Charles Shaar Murray Says Goodbye To An Old Friend

"A place where gems and garbage rubbed shoulders"

Paradise hasn’t exactly been paved and replaced with a parking lot, but my favourite guitar shop has gone out of

business, and as a result London’s Denmark Street will hereafter be a less congenial place. For almost three decades, your correspondent has never visited Denmark Street without dropping in at its most eccentric, eclectic and hospitable establishment: sometimes to buy stuff, sometimes to get stuff repaired or modified, sometimes to gawk at the frankly weird selection of guitar and amp oddities crowding its walls and floor, and sometimes simply to hang out and swap badinage, geeklore and gossip with its friendly staff.

Last time I was there its doors were closed and its windows shuttered, bearing only a hastily hand-lettered sign stating that the repair department was still operating out of the basement, and an ominous laser-printed notice advising the proprietor’s creditors how to contact him. Andy’s – as we knew it, anyway – is no more.

HANDY ANDY’S

Mainstream guitar shops, by and large, tend to be much of a muchness. They’ll be stuffed with box-fresh brand new kit ranging from boutiques to shoddies. The guys behind the counter will be wearing heavy metal T-shirts and go into major sulks sulk if required to put their conversations on pause to answer a question. Haggling will be discouraged unless you’re spending an awful lot of money.

By contrast, the day Fender’s late-seventies quality issues had driven me to serious consideration of acquiring my first pre-CBS Strat, I was sitting in the basement – which, before Andy’s business expanded to fill the entire building, housed both the repair and retail operations – wondering if my finances would stretch to the £385 asking price, when Andy intervened. “If you give me a cheque I can deposit before the bank shuts,” he said, “I’ll knock off fifty quid.” How could I resist? Short answer: I didn’t, and it was the best guitar purchase of my life.

But then Andy’s was always different. It had neither the lowest prices nor the most comprehensive stock on Denmark Street, but it was the least predictable and the most fun. Presided over by the benign, owlish figure of Andy Preston himself, it was never the place where you’d go to check out the latest releases, or to place your order with PRS or the Gibson and Fender Custom Shops. Neither was it a high-ticket Aladdin’s Cave of legendary fantasy-fodder collectors’ antiques like the Vintage & Rare stores. Rather, it resembled a Turner Prizewinning installation depicting the collective unconscious of the past half-century of guitar culture, where gems and garbage rubbed shoulders and you could always be sure of finding an affordable, off-the-wall (no overt pun intended) instrument.

Where else could you get your pickups swapped over and be invited to check out the results on a real-life, non-reissue 1950s Bassman; or use the same amp to conduct an impromptu A/B test on a genuine 1954 Telecaster and brand-new Custom Shop Relic 1952 reissue?

I even met my second wife there: she was investigating a bass while I was testing that 1963 Strat, and rather than try to competitively out-volume each other, we jammed, so I also have Andy’s to thank for 15 years of ma

rriage and music. It didn’t end well, but I still have the Strat.

Other Andy’s memories: not long after The Thompson Twins made their abrupt swerve from a left-wing, world music- oriented six-piece on the squat ’n’ benefit circuit to a new romantic pop trio by amputating their rhythm section, I saw their guitarist in Andy’s, unhappily negotiating the sale of his guitars. When I was plugging my biography of John Lee Hooker a few years back and the TV production company booked the nearby and associated 12 Bar Club as a location, I needed a guitar and amp to use both as a prop and to illustrate a few of the great man’s signature riffs. Andy unhesitatingly provided a 1960s 335 and a tweed Fender amp for the shoot. And just a few months back, I saw Pete Doherty and his lead guitarist babyshamble in out of the rain to pretend he was buying yet another guitar.

CAUGHT IN THE NET

The inexorable rise of internet shopping has put pressure on many of the Denmark Street stores, which find themselves both facing rising rents and acting as showrooms and tryout centres for gear often subsequently purchased from online vendors rather than over their own counters.

Unable to rely on stocking the bread-and-butter entry-level and mid-price items (Epis, Squiers, Mexican Fenders, 1 x 12 modelling amps and so on) which provide the baseline for its competitors, Andy’s was more vulnerable than most.

In Denmark Street, Wunjo’s keeps the flag flying for the weird and wonderful, stocking stuff with that double-take WTF-factor, which provides the alternative to the dominant mainstream, gathering up the waifs and strays and bucking the safe and predictable choices you find in the regular shops. By the time you read this, the Andy’s site (and, possibly, name) may well have been taken over by a more mainstream outlet for mainstream products. Such, comrades, is life under Late Capitalism.

- Charles Shaar Murray

Reprinted from Guitarist Issue 293 Summer 2007 all rights reserved.

Used with kind permission of Guitarist Magazine & Charles Shaar Murray.

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