Jonny Wilkinson
He may be famous for that drop goal which led England to victory in the 2003 Rugby World Cup, but off the pitch the 32-year-old likes nothing better than strumming a few chords and writing some music
MY BROTHER Mark (or Sparks as he is known) gave me an acoustic guitar in 2003 and it was a great way to unwind, so I got a lovely Fender Stratocaster guitar.
I’m a huge fan of Oasis and Noel Gallagher. I love his demeanour and his relaxed stage presence and I saw him playing a Gibson Les Paul and thought: “I have to have one. I want to sound like that too!”
There is something about that Gibson guitar: the sound just fills the room so much better than others. It is hugely impressive but I am quite clumsy so I keep breaking parts of it.
It was good that I didn’t know about the guitar beforehand as I didn’t have any set route on how to learn it or how to progress, and I wasn’t following a structured plan in my head. The therapeutic side came when I started playing in a band with Sparks, who is a drummer.
We played together from around 2007 to 2009 and I realised I enjoyed it partly because there was an element of team work about it. You owe it to each other to get it right. You get totally immersed in it. It’s a great way to de-stress, time takes on this strange quality.
Funnily enough it is the same with rugby in that when you are having to think about something so intensely it almost clears your mind of anything else. You just forget everything around you. I have never experienced time go by so fast. It’s amazing. We started to add a few of our friends to the band. Sparks was on drums, I was on lead guitar and rhythm guitar. We had Carl Hayman, a New Zealand International rugby player, on guitar, and for a while we had Toby Flood, who is an English international, on bass guitar.
John Stokoe, our team kitman at the time at Newcastle, was on the vocals and another friend, Peter Murphy, was a singer too. The club doctor would come over once in a blue moon and he was on the piano.
We would play anything from The Arctic Monkeys to the occasional Oasis number. We also played the Rolling Stones.
Our band practices would be slightly unconventional as we would often have it in fancy dress. I think it stemmed from my having a dressing-up box at my house.
It was OK for me because I lived there but everyone else had to make their way to my house in their respective costume. I have been known to wear a black wig with a Playboy After Dark top with a gold bunny on it (which I got from a charity shop) with tight blue jeans and a pair of or send a cheque/po to The
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