03/10/2026
Digging With Divine! TONIGHT! McChuills!
Are You Experienced? (Track 1967)
So, today’s dig was another wee spin round the legendary Barras market, scene of many a great find over the decades. My solitary purchase was a copy of the first Jimi Hendrix Experience album - I hoped it was in better condition than the one filed in my collection. And… the sleeve was, even if the record wasn’t - so, a partial result.
Giving it a spin transported me right back to third year in secondary school, where my teenage self received “informal” guitar lessons from one of the more enterprising pupils in my year. He lived in his gran’s attic and he charged three ci******es per lesson - I didn’t actually smoke, but would buy the odd pack from the shady convenience shop to pay him. He’d teach me a couple of bars of “Stairway To Heaven” each week, and after a few months I could basically play the whole introduction (now sadly forgotten). Another part of the “curriculum” involved a Jimi Hendrix Songbook and playing songs like “Manic Depression” painfully slow. I say painfully slow, I had no idea - I’d never heard of Jimi Hendrix and I’d never heard of manic depression. After a few months plugging away at the guitar book, Craig lent me a cassette of Jimi Hendrix’s “Smash Hits” and it would be fair to say that, compared to my feeble plucking, Jimi blew my young mind wide open.
My guitar “skills” never really progressed beyond what I learnt as a 14 year old. Having decided I’d never be as good as Hendrix, in my mind there was no real point in continuing - I was content to appreciate music as a fan and, ultimately, share my musical finds as a disc jockey. It was a few years later that I picked up Smash Hits on vinyl, and quite a few years after that, when I finally got this debut album. I’m sure it had a different running order, but I loved hearing the familiar big hitters alongside more instrospective songs like the magnificent “May This Be Love” showing a gentler more introspective side.
Saturday 3rd October
8pm till midnight
McChuills
