Dave Hill

Dave Hill Shot To Fame In The 70S With National Glam-Rock Treasures Slade As They Exploded In The Uk Charts With No Less Than 13 Top 10 Singles. He Acquired His First Guitar In 1959 At Age 13, And This Year Marks The 60Th Anniversary Of Dave Hill The Guitarist – A Man Who, While Touring With Slade To This Day, Is Still Very Much Feeling The Noize. We Caught Up With Dave On Home Turf In His Native Black Country To Reflect Upon The Glam, The Glitz And The Guitarz…

- Rod Brakes

My First Guitar

“My first guitar was a really dreadful acoustic from the Kays catalogue. I was only 13 and I knew I had music in me, but it wasn’t the piano, it wasn’t the violin, and it certainly wasn’t the recorder. I spoke to dad and he said, ‘I don’t want to be wasting money buying expensive guitars if you’re not going to continue with it. I’ll buy you this one [in the catalogue].’

“It turned up in a cardboard box and, because I’m left-handed, I tried playing it upside down, so dad said, ‘I think you’re going to need some lessons. There’s a jazz guitarist at your school and he’s teaching a few kids how to play acoustic. I’ll tell you what, as it’s five bob a lesson, you put in half a crown from your paper round, and I’ll put half a crown in.’ When I turned up at the lesson with this guitar, the teacher said, ‘The first thing you have to learn is to play it the right way around’. I said, ‘But I’m left-handed,’ and he told me, ‘It doesn’t matter – you’ll get used to it.’ And I did.”

Starting With Skiffle

“When I started playing guitar in 1959, it was all skiffle. My first band was a skiffle band called The Shamrocks. My best mate, Tony, encouraged me to get my own acoustic guitar so we could get it together. The first song we learnt was Tell Laura I Love Her and from that we started to formulate something. We used to go up the youth centre on a Sunday morning and have a go.

“From those early beginnings, I started to move towards ‘the twang’ – I’m talking Duane Eddy and Eddie Cochran, then Buddy Holly, then The Shadows. By this point, I’d moved up a grade to electric guitar and we were learning to play