My dad was a docker (soon to get a proper job at Ford’s), so money was tight. Ogling the guitars in Hessy’s and Rushworth & Draper and in the pages of Bell’s mail-order catalogue, I knew what electric guitars cost - almost £30 for the cheapest Burns solid (over a month’s wages in 1962). A one pick-up Hofner Club, Colorama or Futurama cost not much less. And an electric guitar was useless without an amp. 

Ogi’s guitar was a solid, painted blue and clearly home-made. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me an electric guitar and wouldn’t have anyway - it would interfere too much with my school-work - but seeing the Raiders play a dance at Quarry Bank with home-made guitars, couldn’t I make one?

The Raiders featured QB lads Derek (Degsy) Fulwood and Steve Lister. Degsy Fulwood sang, played rhythm and, it was rumoured, had made their guitars from desk-top lids glued together, and their amps too. Later, lead player Steve Lister bought a sunburst Gibson 335, but by then, the Raiders had become the Cordes. 

Dances at QB school hall didn’t last. They were too dangerous. Dingle or Garston ‘teams’ would lie in wait outside the gates and several poor unsuspecting sods had their heads kicked in. This was beyond what the Prefects could police. 

I saw the Cordes play the Holyoake Hall, the dancehall over the big Co-op store on Smithdown Road, just past Penny Lane. One Corde had a blond Hofner Club 60. He hammered it that night and broke two strings. The Cordes were on after the magnificently titled Gerry Bach & the Beathovens, all red Burns guitars and Gerry in a blue sharkskin suit. His party trick was to go down on one knee and bob his Brylcreemed quiff at the ‘bints’ screaming to drag him off the front of the stage. Whatever became of him?

My other memory of that night was of a tall, muscular ‘bouncer’, nervously pacing around, fists encased in heavy suede gloves he thumped together rhythmically as he looked anxiously for signs of trouble. The Holyoake was another venue noted for ‘lumber’. Violence was the frightening underbelly of the Mersey Sound - a shout, a sudden movement and that familiar sick feeling in your sinking guts as girls started screaming and everyone rushed and panicked and pushed to get away as the fists and boots started flying.

Christmas 1961, I shuffled nervously to another ‘Big Beat Nite’ at All Hallows, Springwood. You could cut the tension with a Spanish flick-knife. Once inside, I was told to buy a Coke, drink it and pocket the bottle. I’d need it - several ‘teams’ were in. Oh boy... The dance had hardly started when a fight broke out. It was soon stopped completely by a massive ‘lumber’ - teams in drape jackets and Lybro jeans lined the walls, sent their ‘bints’ on to the dance-floor as decoys, then piled in to anyone soft enough to dance with them. It was a fight that saw the Police sweep in with their ‘Black Marias’ and ‘Meat Waggons’ (white jeeps) to cart off the usual suspects. Very Chuck Berry: “And when the Po-lice knocked, those doors flew back, but they kept on rockin’!”. Rocking? I was legging it frantically down Mather Avenue, desperate to get away. 

Dances were dangerous. But word was spreading that in town you could see groups at lunchtime. Professional groups too - some had even made records. There was never any trouble and the ‘bints’ were ‘essence’. All roads led to that converted fruit cellar in Mathew Street. After seeing Gerry & The Pacemakers and the black leather Beatles at the Cavern, I was in another land. There was no trouble, the bints were more than essence and those four guys in black were the business. Boy did they have guitars. Gretsch and Rickenbacker…. welcome to my world!

I had a plastic ukulele from New Brighton on which I’d scratched the names of my two heroes - Duane Eddy and Ricky Nelson (it was James Burton’s guitar licks that appealed of course, but I’d learn that later). As ‘Duane Nelson’ or ‘Ricky Eddy’, I was set to give Cliff a run for his money. All I needed now was an electric guitar, an amp and a group to lead.

Uncle Bill in the next street had tools and a workshed he’d let me use for my important new Sixth-Form woodwork project. So I forked out valuable pocket-money on a slab of maple from a timber yard in Rose Lane. If I couldn’t make a guitar like Duane Eddy’s twangy Gretsch, I could surely make a solid like Ogi’s? Especially now I’d seen my first piece of guitar porn - a genuine Fender catalogue, all the way from the US of A, printed on crinkly, blue-tinted, Yankee paper. And there it was amongst the Telecasters and the Jazzmasters and the Twin-Reverb amps: the Buddy Holly/Hank Marvin guitar - the Fender Stratocaster.

I traced its exotic shape, stenciled it on graph paper, enlarged it to scale with my Oxford geometry set and was soon cutting and carving away in Uncle Bill’s shed, “Johnny Remember Me” by John Leyton and “Night of the Vampire” by the Moontrekkers fading in and out from Radio Luxembourg. Two problems emerged - I wasn’t doing my home-work and my carpentry was crap. But cousin, Ray, seeing the light on in Uncle Bill’s shed, came over, saw the mess I was making, and in two nights made more progress than I had in two weeks.

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