The rocky road to becoming a guitarist 2/ 2

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Musician Chester Kamen’s tale

Learner Tales is a series where people share their often unusual paths as learners – because there isn’t just one way to do it.

This is Part 2 of the Learner Tale told by Chester Kamen, a musician mainly known as a rock guitarist, in which he reflects on how he learnt his craft. The generosity and openness of his testimony has made it necessary to present it in two parts in order to give space to everything.

Previously, he walked us through his memories of learning from his early years leading up to the moment when he actually started to earn a living in the the world of music. Now we’ll hear how he came to the moment when somebody finally noticed what he was doing, and invited him into the spotlight on the big stage.

Catch-up time if you missed Part 1

Growing up in Harlow, Essex, UK, music was just one creative activity among the many to which Chester Kamen was drawn as a kid. But, as he moved into his teens in the late 1960s, music was always there, busying his attention. Gradually, “learning in a completely haphazard manner”, by listening to others – on the radio and on record – and watching them play, Chester taught himself the guitar. By the time the 1970s had picked up speed, he was at college studying fine art, but also seeing more live music than ever and he understood that “music was what I wanted to do”.

One thing led to another, and music soon pushed everything else into the background. He found himself in groups getting local recognition, but he knew London was the place to play. Finding gigs there for the band he was in was tough. Fortunately, Chester also had another card up his sleeve.

He had developed a passion for the technical side of music, obsessively dismantling and reassembling his guitar, tinkering with machinery, recording at home. He used this knowledge the day he talked his way into a job in a recording studio in Ilford where he learnt how to set up equipment and operate professional tape recorders. This worked out well, and eventually led to a job in a bigger studio with more responsibility.

Learning to enjoy recording in the studio

At the end of Part 1, we left him on the cusp of the 80s in his early twenties being paid as a sound engineer and de facto producer at Stage One Studio in Forest Gate in East London. He was part of the music business and being paid real money for it. It was the start of a new learning curve.

He was very much living in the studio, working very long hours, even if they didn’t seem like long hours to him. What sort of sessions was he recording ?

CK – Beatles-type music by bands, disco-type music, Indian music. I was meeting all sorts of people and having to make it happen – making the connection with them and realising their aspirations within that short time-frame.

His ability to combine technical know-how with a certain flair for tuning into musicians’ artistic needs, giving them the best result from a session, made the job rewarding.

CK – That’s what really helped me move on in the music business. I was able to function with people creatively and give them something. Whenever it was required, I could pick up the guitar and add a bit here or a bit there, or if I’d get an idea on whatever instrument, I’d just give it a go. Perhaps they wanted me because they felt I understood them and I could also deal with the technical aspects. Whereas some sound engineers are just, well, sound engineers.

Learning how to make records was a key to musical success at the time, whatever style you were playing. He told himself that, for the moment at least, that this was where he needed to be.

CK – Back in those days, there was nowhere to put music other than onto a piece of plastic. The goal was to record it and put it onto a piece of plastic, so you could hand it to a DJ or radio station so they would play that piece of plastic.

Back into playing and endless auditions

Helping other people record their music had involved putting his own playing on hold. Did he want to be a producer all his life? The musician in him took over again.

Chester started looking for new bands to play with, reading the ads in Melody Maker every Thursday, and setting up auditions for the following week. This often meant travelling to places he’d never been, nowhere near home, to take his place in the queue and hope to be chosen to join the group.

CK – You’d have a little slot at, say, 2 o’clock. Someone would be coming out and you’d be going in. For an audition, you’re showing your ability, but you’re also making an impression as a person. It became a way of life. And then you’d join a band and that would all stop. And all these bands would be out of Harlow, of course, somewhere else. Just being accepted into a band who were at Wembley or wherever was an achievement. You’d been chosen. But that band then had to go through endless hoops in order to make it in the music business.

He points out that a musician also has to learn to live and work with others as part of a group. It is a process of discovery which requires an ability to constantly prove your worth.

CK – Learning how to be in bands was not something you thought about really, but it was going on. Being in a band in your hometown, it’s like you’re all related, you’re all together. When you go and join a band in another city, everyone comes from somewhere else, so you kind of carry your own little world with you. I was aware that people who lived in London would see me as a little guy from Harlow who had the temerity to be there.

Learning the ropes with cover bands

Working in studio had given him a salary. Was he able to make a living once he joined a band ?

CK – In London, you would be paid expenses, maybe getting £15 a week, just to show that you were in the band. A management company who would have a little investment in the band, and they would be totting up all those expenses until they’d achieved a record deal. The record company would pay the management company an advance so they would recoup what they had paid you. They were often an enterprising bunch of hoodlums. They would come to rehearsals once a week or twice a week with advice – what to wear, how to smile. And we’re not talking about boy bands here, we’re talking rock bands on the edge of the pop music industry. And you had to get on with them as well!

