It's John, Paul, George, Ringo and Kevin

Thanks to being a member of the Fab Five (see previous post), I can actually play about half a dozen Beatles songs. It's only taken me about 35 years to learn A Hard Day's Night. Still you get there in the end. My career as a rock star started humbly. Then it carried on like that. Aged 14, I bought my first acoustic guitar off a couple of girls who lived a few streets away. It cost a fiver and was bloody awful.

I persevered. About a year later I met a rather attractive woman at a party who was miles too old for me. I longed to get off with her and didn't, but she did sell me my first electric guitar, a Jedson (never heard of them since . . .) Telecaster copy for twenty quid. It was slightly better.

Being flat-broke but moderately enterprising, I nicked the home-made transistor amplifier and speaker that originally constituted the left-hand channel of my father's exceedingly eccentric hi-fi outfit (Sixties-speak for home music centre). My dad was always one of those people who spent hours building reams of electronic spaghetti and occasionally had to buy a record to see if it worked.

Incidentally, the right-hand channel was a valve amp, partially working at 400 volts or so, with no case so that small children could shove their fingers into it. It sat in the middle of the lounge floor. The speakers were beautifully matched. One was two feet high, the other four feet high.

Thus armed, I was ready to rock and joined a couple of garage bands, one at home and one at school. Usually I had no transport so I pushed the ensemble to rehearsals, anything up to two miles in a wheelbarrow. I must have been fit in those days.

At school there was my mate Andrew on piano and my mate Glenn also on guitar. Sometimes there was our mate Benny who made an awful lot of random noise so I figure he must have been the drummer.

Andrew was a Beatles nut so this is how I first met that dreadful tome, The Complete Beatles Songbook. Using it, we struggled through A Hard Day's Night and various others. They sounded nothing whatsoever like The Beatles.

I think I did eventually manage a passable version of Yellow Submarine, which is a really hip song if you're aged about six. We couldn't understand why it was so difficult and decided that it must be our fault for being crap.

Thus I gave up on the Fab Four and learned a load of Stones songs instead. This was much easier; you just had to listen to their live album and play each song about 500 times to write the lyrics out. We always had to do that back then.

It's so incredibly easy today. For Les Malfonctionnaires, it took about five minutes to find the words and chords to A Hard Day's Night on the internet. It took about another moment to put the song in its proper key of G, and not C as it said in the book. Add in the modified but simple enough chords, also cunningly not mentioned in the book, and Hey Presto! it sounds just like A Hard Day's Night. Not really rocket science.

As it happens, girlfriend Claire wanted a sing-along during our French family Crimbo and, for the first time in 35 years, I found myself gazing at The Complete Beatles Songbook, her brother in law's copy. And it's still a bloody nightmare: The words aren't lined up with the music. And neither are all the great streams of chords, with nothing to mark where the verses, choruses and middle eights begin and end. Not to mention songs put into the wrong keys for no good reason.

It's hard to know so long after the event whether the book was laid out like this to make The Beatles look incomprehensibly clever or whether the typographer was just unbelieveably incompetent. But even though we were young and crap, it's nice to know that it wasn't all our fault.