Happy Birthday Oli

It's rare that you can pinpoint a specific day in your life which changed everything thereafter. In August 1994 a series of events took place that would catapult my life on a whole new trajectory, and my friend Oli's birthday will as a result always be a special day for me. The reason I play guitar, is because Oli doesn't. And because, of the three friends he chose to take to Center Parcs to celebrate his coming of age, I was one of them. And because shortly after that trip, my younger brother was due to start at the school both Oli and I attended and had chosen to learn to play guitar. He needed an instrument to learn on. Oli had one such instrument gathering dust, which needed a new home. With the frequent discussions taking place between Me, Oli, and our respective mums (who were all but interchangeable at the time as both had pretty much adopted her counterpart's offspring) to plan the upcoming trip, the subject came up of my brother's need for a guitar, and so an arrangement was made whereby the not-quite-full-size classical guitar would change hands for the very reasonable sum of twenty-five pounds, and that the transaction would take place upon our return from Center Parcs. We set sail to Nottingham on the 19th July and returned on the 26th. The remarkable events that took place at Center Parcs, most notably Gaz Bunt's propensity for the entire trip to re-enact the events of the film Backdraft, with alarming realism and frequency, are a whole other story.

I played the hell out of that guitar. My brother lost interest after a few months (though did pick it up again some years later) but to me it was a key to a larger world, inhabited by heroes, masters of an elusive craft I had long yearned to share. Granted, at the time my main hero was the legendary Per Gessle of Roxette rather than Jimi, or Prince, or Satch, but he set me in the right direction. I couldn't afford lessons, but wouldn't have been interested anyway - I learned the flute at school via lessons and always ended up learning whatever the teacher wanted me to learn - with the guitar I chose what to study - something I soon realised makes all the difference. Armed with a chordbook, a rudimentary understanding of music theory from doing music GCSE, and two books full of songs by the Beatles and the BeeGees, I realised that as long as you knew the songs, you didn't need to be shown how to play them, it was all there in the books. The chord shapes matched the strings and frets and it was all perfectly logical. Just hold these strings down here, then move to those ones over there, and before you know it you're playing New York Mining Disaster 1941. And the best thing was, it was free!

This was to be a key factor in my advancement - After that particular set of Summer hols Oli and I parted ways, academically at least, as he went to college while I stayed on at school, and most of my other school friends were busy discovering alcohol and night clubs. the fact that I still looked far too young to get served, coupled with the fact that I had barely any money, meant that while my school friends were out revelling in the wild world of glow-in-the-dark plastic palm trees, my options were limited to staying home and playing Oli's guitar. I didn't mind one bit. By the end of my A-Level year I had reached a point where I had the confidence to get on stage and play songs to other people, even including my first, naive attempts at writing my own songs. I was in a band called Skarph and we somehow sold out a 150-seat theatre for a one-off gig, where we did three sets of about 45 minutes each, with costume changes between each. Where the drummer fell asleep mid song and carried on playing, and none of us had guitar amps. I was the only one who could get any kind of distortion as the electro-acoustic I had finally got round to getting with my inheritance money could go loud enough to distort the signal into the mixing desk. One rehearsal Oli came down to the theatre where we rehearsed and did some promo shots, the most memorable one being where he did multiple exposures on the same shot, so that we were simultaneously on stage, in the rafters, in the audience and dramatically exiting stage left, all in the same shot. This determination to do things a little differently is what makes Oli such a brilliant photographer to this day. Good times.
At the end of the year there was a school concert, and as was the tradition with our school, at the Summer concert any student who was leaving that year was allowed to get up and do their turn. I got up with My friend Jonty (who, due to one very drunken night and some disagreements on the class structure in Britain, I am sadly no longer in touch with) and did a version of Message In A Bottle, and my own newly written song (Tell Me) How To Live. I was very into brackets back then - it seemed very high-brow and deep. Most of my contemporaries had little to show for the past two years' evenings of debauchery, save a few hangovers, but I had received this beautiful gift of freedom of expression that allowed me to play my own songs to crowded hall of my peers and mentors. I was addicted.

Since then, playing songs has been a constant source of relaxation, catharsis, excitement and discovery. It has found me playing at a festival in Germany, on a year out where I had thought I would be doomed to have little more than fresian cows for company. It has allowed me to meet and share ideas with some of the coolest and nicest people I have ever known. It has seen me play pretty much every venue in Manchester city centre, had me drunkenly bellowing out La Bamba at the top of my lungs from the top of a canal boat in Wales, appear dressed only in a sock, for a bet (I won - ten pounds if you're wondering. Times were hard). It has led to me learning the bass, ukulele and mandolin. I even once got to jam with a (completely unknown) hero of mine, Joe Roberts, in a very dingy Roadhouse in Manchester. I have countless recordings made over the years with countless other musicians and singers, some of which make me smile, some of which make me cringe. A few make me do a little happy dance, that I could have been involved in making something which makes me feel so utterly full of joy. When I look back over the past 15 years, it's great to have such a vast record of what I've done, what I've achieved, and who with. And all of this stems back to Oli's birthday.

So, thanks Oli, for not playing guitar, and for taking photographs instead (he's very very good at that by the way). Thanks for being one of my longest standing and most interesting friends, and for not getting cross when I consistently fail to keep in touch, or to find school photos that you asked for so long ago it's embarrassing. For being efficient and sending me things in the post that cheer me up immensely. For not giving me a hard time about the fact that although your birthday is such an important date in my calendar I never quite mange to get my arse in gear enough to send you a card. For making me laugh when I need a lift, and sharing in so many happy memories, and just generally being very very cool.

Happy Birthday, Oli. Here's to many more (oh, and say hello to Mum for me)

Pablo, 19th August 2009