Chester was also in what are known as function bands, groups who played the hits of the day as part the evening’s entertainment in discotheques up and down the UK.

CK – In these discos, half the night would be records, and half the night would be a function band playing cover versions. It was part of a musician’s rite of passage because it gave you a regular wage. It was also a way to learn the tunes that you wouldn’t have played otherwise.

Winging it with trained musicians

Learning how to assimilate new material quickly was an essential skill Chester would need throughout his career, but it was something that he admits took all his attention if he was to do it successfully.

CK – I never thought I’d learnt music as a legitimate subject. I have no formal training. So I always felt like I was winging it in every one of these situations, and just getting by without fully understanding what it was I was doing.

Here he puts his finger on a quality that every autonomous learner needs to develop which is tolerance of ambiguity, or the ability to feel comfortable with uncertainty. This tolerance, when you are out of your depth, means that you are able to keep going because you can accept there are things you don’t understand. If you can’t do this when you are working as part of a team, it slows everybody down, and your place may be in jeopardy.

CK – Unlike some musicians, especially piano players, who’d come up learning how to read music, learning how to structure music, knowing what to call certain chords, all the technical side of music, I didn’t have that. I was kind of lost.

The fact that Chester came through moments like these shows that he felt, in spite being “kind of lost,” that he had a safety net. Things had to work out, because there was no other option. Of course, it was difficult, but he was exactly where he wanted to be. This recalls something he said in Part 1 about feeling at home on stage when others were “quaking with fear.”¹

He may not have been shaking in his shoes, but he had the distinct impression that formally trained musicians had something which he didn’t.

CK – I had a lack of confidence in that situation. Horn players, for instance, have always learnt legitimate ways of playing music. When you hand them a sheet of music, they’ll play it. Whereas I didn’t have that knowledge, so I couldn’t.

He wouldn’t learn to read music until late in his career when he started to get interested in jazz and found that his tried and trusted method of picking things up from record no longer worked.

CK – If I wanted to learn something by Charlie Parker, my ear couldn’t do it. I was incapable of picking it apart. By putting the sheet music in front of me, and slowing the track down to a crawl, I could find the right notes to play and then commit it to memory.

The ability to read music wasn’t really required when playing rock music. In fact, it was actually frowned upon. But self- taught learners are always able to do something which formally trained learners can’t do. In Chester’s case, he was able to create music like a painter.

CK – I approached the musical canvas as a bunch of colours as opposed to notes on a page. I was never thinking : “These are the notes I need to play in order to fit it.” I was always thinking : “I need a splodge over there. I need some grinding, gravelly noise over here.” That was how I painted an interesting picture. It was definitely what my life as a session musician was all about. It was painting in sound.

People finally began to notice

Being a session musician grew from being in bands, even though Chester seems to remember them all failing just short of success. How many bands was he in before he broke through ?

CK – It was endless. And almost all the bands I was in felt like they could make it. They had something worthwhile, and people in the business also thought there was something worth investing in. They pretty much all failed at some point. Always trying to make a success which was never really forthcoming.

Resilience was the only real option. Nobody was looking after him as an individual talent because he “never had a manager, never a strategy.” He just had to keep playing, telling himself “maybe someone would notice what I was doing.“

It was this tenacity which led to Chester meeting Bryan Ferry, who noticed his playing at a time when he was himself preparing to commit to a full-time solo career following the separation of Roxy Music, the group which had made him famous. When he and Chester met, Roxy Music had recorded and toured Avalon, “probably their most successful album” according to Chester, and then decided to split up after being together for over a decade.

Ferry was looking to move out of his comfort zone, experimenting with different formats, when he heard this young guitarist’s playing and made that magic phone call. This was the beginning of a long collaboration says Chester : “I ended up working pretty much full time with him for 11 years.” Several months later, in June 1985, Boys and Girls was the first Ferry album to be released with a Kamen in the credits.

Slave To Love is the most famous song from that period, and the video of the Live Aid performance from August 1985 shows Chester looking understandably happy playing it on the stage. He’s the one in the black tee-shirt and white pants. The guitarist in the blue shirt is David Gilmour of Pink Floyd no less.

Chester’s paintings in sound were made to measure for someone like Ferry who, as a fine artist himself, was definitely into music as an art form.

CK – Bryan Ferry was not just a trained artist, but an art teacher. He encouraged me to think completely out of the box. I was already doing it, and that’s why I was there. His message was to just treat the guitar as a maker of noise and sounds.

Chester would work on two more albums with Bryan Ferry : Bête Noire (1987) and Mamouna (1994). On Bête Noire, as well as doing his usual job of playing, he is credited with co-writing Seven Deadly Sins and co-producing four tracks including the hits Kiss and Tell and The Right Stuff.

