Get this down, learn this.’ I said: ‘Thanks a lot’. It was everything from Otis Redding’s Otis Blue to Wes Montgomery, Mose Allison, Roland Kirk, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass… every jazz guitarist, and R&B and blues, Muddy Waters… so diverse. He called me up and said: ‘Here’s this stack of records’. I worked in the local music shop, polishing guitars on Saturdays, restringing them, so I was always jamming in the shop with all these professional musicians, and word got around. I was like the little upstart fourteen-year-old guitar player I didn’t sing. So Bill felt a great deal of gratitude and he said to Tony: ‘Get a band together and I’ll produce it for you’. “Tony had actually been right before Charlie, and had introduced Bill to the band. I was still at school, and lucky enough to be asked to be in this band called The Preachers, which had the original drummer of The Rolling Stones, Tony Chapman, who was Bill Wyman’s best friend. I noticed that everybody was reading The Beano wearing sneakers and playing Hideaway. “Before The Bluesbreakers, when Eric Clapton was an underground legend, you’d see the slogan ‘Eric Is God’ on the overpasses all over London. ![]() For Christmas I got The Shadows’ first album, and Django Reinhardt’s Hot Club de France with Stephane Grappelli which I thought was horrible! That’s what my mum and dad partied to in the 30s and 40s.”Īs the British beat boom grew ever louder, Frampton soon realised that he wanted to travel his own route. My dad brought it home on the back of a Lambretta we didn’t have a car yet. “Then of course Apache comes out, so that was it. That was it, I didn’t go to sleep.”įrampton’s first ‘gig’ was at the age of eight, as a Boy Scout playing Cliff Richard and Adam Faith hits of the day at a variety show. I woke him up at 3.30 in the morning and said: ‘How d’you tune the bottom two strings?’ He said: ‘You bastard, go back to sleep’. “My brother still believed in Father Christmas, so my dad put the guitar at the bottom of my bed in the middle of the night. ![]() ![]() He bought a classical six-string for himself, because he played in a college dance band before the war, and he got me a steel-string – they were called Plectrum guitars, no make, I don’t know what it was. The clock moves on to Christmas Eve 1958. I didn’t care what they were singing about, it was the sound of an electric guitar.” I heard this sound, and I just liked anybody that had a guitar. “I saw this Fender Stratocaster and this weird-looking Gretsch hybrid guitar with a bar on it. That Christmas I said: ‘Can I have the other two strings now’?’ So he did Tom Dooley or Freight Train or something. Next year, doing the same thing, I said: ‘Can you play it, dad?’ ‘Oh yeah,’ he responded. “It was this little case with my grandmother’s ukulele. “I was up in the attic when I was about seven, helping my dad down with the suitcases for the summer holiday, and I said: ‘Dad, what’s this?’” he recalls. "Anyway, we went into a private room and he asked me what strings I used! It was a wonderful moment.” (At the New York show, Frampton even played a bit of The Shadows’ 1961 instrumental chart-topper Kon-Tiki.)īorn in Beckenham in Kent in 1950, Frampton got his first guitar at the age of eight, but that wasn’t his first string-driven thing. Afterward, backstage, my parents went up to him straight away and said, ‘Peter’s going to be so excited’. The show was great, packed, a lively welcome home. He said, ‘You’ll never guess who just called for tickets – Hank Marvin!’ I’d met Hank a couple of times, we knew each other well enough to say hello. ![]() "He called me and said, ‘Pete, are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘I will be’. We’ve got an English road manager who’s a Shadows nut. “The biggest moment in my life, apart from playing on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, was what, seven years ago, playing Shepherd’s Bush. Mark to this day says if he plays a Stratocaster, it has to be red. I’m sure if Mark Knopfler and Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck were in the room, we could all play it all the way through, it’s so indelible. “The first Shadows album,” he breathes, still in awe. But overriding all those elements has always been his unadulterated love affair with the guitar, for which he blames one Hank B Marvin. His incredible year of 1976 was followed by a fair-to-miserable time in the remainder of the decade, thanks to a mixture of bad luck, bad judgement and quite a bit too much booze. Peter Frampton spent a decade building up to one of the biggest-selling live albums ever released, and then spent the next 25 years explaining to people where he went.
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