1. Bo DiddleyChess Masters
I had a couple of guitar lessons when I was about 12 from a local hippy folkie bloke called Steve who lived around the corner. The main thing I got from him was that he let me borrow a Bo Diddley album, which was amazing. I didn’t have it for very long, so I went to buy a similar album and found this Chess double album – probably one of the first I ever bought. There was just something about Bo Diddley that was life affirming. The rhythm, the percussiveness of it with his percussion partner Jerome Green. It’s Latin and African and rock & roll and Cuban all at the same time. I love percussion, and I think I got that from listening to this record. There’s women in the band too, Norma-Jean Wofford aka The Duchess, and Peggy Jones, aka Lady Bo, so it’s an inclusive band. There’s the ridiculousness of the lyrics – there’s a good one in ‘Cops And Robbers’ about someone who’s got a “stopper” in their hand as slang for a gun, or a guy who gets knocked out so hard “they’re gonna have to pump air into him,” or one in ‘Who Do You Love?’ about a guy with “a cobra snake for a necktie”. Then there’s his square guitar, The Twang Machine, a ridiculous looking object. Just fantastic.
My first band The Innocent Vicars, would do all kinds of versions of ‘Cops And Robbers’ and ‘Mumblin’ Guitar’ because they were reasonably easy to play cackhandedly. I got to see him a few times, the last one was very late on in his life. He was sitting down but he still had that vibe about him. He was playing some kind of auto wah Boss pedal, making insane noises, and every time he pressed it he had this look of childlike glee as the sound came over, still excited.
I once met him in a lift in New York. He was literally the first person I met in America on that trip. I got off the plane, went through passport control, got a cab, went straight to the Washington Square hotel and then got in the lift. You could probably only get three people in there, he’s quite a big guy, and it was him and this large roadie. I was jumping up and down, going on about how I loved ‘Mumblin’ Guitar’ as a 12-year-old. They gave me pretty wide berth and got off at the next floor!
