Guitar Man

The guitar, after a dip in popularity during the 80s, is now once again the instrument of choice for modern popular music. It is portable, it has history, it will always be hip.

Why has this instrument become such a household classic? Will Hodgkinson, a nascent guitar player, with only an afternoon's experience bashing on a friend's guitar at the age of 16, set out to find out. Along the way he hoped to teach himself a few chords too. At the end of his odyssey he decided that he would test his newfound knowledge by playing before a live audience.

On his trip he chats to Bert Jansch, who patiently explains to him how to play the folk classic 'Anji', British guitar hero Johnny Marr and reclusive folk guitar legend Davey Graham. He travels to America and with a hurricane brewing he visits Roger McGuinn from the Byrds in his suburban home in Orlando, in the spirit of Robert Johnson he travels to the Deep South and drops in on T Model Ford, an old bluesman living in Mississippi, and meets Les Paul after a deeply disappointing gig in New York.

With a dawning realisation that his own talents may be severely limited, his fellow band-members reluctant to practice, and his wife and children increasingly bored by his new obsession, Will wonders whether the gig that he has planned, in front of 200 of his friends and colleagues, not to mention paying members of the public, may all have been a terrible mistake.

Gloriously readable, highly amusing, hugely informative and always entertaining, Will Hodgkinson gets to the root of modern music's and his own obsession with the guitar.