RIP Bert.

Bert Weedon died today at the age of 91. Bert, though you may not know the name, changed the world about on a par with Einstein. Back in the fifties he wrote a book, a teach yourself guitar book, called ‘Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day.’ Then as now a fourteen year old boy will not continue his efforts for longer than a day if he isn’t a hero by the end of it, so Bert’s book was the answer to many prayers. Even if like me you only read the first dozen pages, it held out that irresistible promise. And by some miracle of education we actually were all ‘coming round the mountain’ by the end of it. And the ‘we’ includes many illustrious names, the Beatles, Stones, The Who, Queen, a whole generation of strummers that went on to change the world, thanks to Bert. Personally I’m in my nineteen thousand, seven hundred and tenth day and still loving it and learning. So Bert wasn’t actually giving us the whole story back then but I’m glad he didn’t. There’s still something magical about that promise. Why mainstream education hasn’t taken it up I don’t know. Imagine “Maths in a day.” If by the end of that magical day you could add two and two and were convinced you’d cracked the back of it you might turn up the following day to sort of finish off the loose ends. I think that’s what I’ve been doing these past fifty years. But they don’t do that in schools, they’re too busy saying ‘well that’s just day one of a five year endurance course’, and to any eleven year old, even girls, that’s one down and one thousand eight hundred and twenty four to go. Where Bert gave us three chords and said the world is yours the other guitar books said place your first finger here, your second here, read these notes, up stroke down stroke etc. Who cares! all we wanted to do was play. And we did. And out of that play came ‘ She loves You’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’,  ‘Tommy’, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Hey Jude’, a thousand examples of the amazing creativity of a generation that changed the world. And that in no small part is down to Bert. Even down to the Mott the Hoople song I’m currently learning, “All the young dudes carry the news, bugaboo dudes carry the news.” And they do, and they will if we let them. RIP Bert.