Around this time I got my first playable steel-string guitar, it cost me a fiver and was an object of wonder and beauty.  It was a Scarth and, like Abbott and Aristone, a British-made dance-band instrument having an arched top and tailpiece but with a round sound hole.  It had its little idiosyncrasies - the action went up and down according to the weather, which could be counteracted by wedging a lollypop stick under the neck - a feature that merely added to its mystique.  You don't see too many like it any more! 

However, good steel-string guitars were few and far between with Harmony and Levin leading the field.  I was living on an old boat on the River Thames and stringing together tunes based on picking patterns, such as "Down On The Barge" and that old Scarth served me well - featuring on the cover of my first LP, in the traditional 'folk-singer-on-the-rubbish-dump' pose.

In the early sixties I attended Kingston College of Art fairly frequently.  The Art Schools seemed to be turning out more musicians than artists at that time.  The Yardbirds were at Kingston, as were Eric Clapton and Sandy Denny.  The R'n'B craze had replaced skiffle and the best band was considered to be Alexis Korner's "Blues Incorporated". 

I played in an Art School R'n'B band for a while, "Hog Snort Rupert's Famous Porkestra", using a borrowed electric guitar.  I found that some of the band's riffs sounded interesting played fingerstyle on an acoustic guitar and pieces like "The Wildest Pig In Captivity" came out of that.

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