Noel Harrison

Guitars 

Throughout his life, Noel Harrison played a variety of guitars, after first picking up the instrument aged 15.

Over the course of his career, Noel owned acoustic models made by Gibson, Ramirez, and Whitebook. He also promoted electric guitars made by Fender.

Below are details of some of Noel's instruments and a 'musical history' he wrote in 2006.

My Musical History - written by Noel Harrison in 2006

As a twelve year old I used to fantasise that I would become a crooner, like Bing Crosby. I started playing guitar at 15 on a borrowed cello-top Gibson. Banjo chords. Guitars were rare in England in those days. When I was 18 I bought my first instrument, a little nineteenth century “ladies guitar”, inlaid with mother of pearl. It cost me fifteen pounds.

I went to see Segovia give a solo concert and was awestruck. I took some classical lessons from a Mr Williams in Charing Cross Road who was always boasting about his son John. Quite right too, John Williams went on to become one of the world’s finest classical guitarists. I never had the self-discipline to follow that path.

I had fallen in love with French popular music, listening to Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf, and I applied myself to learning the chords to accompany my singing of those and other French popular songs.

My first professional appearance was in the Soho (London) festival in 1952, billed as a 'French Cabaret Singer'. I became friends with the West Indian folksinger Cy Grant and learned to play calypso and to admire the improvisational brilliance of Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Terror.

Cy Grant also introduced me to the voices of Josh White, Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy and encouraged me to take a regular gig playing around the tables in a Greek restaurant in King’s Road, Chelsea. From then on that’s what I did, progressing to coffee bars, nightclubs and debutante parties. I took my guitar (by now a 1916 Ramirez flamenco model) to Italy and got a job playing in a bar in Cortina d’Ampezzo, from whence I was summoned by a telegram from BBC TV to join Cy in an unusual job: singing the news as a calypso at the opening of a nightly magazine program which followed the regular news.

The topical lyrics were written at the last minute by Bernard Levin and other journalists who phoned them in to us and we’d make up a tune. In 1958 I stood on the roof of a pub opposite Drury Lane Theatre singing a calypso about “My Fair Lady” which was having its London opening that night starring my father, Rex.

I got plenty of night club jobs. My repertoire was French, Calypso and Neapolitan, nothing in plain English.

When the TV gig ended after a year or so I took off for Italy again, planning to go to Rome to see if I could sing at Bricktop’s, a legendary joint run by a black American singer with red hair.

I never made it past Portofino, where I landed a nightly gig at a waterfront watering hole called La Gritta. A car accident which knocked out my front teeth put a stop to that. Shortly thereafter I saw a man in a cowboy outfit playing a 12 string guitar around the café tables in the piazza. He was singing “San Francisco Bay Blues”. His girlfriend was passing a white Stetson around collecting tips. I offered him my vacant position at La Gritta.

“I’m carrying a banjo player”, he said. And so it was I spent the rest of the summer with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and the five string banjo player Derrol Adams and learned all about American folk music.

Back in London I became the resident MC at the Blue Angel nightclub and stayed for four years, with side trips to perform in South Africa, Kenya and what was then Southern Rhodesia, and then to the Blue Angel in New York to open for Shelly Berman. I also appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, without making much of an impression. By now I was 30, with a wife and kids and the living was not easy.

The Blue Angel (London) was getting stale so I decided to give up show business and open a restaurant. But not before giving New York one more try.

I opened at the Living Room on 2nd Avenue in May 1965 to unexpectedly warm reviews. At about the same time a record I had made of “A Young Girl” (an Oscar Brown Jr translation of a Charles Aznavour song), made it’s way first onto pirate radio in Britain and then onto the American charts. My dreams of being a crooner, or something akin to that, opened up again.

I emigrated to the US with my family that fall. I toured the country, initially playing supper clubs like the Hungry I in San Francisco and Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago. My record was on the charts for quite a while, though never quite in the top ten. But I was driving down the street in LA one day listening to a phone-in contest for listeners’ current favourites on KFWB. The Beach Boys, the Beatles and my record. I won. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. In short order I was on tour opening for the Beach Boys, and then for Sonny and Cher who loaned me their guitar player, Mac Rebinac, better known as Dr. John.

