Me & my guitar: A love story

During the Sixties, the whole changing culture became guitar-centric. The shaggy, sensitive troubadour with his battered guitar-case, roaming the world with only his songs for company - the poet and the one-man band of Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound" - was one of the great archetypes of that self-mythologising age. Like many weekend hippies, I roamed, I rambled - but not very far.

In 1967, I travelled around America on Greyhound buses with my friend Rodney Portman and a guitar. It was the summer of love (something of which I had not had too much experience at that point), and we ended up in the throbbing, hedonistic epicentre of global hippiedom, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Everybody, I now realise, was at it some way or other, except us. I was a drug-free virgin in paradise.

But here is another thing about the guitar. It's a short cut to the past. Today, I only have to play Paul Simon's "America" or Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe" and I'll be back there, in the Sixties yet somehow missing them. Like Mr Jones in Dylan's famous "Ballad of a Thin Man", something was going on and I didn't know what it was. Did I, Mr Jones?

Mamas, if you let your babies grow up to play that old guitar, it will take them to some strange, interesting places. They will be invited to more parties. They will probably get more sex. You don't have to be a show-off to get the most out of a guitar, but it helps. As I edged towards competence, I found that I liked playing in front of people. Today I can see that, in this at least, it is for me similar to writing. I want to reach people. I may enjoy playing or writing for myself, but to make sense of it, communication - performance - has to be the aim.

Writing is a cool business, compared to playing music. You write. It goes through the process of publication. Eventually people read your words and, sometimes long after they were written, someone might say they liked them. Music is more immediate. You can learn a song, maybe even write one, and see, feel, how it works that very evening. In a way, it's the perfect complement to writing.

1971. Paris. I was in my early twenties, on the run from Englishness, and there was a lot of exciting, bewildering stuff going on around me. One night I found myself at a party where, at some point, and pretty much without warning, everyone took off their clothes. I remember sitting naked on a sofa, panicky and bug-eyed, gripping my guitar to me like Peter Sellers in A Shot in the Dark as all sorts of relationships were explored on the floor in front of me.

Later, back in London, I started playing in restaurants and bars, sometimes solo, sometimes in a duo with my friend Derek Creigan, a Scottish bass guitarist with a voice like Joe Cocker's. Whenever I read in today's papers of the binge-drinking excesses of modern youth, I think back to some of the things I witnessed, belting out "Blue Suede Shoes" or "Hotel California" as the English let their hair down in the orgiastic bedlam of a basement restaurant in Knightsbridge.