About Chris
Downing
I started playing a ukulele
banjo when my dad brought one home from a friend at work.
Although it was small, so was I. I was hooked. When I went
to my first dance when I was about 13 and heard what real live rock
music sounded like, I just had to learn to play the guitar.
I went to lessons in Southall in
West London for about two years until I started up a small three
piece band that played a few local clubs. Our first gig was at
the Railway Working-Men's club in Willesden. You still see
this building quite often on TV at the end of a street of northern,
terraced style houses. So I'm often reminded of those days when at 16 my greatest
ambition was to be a professional guitarist.
My first real job
when I left school at 16, was to work for Inland Revenue at Bromyard Avenue in Acton
for 6 months.
My 'mentor' was a lady called Queenie Watts. She had a son
called John Entwhistle who played bass for a local band - he knew
a guy who was looking for another guitarist to join a band called
'Macabre'. I left the Inland Revenue and went full time with
Macabre and amongst all the gigs we did were regular jobs as support band for the other group John was in.
That group had recently changed it's name from the 'Detours' to 'The
High Numbers' and recruited a new drummer called Keith Moon.
Keith lived a couple of miles from me in Sudbury and we got to know
each other pretty well over the year we played on the same bill
every few weeks. You know, just as
fellow musicians; he'd occasionally come over to my house and I went to
his a couple of times, but mostly we met at gigs where we would be
the warm-up band. They were becoming quite a popular band in
London. By then they'd changed their name to The Who.
We all saw less and less of the
The Who as they became very big and we continued for a while to support
other well known bands and of course did our own thing as the
headlining band all over venues in London and the South. We
even went down to Cornwall, which in those days was a big trip
taking all of Saturday, gig and sleep over to travel back Sunday. Somehow though I
thought that there should be more to the business of playing guitar
- more practise, better arrangements, more scope to the repertoire -
but the other guys were enjoying the rock and roll life too much to
want to put in more effort. In those days we all thought that
your shelf life in rock was about 4 years maximum so I decided that
I would give up and take a 'steady' job in sales. If I'd have
carried on like other friends did at that time, Mitch Mitchell or Ronnie Wood, who knows.
I never stopped playing with a few friends,, but basically continued a
sales career that took me all over the UK and more recently as a
sales coach and workshop host to Singapore, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris
and Frankfurt. But the end of the dot.com era came and the old
yearnings to play again pulled harder. In 2002 BT was looking
to reduce staff - I left.
Whilst keeping a few
consultancy opportunities alive for teaching sales skills and
business improvement processes I also started to help a few friends'
children get to grips with playing guitar and bass. From those small
beginnings I started to teach more and more locally. At the
same time I went to Chippenham College for a day a week for two
years to learn more about the
process of teaching music. I feel pretty competent now to deal
with any challenge that comes along.
But I'm still
learning. In November 2004 went to Jerez in Spain for a
course in Flamenco Guitar with El Poeta and Simon Rubio. I
underlined guitar as most of my friends seemed to misunderstand why
I was going and assumed I would be learning Flamenco Dancing.
Err no. Maybe that's a project for another year. But the
girls dancing Flamenco were certainly better looking than the guys
playing guitar!
Chris Downing
5/2/2007
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