I then proceeded to scuttle this career by accepting a co-starring role in NBC’s new spin-off, the Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for a year and made me briefly but wildly popular with teenagers as the flip secret agent Mark Slate.

Most people assumed that my subsequent recording career stemmed from my acting, rather than vice versa. For four years I was “hot” in Hollywood, guest starring, co-hosting and being a talk show regular. I also put out three LPs on Reprise which were largely ignored, though my version of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne made a small top forty splash, and Norman Jewison hired me to sing The Windmills of Your Mind on the sound track of The Thomas Crown Affair.

I was making good money, and my celebrity status enabled me to secure leading roles in summer stock musicals for thousands of dollars a week. I acted I danced I sang. Half a Sixpence, Where’s Charley, Walking Happy. The poor old guitar (now a Martin D35) remained in it’s case a lot. Then when Judy Collins played a concert at one of the theatres where I was working I invited her back to my house to drink wine with some friends. As I carried her guitar case across the theatre parking lot I felt a strong pang for my musician days.

Being a TV celebrity can be a pain. Loss of anonymity, intrusive behaviour by total strangers, sly and offensive fictions fabricated by gossip columnists. I hated it, in spite of the money. I broke up with my wife. Emotional trauma in the public eye. Not for me.

I found a willing partner in my desire to get back to basics and she and I left L.A. and Hollywood in a station wagon with a tent trailer and eventually discovered the beauty and simplicity of Nova Scotia, Canada. I bought an old hill farm for a song (almost) and got the guitar out on a regular basis. CBC TV in Halifax gave me a national slot and I devised a half hour program which I hosted called Take Time, about songs and songwriters. It was very loose. A Toronto paper described it as so laid back as to be almost asleep, but hippies loved it. It ran for a season and a half.

Now I was part of the Canadian folk scene. I played festivals, folk clubs and Maritime honky-tonks, with fiddlers, bluegrass bands and brilliant French Acadian musicians. I picked and smoked and drank on countless front and back porches and around kitchen tables. Money was sparse, but I supported my musical habit by going on the road for a month or two every summer with American Equity stock productions of My Fair Lady (playing my Old Man’s role) Camelot, The Sound of Music etc. where the residual echoes of my erstwhile fame guaranteed me a handsome enough wage to see me though the long northern winters with a full bar.

Time and Fate and goatish behaviour put an end to my second marriage after 17 years. By then we were living in southern Maine. I took off once again in another Chevy station wagon but without a tent trailer. I made my way back to LA, picking up a new companion, lover, ally and eventually wife on the way.

I had written a one man show about Jacques Brel called Adieu, Jacques..., which had been well-received by critics in various cities. I was invited to perform it at the Smithsonian poetry series in Washington DC and the Carnegie series in Pittsburg. I opened at Theatre in Hollywood in 1989 to fine reviews, an LA Weekly award and small audiences.

I played my guitar, now a divine handmade Mark Whitebook, and got a few cabaret and folk gigs, but the dedication required to build a following eludes me, so for seven years I made a living as a screen writer pouring out scripts to order for French producers, performed Adieu, Jacques.. here and there and trotted out my by now extremely eclectic musical repertoire when the opportunity arose.

One way and another I scuffled up a living until I reached retirement age at which point to my delight and daily profound gratitude my SAG and Equity pensions kicked in together with Social Security. While not making me independently wealthy, these blessings banished the wolf far enough from the door to enable me to concentrate on being a crooner (or something akin to it) at last.

God willing, and the creek don’t rise, I intend to keep my companion, lover, ally and wife, my Mark Whitebook guitar, and my Chevy wagon for the rest of my days while I pick and croon...

Fender promotion

Noel did not often play an electric guitar when performing live, but in both 1968 and 1969 he was included in promotional magazines by Fender, showing off one of their electric guitars.

Other stars from the time who appeared alongside Noel in the booklet included The Byrds, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix.