With the arrival of my latest acquisition, a Dean Key Largo, from the US, all the interest my friends have shown in it, and my newly-begun guitar restoration projects, I thought it would be nice to display all my guitars on the web.

So here is a brief run through of my guitar accumulation – collection would be too purposeful a word for what I have here.

When I was five, I told everyone I wanted to be a pop star like Tommy Steele. And my mum bought me a plastic Tommy Steele guitar in Woolworths.

That went the way of all flesh but my enthusiasm was undiminished so around my tenth birthday she bought me a wooden guitar in Woolworths. This was a cheap plywood thing with steel strings that went rusty over the years – I never knew you could change them – and it also disappeared, sometime during my teens.

I spent quite a lot of time playing my brother’s guitar, but then he went off to Italy on holiday and left it there when he returned.

I bought an electric guitar in a second-hand shop in Bournemouth in 1969 but, again, I didn’t know what I was doing. This was the third unplayable guitar I owned. I traded it in against the Les Paul copy that I acquired in 1979 while trying to start a pub band.

I acquired my first Hofner guitar in 1967. This is the electric one, and was sold to me for a fiver by a man who was fed up with it floating around on the back window shelf of his car.

It is a typical 1950s arch-top hollow-body with no sound holes and electronics that look like they came from someone’s old Dansette record player. Because of the arch-top, the neck on these guitars extends over the body but doesn’t touch it.

The practical consequence on this guitar is that this cantilevered section is broken and the fret is missing. I thought to use it as a slide guitar – Jeremy Spencer had just released some stunning tracks with Fleetwood Mac on the Blues Jam at Chess album – but it never really worked properly and has been consigned to the
loft for twenty years.

When I was asked what I wanted for my 21st birthday, my immediate response was “a guitar”. Luckily, by now my brother had started work and met various other musically-inclined people, so he went and got some good advice.

The result was he and my mum and dad clubbed together and, with a bit more cash from me, bought me my Yamaha FG-180.

At last, good fortune struck. This was and is a splendid instrument. Due to my own involvement with the folk music scene, I had got to know a lot of musicians and they taught me various songs.

I also learned a lot out of books. I struggled through the 1970s, singing in folk clubs and forming groups where I could but hampered by having a singing voice that sounds fine inside my head, while for everyone outside it is disastrously flat.

In the mid-1970s, my mother went off on a cruise to the eastern Mediterranean and came back with a Saz for me. I had no idea what to do with it. It has six strings in three courses and movable tie-on frets that are set up to play arabic quarter tones. I didn't even know how to tune it. It, too, has been consigned to the loft ever since.

However, during last year’s Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF), Mediva gave a concert featuring a Saz and I now know at least that is tuned to an open G chord – G, B, D – and
also realise it is not supposed to be very loud.

I met Juliet in the mid-1980s and we were married in 1990. She brought her East German classical guitar and an East German mandolin with her. The nut on the mandolin is too high so it is really difficult to hold down the strings. It also has a floating bridge which I find very difficult to position correctly.

She had restrung both for left-handed use. On restringing the guitar for right-handed use again, the bone in the bridge collapsed making the guitar unplayable. As a result of BREMF last year, she expressed an interest in playing the lute. As lutes are expensive and hand-built to order, the general advice is to learn to play lute tunes on the guitar first, so I refurbished her guitar and mandolin so she could use them again.

I bought this twelve-string sister to my FG-180 in the mid-1990s really because I've always wanted one. It is startling to realise, in the light of all I've learned about early guitars recently, just how similar this is to the original style of guitar and lute.

This is a good guitar too, but I do have trouble holding down all those strings. I must practise more.

I have always wanted to play slide and open-tuned guitar but am loth to retune the Yamaha because this often results in broken strings – usually on a Sunday morning when no music shops are open.

It had gradually become plain to me that there was a resurgence of interest in resonator guitars, and I really fancied one of these.

I spent two years researching them and finally decided to visit the London Resonator Centre. Juliet took me there last year on my birthday and, after trying every guitar in the shop, we settled on this wonderful Ozark electric resonator.

It doesn't need to be electric – it is astonishingly loud – but it was the guitar that felt best. When I got it home, I realised it had a slender, electric-guitar neck just like my Yamaha.

We came home via David Pringle's leaving party in the Mitre. David was going off to Scotland and abandoning many of his possessions. He gave me his old Hofner arch-top acoustic guitar, one that had accompanied many a drunken rending of Wild Thing after the pub on a Friday night.

This was bought for him in the 1960s and is the same model that Hank Marvin started on. It was missing its scratch plate even then. I will have to try to find another one.

This guitar has the same kind of cantilevered neck as the electric and, while it is not broken, features a distinct kink so that any note held at the twelfth fret plays at the thirteenth.

I played this for a while, keeping it in my study and trying to build up my finger callouses – I hadn’t played seriously for twenty years – and I am beginning to be able to play for more than half an hour at a time now.

But I couldn’t cope with that bent neck, so I bought my red Tanglewood bowl-back as a study guitar. This has a wonderful action and a lovely, bright sound, but the bowl-back is in direct opposition to my expanding waistline and the guitar keeps rolling on its back, making my left hand arch too much to get to the notes

This guitar has been superseded by the Key Largo, and is for sale. But be warned, you need to be thin to play it.

While Juliet was beginning to learn classical guitar, it occurred to me it might be a bit of a culture shock to go from an ordinary guitar to a lute, with its rounded back. My experience with the Tanglewood came to mind. So I thought I would try to find her an inexpensive lute. I typed “lute” into ebay, and it came up with “lute guitar”. I did a lot of research and discovered these were invented by the Germans in the late-19th Century to feed the youth movement and their romantic craving for mediaeval things.

The lute guitar has the body of a lute but the neck and strings of a guitar. So I bought it for Juliet for last Xmas

I bought his little German guitar with the lute guitar. When they arrived they were both rather worse for wear. so I stripped off the varnish and set about restoring them.

The lute guitar was my priority as I needed it for Xmas and I ended up recruiting the father in law of a friend who is a retired cabinet maker to finish it.

Now I have a bit more time, I have just signed up to spend Monday evenings refurbishing this guitar. It is in a poor state – the back is coming unglued from the sides – but my guitar-maker assures me we can repair all that. I can't wait.

 
One evening, while Juliet was practising on the lute guitar, I received an email from Witchwood that a guitar identical to Dave Lambert's of the Strawbs was on sale on ebay.

I looked and couldn't believe the price. But it was right, so I bought the guitar. I've had it about three weeks now, and it is not without its problems `– it is neck heavy so when I let go of it while it's on the strap, it tends to slide down and end up with the headstock by my knees – but it is gorgous and I love it to death.