My son’s following in my footsteps by learning to play guitar — badly

When I was a teenager, I bought an album by a band I had never heard before purely on the basis that some older, and therefore cooler, kids in the record store said it was good.

They weren’t talking to me, as I was younger, and therefore not cool, but they were going through the racks chatting about music, so I just loitered near them listening to what they were saying in the hope of getting the inside track on what was hot and what was not. As soon as they moved on, I grabbed the album they were talking about, bought it and brought it home, and with trembling fingers threw it on my dad’s record player.

The album was Bleach by Nirvana, and I didn’t think it was that good. But I didn’t say that to anyone, because it was clearly cool, so I just kept saying ‘Oh, there’s this great band from Seattle called Nirvana, really interesting, you’ve probably never heard of them.’ Fast forward a few years, Nevermind came out and literally everyone in the world had heard of Nirvana. A few years after that, Kurt Cobain departed the earth.

Thirty years have passed and all this month I had time to reflect on his legacy as I listened to my 16-year-old try to learn Smells Like Teen Spirit on guitar.

It was only a matter of time before my son started playing; the year he was born, someone gave me a BC Rich Warlock electric guitar as a gift with the presumption that I would be shredding face-scorching solos in no time. That never happened as I had two small kids, and then another two came along, so time to learn a music instrument was superseded by time spent learning how to perfectly microwave a bottle of baby formula so that it didn’t scorch tiny mouths. The guitar got put in a box in the attic, along with all my other hopes and dreams, and sat there gathering dust.

That was that until I took it down with the Christmas tree last year and it was seized upon by the teenager. I honestly thought he would pluck a few strings and then give up, but no — he was all in. Soon the house was filled with sounds akin to Jandek’s angular twangs as he tried to figure out how music works.

Once it became clear he wasn’t going to quit, we decided that listening to someone learn how to play on an acoustic might be easier than listening to them fumble their way through power chords on a model of guitar made famous by thrash metal titans Slayer.

We got him an acoustic for his birthday, and it transpires that there isn’t that much difference in volume between an electric mini-amp and a loudly strummed acoustic. Really, all the acoustic guitar did was switch us from Sub Pop-style superfuzz distortion to an equally annoying MTV Unplugged-style of stripped-back grunge hits. I would wake in the middle of the night to the strains of Heart Shaped Box and have to WhatsApp him to tell him that while I really support his newfound love of grunge rock, the time for that is between the hours of 8am and 9pm, or possibly just between the years 1986 and 1994. But he is sticking with it and is learning; my wife and I have been treated to a few renditions of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Metallica’s One, and even System Of A Down’s Chop Suey!. Granted, we were subjected to them whilst trying to watch the finale of a Netflix true crime series we were very invested in, but he is getting there, and more importantly, he is able to apply himself to learn something in a way that I never could at his age.

My parents always encouraged me to play musical instruments, but all the lessons and encouragement was wasted on me. They even hired a local showband pianist to try and teach me the basics, but nothing took, aside from me developing a mild nicotine addiction from all the smoke he would blow in my face while I spluttered through the chords.

It’s always nice to see yourself in your kids, but it’s nicer when you don’t; when you see them do all the things you wish you did, or have skills you never had. And it is a fitting tribute to Kurt Cobain on his anniversary to know that he could write a hook so catchy that disaffected teenagers would still be trying to play it on guitar three decades after his death.

‘I honestly thought he would pluck a few strings and then give up, but no — he was all in’