I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s (of the ‘Young Onset’ variety) back in the heady days of 2008. Back then I wrote an article for the Independent called ‘The Longest Wait’, so titled because Parkinson’s was, to me, then a disease of potential – I knew many of the things it might lead to, but there was no clear timeline. The general consensus was something along the lines of ‘another five decent years, then a few more of decline, then a final few years of utter shite.’ Happily, this has not turned out to be the case. While the progression of YOPD is still relentless, it is in no way as was thought. On a good day, you still wouldn’t know. In many ways (and this is primarily due to the delights of leva-dopa), I’m better than I was a decade ago. But I’m not here to talk about all that. I’m here to talk about stranger things.
My diagnosis came about because, sometime around my 38th birthday (2005), I decided it was time to pick up my electric guitar once more. I had started at age 15, and was a pro by the time I was 21. In 1988 or 89, I started teaching at the Musician’s Academy in Wapping, later to morph into MI London. My first students were all older guys (they outnumbered women by about 20 to 1) who had played in their youth, done the family thing and now had some extra time and money. Good god, the gear! Anyhow. I spent the next decade as a jobbing guitarist/teacher. I never got the gigs, but I did have a tuition column in Guitar and Bass magazine, so I wasn’t too bad … I quit in 2000, primarily because the anxiety and depression and other shit (which I hid mighty well, and which I now realise were most likely early symptoms) became overwhelming to the point where I couldn’t perform. I spent the next seven years at university, eventually gaining a PhD. For the first five of these I literally didn’t pick up a guitar.
Then, one day, I did. And it felt … wrong. At about the same time, I started getting hit while sparring (at karate) by people who had no business laying a finger on me. That and my form while doing my kata was off, usually in the left hand. I sought medical help. This got me nowhere until, at a family gathering, I was doing my usual ‘this is why I no longer play guitar’ (which involved wiggling the fingers on my right-hand and then my left – see video) when my late uncle (an eminent professor of medicine) ushered me over and said ‘you need to see a neurologist, old boy.’ Within a year, my life changed. And continued to do so as symptoms linked arms with therapies, frog-marched me to the top of various hills to show me the view and then pushed me off.
Cut to 2024. Over the past decade and a half I’ve written a lot of words (quite a few of them published), played a lot of cricket (quite badly), and had a lot of experiences of other sorts. I even played a gig on my 50th birthday (with mixed results). As my writing habit ground to a halt (following in the shuffling footslides of my short academic career), the feeling that I had left something undone in music grew. And so, last week, I decided I needed a new electric guitar to play during my regular visits to Leiden (where my partner lives). Having misread the time zone of a dental appointment, I visited a guitar shop and found an instrument that I rather liked. I took Nadine to see it the next day but miscalculated – by the time we got there I was so off I looked more like a penguin than a human, a problem exacerbated by the crowds perusing the market. We tried again the next day, with more success, but the instrument didn’t balance quite right (and I have enough trouble playing without having to wrangle the guitar), so back to the drawing board. We visited an Amsterdam shop recommended by an ex-student (thank you, Petja – you’ll be able to hear Petja on P. Rex from Dancing with Architects when it’s finally released). There I played something like 15 guitars before finally settling on the one in the video. It wasn’t what I expected to end up with, but always have an open mind, right?
Yes, it’s pink.
My attitude to guitars (and this is only the fifth electric I’ve owned since I started playing in 1982 – I still have the second one I bought, in 1984) is that I don’t much care what they look like, whether they’re ‘mint’, ‘all-original’ or whatever. A guitar is an instrument – it’s there to negotiate the moment the music inside you caresses (or otherwise) the air molecules that surround you, that take it to the (hopefully consenting) ears of others. A guitar must ‘speak’ to you when you pick it up. It must almost force you to play it. It should be an irresistible temptation.
But it’s been so long I don’t trust my instinct any more. How the hell can I, a parky whose fingers fumble with forks and have catastrophic interactions with coffee cups, expect to be able to feel the instrument as I used to? So I asked Nadine:
‘Which one do you think?’ I said.
‘I know nothing whatsoever about guitars, but that one.’ She replied.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because when you picked it up, you smiled.’
Reader, I bought it. This is me playing it. What comes next? Who knows, but also, who cares, so long as I’m smiling, right?’
(excuse the filthiness of the playing, but, well …)