Thanks, Manfred

I should also have credited a few other influences when I was starting out. A whole bunch of us at school all seemed to find guitar at the same time, so there was that helpful rivalry/copying thing going on. Already interested in folk music through the Clancy Brothers, Spinners, Corries, Islanders, Robin Hall & Jimmy MacGregor etc, I roomed with a guy at Strathclyde and competed over who could master Anji or Classical Gas first - it seems amazing to me now that you could buy the sheet music for Davey Graham's Anji in any music store in Glasgow back then ( I still have it somewhere)- try finding it now! Discovered the Glasgow Folk Centre in the top of a tenement opposite the old Anderson's University building. They had a library of LPs you could borrow for very little, found the Incredible String Band in amongst their collection. Strathclyde University Folk Club used the rooms on Wednesday evenings - Barbara Dickson and Rab Noakes played some of their earliest gigs there, others I remember were Alan Tall and old Davey Stewart. Brian Miller seemed to be running the club (one of the other residents I remember was Artie Tresize) and also taught folk guitar on Wednesday afternoons when we had no classes and were supposed to be engaging in athletic pursuits. I learned claw-hammer from Brian and I guess that still forms the basis of how I play (though you might not recognize it!) The last I heard of him he had joined the folk/traditional teaching staff at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama under Brian McNeill (Battlefield Band). I somehow missed the ISBs, either they had moved on before I reached Glasgow or I was asleep for my first couple of years at Uni (a real possibility). Archie Fisher and the East Fife Road Show stand out in my memory, and Archie later became a regular visitor (and poster-boy!) at the Fylde guitar factory in Kirkham. His first album was and remains one of my favourites. It's one of the few that Dave Bulmer (Celtic Music) got around to re-releasing. A long-gone guitar hero from that time was Hamish Imlach. Notorious back then for drug busts, "Cod-Liver Oil and the Orange Juice" and other songs of real life in central Scotland that your mother and father would prefer you didn't know (or sing), he could get some great blues and ragtime licks out of his Guild guitar. Gordon Giltrap was another Fylde customer (and another of those magicians who can make a six-string sound like a twelve-string and a twelve-string sound like a quartet). Still haven't got my head round Rizraklary (sp?) forty years on. That was on an album of acoustic guitar (The Guitar Sampler) which also featured Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Ralph McTell and a host of others, all of whom I followed up for tunes and playing-styles.

Some of these guys are still playing forty years on, but where are the players of today? And who are they? Any nominations?