Early Teenage Years - 1976

This was definitely a time of big change. Puberty had arrived and 1977, the year of Punk, followed hot on its heels, and I had begun to dream of playing guitar and being in a band.
But when I turned 13 in March 1976, I was still listening mainly to The Shadows, and my Dad's rock 'n' roll records. During 1976, my interest in classical music began to gradually wane, as I became more and more drawn to the idea of playing the guitar.
At that time my mother had a 'Spanish' guitar which used to hang on the wall, more as an ornament than an instrument. But as a young, second generation Shadows fan I used to get it off the wall and pose with it in front of the mirror whilst pretending to be Hank Marvin.

Being actually able to play anything was still 2 or 3 years into the future, but being a little older, I now at least understood what a 'lead guitarist' was, And when I wasn't pretending to be Hank Marvin, I was acting out all of Scotty Moore's guitar solos from my Dad's early Elvis records.
Around this time (when not dressed in my Sunday best as above) I had plagued my mum and dad to let me have a pvc bomber jacket (a real leather one being unaffordable at the time) and I used to don my black bomber jacket and brylcream my hair back into a teddy boy style "duck's arse" to go a weekly rock 'n' roll disco with a school friend who was also into rock 'n' roll. We were both slightly in awe of an older lad who used to go there, who always wore a pair of real blue suede brothel-creepers, which were sold in a shop in Mansfield (where I grew up) which we could only gaze longingly through the window at, because they were far out of our price range. Besides which, there was no way I would've been allowed to have such a thing, as my mother was not at all keen on my 'teddy boy' image, and sadly I have no pictures.

As for the guitar, It simply never occurred to me that a person could teach themselves. At school, a couple of the more well off kids had been taught to play the piano through formal lessons, and I assumed that the same thing would have to apply to learning the guitar.
But within a year or so, the home-grown 'Punk' music which swept the UK in 1977, helped to cement the idea in my mind, that a person could be self-taught. And within that year, I abandoned rock 'n' roll and decided that my black bomber jacket would serve equally well when I began to embrace 'Punk' music, which had a 'sound' and attitude which seemed tailor-made for a young 14 year old full of rebellious stirrings and growing discontent with school life, and the academic expectations of my parents.