How Davey Graham’s tune ‘Anji’ finally convinced Will Hodgkinson to pick up a guitar and learn to play

STOP IT! I can’t stand that guitar. It’s driving me crazy!’

I was getting used to this kind of reaction from my wife. It seemed that my every rendition of the chorus of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ by The Rolling Stones was like a needle piercing the nerve-endings of her brain. But it wasn’t NJ who was complaining. It was our three-year-old son Otto.

‘I don’t want you to play your guitar any more,’ he cried, sticking his fingers in his ears. ‘I don’t like it. It’s horrible.’

I had only had the guitar for two weeks – a cheap acoustic of dubious pedigree but reasonable quality called a Walden – and my family were rebelling against any attempts to bring a bit of musical provenance into their lives. But I had set myself a task which, having been foolish enough to boast about, there was no getting out of: to perform before an audience in six months’ time. This was before I had picked up a guitar, when the idea still sounded fun; a way of forcing myself into doing something I had only talked of for the last two decades. The possibilities of life are infinite, limitless and exciting before you start attempting to do something. But as soon as you apply yourself to learning a new skill, you are confronted with the severity of your limitations. I tried once again to make the guitar sound good, imagining how Keith Richards would be languidly strumming the simple but elegant sequence of chords that make up `You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ while some beautiful girl, Anita Pallenberg perhaps, lolled about at the other end of the sofa as the ash from her joint burnt a hole in her peasant tunic. At the other end of the sofa Pearl, our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, started crying.

‘It just sounds so awful,’ said NJ, not looking up from her book. ‘Brian Jones must be turning in his grave.’

‘But I’m playing the right chords,’ I protested. There are only three of them – C, F and D minor. They represented my entire mastery of the guitar. After a week or so of practising I had managed to make the changes relatively smooth, but despite that brief moment of transcendence, NJ was right: the sounds coming out of my guitar were weedy, parochial and niggling. ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ is a song of tender glamour, evocative of broken dreams and hopeful acceptance. My version was evocative of being harassed by a careers officer.

‘It’s so jumpy. Why don’t you try playing it a little gentler?’ suggested NJ as Otto bashed the head of Pearl’s doll against a wall.

It was the summer of 2004. Having reached the age of thirty-four and succeeded in avoiding any musical knowledge whatsoever, despite a lifetime of staring at album covers for hidden messages, it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to actually pick up the guitar rather than pick over the achievements of those who had. I had always retained a puerile admiration for anyone who could play something – anything – and had remained happy to spend hours listening to people make a sound resembling music on the thing while having absolutely no idea what they were doing. Then one evening, in the basement of our flat in London, I put on a record I had picked up by a guitarist called Davey Graham. I had heard the name before but knew nothing about the man beyond that he had been something of a cult figure in the early sixties, a hero to a generation of guitarists including Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch and Eric Clapton, and that he had dissolved into obscurity and rumoured narcotic oblivion as their stars had risen. I assumed he was dead.

On the album was an instrumental called ‘Anji’ that was captivating. It was played on an unaccompanied acoustic guitar, but it sounded like an orchestra: a blues bass and a folk melody merged to suggest an eastern raga. It had an ancient quality. Apparently, Davey Graham had written ‘Anji’ in 1961 at the age of twenty, a gift to his girlfriend of the time. When it came to an end I put it on again – and again. For the first time, I had heard a song I felt compelled to learn how to play. I picked up the guitar as a direct result of ‘Anji’.

Extracted from Guitar Man by Will Hodgkinson (Bloomsbury, £9.99). Buy a copy here.

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