Invited to play with everybody

While Chester’s longest collaboration to date has been with Bryan Ferry, the spotlight this gave him has helped him play with many well-known artists. An article about his career in  Guitar Player magazine from 2021 opens by saying “Chester Kamen has played with everybody.” The truth probably lies somewhere between that overstatement and the list given in his profile on allmusic.com which, although impressive, is certainly incomplete.

Among the most celebrated, he gets a name-check for playing on Madonna‘s Like a Prayer from 1989, and the Wikipedia page about the recording session says that Chester was called in to give the song some of “the attitude and quirkiness” of British Rock.

Personally, it is the special energy he brings to live stage appearances which I find uplifting, and which must have helped him to make a name for himself as he moved from project to project. Just get a blast of his guitar playing at the end of a live TV performance of Target Practice by British singer Belouis Some from the mid-80s. At that point, Chester was 27, and 9 years into a professional career.

More than a decade later, take a look at his playing on Torn alongside Nathalie Imbruglia, performed live in 1997, for an example of his ability to play a guitar line which almost makes the original studio recording sound tame and polite.²

In the same live vein, there is a more recent example from 2016 when he played as the sidekick to David Gilmour on the European leg of his Rattle That Lock World Tour. From the video Live at Pompeii, check out the nice Gilmour-Kamen guitar conversation during Money.

Now on a mission to be himself

But once you’ve made it as a professional musician and seen the rewards from a long and winding learning road, what’s next? In recent years, Chester has found himself drifting towards jazz. And suddenly, the guitarist who seemed to have played with everybody was having to learn to play all over again, simply because, as a rock musician, he was approaching jazz not through jazz itself, but through jazz rock.

CK – I was playing jazz rock and I was interested in jazz, but I didn’t know any jazz. I wanted to play jazz rock without knowing any jazz! So I had to go back to playing by sitting in at jazz clubs with one or two tunes that I had learnt. And that took me back to where I was, as a young musician, when I first wanted to move out of Harlow watching musicians play who were better than me.³

Chester knew that, if you want to start something new, whatever your ability in other fields, you have to be willing to start learning from scratch . If he wanted to play jazz, he would have to start again from the beginning.

CK – I had to learn jazz repertoire and jazz history. Which led me back to my instrument as a thing all of its own, not connected to a studio. Which is kind of where I am now, playing my instrument without it being plugged into the machine. So it’s taken on a new shape – a shape I didn’t really want it to take. The first guitar I ever bought was a £35 copy of a Gibson SG and I’ve progressed all the way away from there. And now I’ve gone back to playing that guitar, but a real one, a real Gibson this time. So it’s come full circle.

I pick up on this idea of coming full circle, saying that, even if he’s starting at the bottom again, he’s not the same musician today as he was all those years ago, when he was a teenager dreaming of playing with people who were better than him. He immediately corrects this.

CK – I’m not the same person! Now, I’m on some kind of personal mission to be myself, which is a rock musician but in a jazz context. And it’s interesting that, in general, the rock n roll world doesn’t want to hear about jazz, and the jazz world doesn’t want to hear about rock n roll.  But it’s good for me. I still feel like I’m learning how to do it even at this very late stage.

How long does he see himself playing?

CK – For God’s sake, I shouldn’t be retired at 68 ! I thought I was going to retire into a dark room at 60, because I thought 60 was old. Growing up, we all thought 60 was old. I don’t think I’ll make it to a 100. My fingers won’t. For now, my fingers still allow me to play. So I’ll continue as long as I can.

As we are winding down to finish, Chester adds something. The musician, who once dreamt of making it big, now sees advantages to bringing down the volume and talks about his work with a jazz trio where all the musicians need to be able to hear what the others are doing. He taps a small guitar amp and says : “This is how small I’ve got. I’ve gone from a big guitar amp to this little guy here. Which was originally developed by the makers purely as a practice amp for people to use at home. But it’s more than loud enough now to go with this guy.” He points to the piano beside us. He plays two chords on the piano and lets them ring, listening as they sound. There’s a glimmer in his eye and he nods his head. Something is there. He’s not done with music just yet.

Still want more?

You will find Chester Kamen on YouTube in his own name with a selection of intriguing solo tracks and some videos of his work in the jazz rock vein. He also plays in a more classic pop rock style with the group Chester Kamen and The Loves. They are currently working on their new album – and their complete discography is available for listening and purchase on the Bandcamp platform.

1. The quote comes in section 3 of Part 1 entitled A love of performance : “Learning lines was different to learning a skill. You’re committing something to memory so that you become it. It seemed a natural thing. It never led to a state of nervousness. When it came to going on stage, I was never quaking with fear like some people were. I’ve always been comfortable on stage. In fact, when performing music in later life, I would walk on stage and, when I turned to face the audience, I got the uncanny feeling that I was home in my living room. This is actually where I was most at home in the world. Almost like a physical recognition that I was home.” ↩︎
2. David Munday plays on the original studio version. ↩︎
3. This is in section 6 of Part 1 called Looking for new places and new challenges. ↩︎