Guthrie Govan – my part in his career

Here’s a low-stress piece for a snowy day here in Britain. Looking on YouTube for a particular musician a year or so ago, I found a clip in which he was playing with a guitarist called Guthrie Govan. The guitarist was stonkingly good. In characteristic YouTube fashion the algorithms then kept offering me other clips demonstrating not only his astonishingly brilliant technique, range of styles, and sheer musicality (in these days of Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift), but his ability as a teacher. By all accounts he’s a really nice bloke as well.

Now, the thing that niggled me from the very first video was that Guthrie seemed vaguely familiar, particularly his frizzy long hair as well as his physiognomy. Yet I’d certainly never seen him play live or on video, nor heard his records, nor knowingly even seen his name. Eventually I made a mental association, and looked up his website to discover he’d been brought up in Chelmsford, Essex, where I spent most of my career as a GP. At that point the memory became crystal clear.

It wasn’t that he’d been our patient, as far as I know – I suspect his family were registered at the practice along the road in Great Baddow (where my first house was, as a matter of irrelevance). No, the memory was that through much of the 1980s, as I drove into the surgery car park in the morning, I sometimes had to stop while a kid in the uniform of our outstanding grammar school (we still had the 11+) walked across the entrance, always accompanied by his, to me, slightly Bohemian-looking mother. I assumed she was on her way to work as he walked to school.

As timing would have it, if I didn’t actually have to wait for them, I passed them coming along the road, or saw them cross the entrance as I unlocked the surgery. So I seldom missed them. I was struck, first, by the boy’s unfashionably hippie-length wavy hair, which took me back to my own college days. It made me wonder if he suffered any stick for it from pernickity headmasters. And secondly, I noted the fact that he always carried a guitar bag on his back, which became an increasingly noticeable fixture as I (involuntarily) tracked his school career through my morning encounters over the 1980s.

My recurrent thought was that this guy was certainly taking his instrument seriously, and was probably a good player, and that I’d not be surprised if it became his career. At that time I’d been playing guitar in a couple of not-very good local bands, so I suppose it crossed my mind that our musical paths might intersect in some Chelmsford venue at some stage. In fact they never did. In later years his younger brother joined the morning stroll, and eventually I stopped seeing them, and I assumed the young guitarist had gone of to college (as indeed he had – he studied English at Oxford according to Wikipedia).

And so Guthrie Govan passed out of my memory until YouTube did its thing several decades later, and I discovered not only that the boy had made good, but that he was in that small class of players regularly (and foolishly) labelled as “the best guitarist in the world.” Since his is not a household name, I thought I’d introduce to you only the second famous guitarist to emerge from Chelmsford (the first being a folkie, Nic Jones, in the 1970s).

And my role in furthering his career? Well, apart from any psychic effect of my well-wishing as I parked my car at work back in the eighties, isn’t it obvious? I didn’t run the guy over.