man", doing leather work while I, aka confusingly, "Man", or sometimes, "Other Man", made and repaired guitars. We shared a workshop and also a cottage at Gannochy Farm just outside Perth. I'm happy to say it all worked really well and we both got busy quite quickly with our trades, learned the nuts and bolts of business and had a lot of fun. Somewhere or other there are a lot of very silly photos from that time... although it was before the days of peoples' whole lives being photographed and broadcast every ten seconds... probably just as well in our case...
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| FIFTY YEARS AGO! We will have to celebrate with a mug of peppermint tea or something... |
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| I mostly fixed guitars but other instruments came my way too |
1976 was a restless year for me but one in which I picked up loads of the experience that has set me up in my working life.
At the beginning of the year I was working at John Birch Guitars in Birmingham. At the time, Birch's was the top custom guitar maker in the UK, making guitars for the rock and pop players of the day such as Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath and Dave Hill of Slade.
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| John Diggins, the guy who actually made these guitars rather than John Birch, was one of the most amazing craftsmen, I've worked alongside. Birch was responsible more for the pickups - which have a particular powerful chunky-clangy kind of sound that's still much in demand |
I found working at Birch's really heavy going... it was a dis-organised, unhealthy kind of place and I liked Birmingham even less. So I left in the Summer of '76 to live and work with some hippy friends from university on an organic small holding near Aylesbury. What a breath of fresh air that was...
... to be continued...
