Chris on the Road

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.