“Got Electric Guitar from Whitwams £8”
For eight quid you just KNOW I got a top quality electric guitar don’t you?
This entry would seem to suggest that “the band” was still together and that rather than me being unable to play the piano, I had decided that I wanted to progress to being unable to play the guitar instead.
Regular readers will doubtless be aware of my virtuoso prior ‘experience’ with a guitar and have obviously been wondering when I was going to use those mad skillz to ‘go electric’.
Just as the boos rang out at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan first plugged in, I am sure similar responses were heard throughout Fair Oak in 1974.
Whitwams was a store in Winchester that I frequented quite a bit in the seventies. It first opened in 1909 as a purveyor of pianos and sheet music and by the time I started frequenting it, it had progressed to selling all kinds of musical instruments on the ground floor (including ‘top quality’ guitars) and records and tapes on the first floor. I seem to remember enquiring about a job there once… maybe my diary will fill me in on that later?
Astonishingly Whitwams is still going. Not, I hasten to add, in its original format or location. It now specialises in audio/video sales & installations and presentation equipment. I’m sure it continues to thrive because it has always maintained an excellent reputation. Kudos to a company that is now over 100 years old!
Excerpts from a 70's Teenage Rock Opera 
I was in Germany during the summer of ’74 and remember Sugar Baby Love. I think it even got some airplay on this side of the pond (I bought the ’45 here in the US, at least).