Steve Smith

A Guitar In How Many Millions? When in the Sixth Form of my local school in Oxford, I bought a second-hand black electric guitar made by Suzuki: a name one associates with motor-bikes, not electric guitars. I learnt very quickly that I'd never master the damn thing, so I sold it to my friend Andy, bought a drum kit, and along with two friends we formed a school band. Andy (in the style of Jerry Garcia!) always played this guitar with a pained expression on his face: so it was only fitting that we fixed a plastic label with "Pained expression" stamped on it onto the guitar. Not many black Suzuki guitars with "Pained expression" on it out there in the rock world, I reckon. Or indeed anywhere. Time passed, A-levels finished, and we went our separate ways. I never saw Andy again. Now skim forward three years and move from Oxford to my new friend Mike's student digs in a rundown terrace somewhere on the outskirts of Cambridge. Mike had just bought himself an acoustic guitar that he was learning to play, and I was visiting him for the weekend. The talk that lunchtime drifted around guitars, and I reminisced about the black Suzuki that I once briefly owned. Mike had never heard of Suzuki guitars, and I had difficulty of convincing him of the existence of such a thing. Sunday lunch over, I peered out of the kitchen window into the overgrown jungle of the back garden, into which Mike had never ventured. Curiosity led me down amongst the brambles and bushes to see what was there. Behind a large, dense hedge there was a small, tumbledown shed completely unseen from the house. Curiosity then led me to the shed, and opening it I saw three items: one storage box, one rusty lawnmower, and one black Suzuki guitar with "Pained Expression" on it. I froze: the world spun! Gathering my wits, I picked it up, walked back up to the house with the guitar behind my back, and said to Mike: "Remember I was talking about that crummy black Suzuki guitar I bought back in Oxford three years ago? Well, here it is." We both stood there, staring at it; pondering the massive, massive almost impossible improbability of the moment. It still makes me tingle thinking about it now.