Hank Marvin
Brian May on the profound influence the underrated Shadows leader and prototype guitar hero.
“Guitar was the work of the devil to our headmaster at Hampton Grammar school. And we actually had to hide, y’know? We would play in the cycle sheds after school round the back. Or we actually managed to make a little guitar club in the library, where nobody ever went [laughs]. So we had kind of a little guitar clinic, I suppose, of people who wanted to bring in stuff that they’d heard and wanted to play. We’d be like: ‘Who played the new Shadows record first?’
“We were lucky, really, because we were around at the beginning of rock guitar. It didn’t exist when I was a young kid. People like James Burton, I didn’t know who James Burton was. But I knew there was a guitar solo on a record made by Ricky Nelson called Hello Mary Lou – and that’s what I wanted to do. Cos he made the guitar talk; he did this bending thing. Everybody up to that point played [takes his Red Special guitar and strums a couple of chords and some simple notes], each fret for each string has a particular note. But James Burton was doing [bends], which takes the guitar to a completely different place once you’re bending strings, so that any fretted note can become almost any other fretted note depending on how much pressure you put on it. So to me that was like a door opening.
And that’s what I wanted to do. I would find guitar music wherever it was, and there wasn’t very much, so it would be people like Chet Atkins, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Bird… I would just go through the record shops and pick up anything with a guitar in it.
“But then along came The Shadows, with Hank Marvin. And Hank
Marvin is still one of the most underrated guitarists, in my view. Just a magnificent player. And what he did was quite simple for The Shadows, but just beautifully played, every single piece of the note, the way he left the note, was treasured. He’s a wonderful player, with a wonderful sound. Sound is vital. To me there’s no use playing very clever guitar if it sounds crap. It has to have a beauty to it, there has to be a voice.”
Listen to this: Apache (The Shadows, single, 1960)