Charlie Watkins...W.E.M. .... English Legend

[losthobos]

I dont know if you know of Charlie Watkins....he was a true character...accordionist who turned to rock n roll....made amps, pa,s before anyone had heard of a music festival...powered Hendrix, the who, stones etc and had to hide from the police due to noise abatement issues at Hyde park concert...no one had heard anything like it....went on to develop the copicat and W.E.M. Instruments....returned to accordion in later life making Songbird amps and midi units...died a couple of years back at 93....
Hopefully the link below will lead to his biog....pages of it but good read...
http://www.wemwatkins.co.uk/
You need to tap the 70 years in music link
Enjoy

 

[AccordionUprising]

Great stories!

 

[maugein96]

Interesting link Terry. There aren't many characters like Charlie left in this world, and he certainly made his mark in the music world (in the UK at least).

My first WEM amp was only a 30 watt job but I remember we were practising and a lady from three streets away came up to us and claimed she couldn't hear her TV for the racket of that "stupid twanging guitar", and complained that I didn't even sound like Hank Marvin!

We were into Surf rock at the time (I still am). A Finnish band named Laika and the Cosmonauts eventually succeeded in doing what we couldn't quite manage, but they were more than a decade behind us, and never started recording until 1987. I regularly listen to them even now. They wound up with a tour of the US in 2008, and IMHO they were the best band of that type ever. The genre is called "rautalanka" in Finland, but they diversified a bit from that. When I disappear off this forum for a while it's usually because I become a wannabe Cosmonaut. I can still play most of their stuff, but obviously not as well as they did. The money I've spent on accordions means that three out of four of my guitars are Squiers, although I do have a Burns Cobra that I use occasionally for weight training. It also doubles up for hammering in fence posts!

What's this got to do with the accordion? I think it started with Charlie Watkins, who also couldn't make up his mind whether he was an accordionist or a guitarist.

Thanks again Terry, great read!

 

[Glenn]

Indeed a great website and very interesting article. Pity it doesn’t go into any depth with regards to accordions. If only he could have made the accordion as “sexy” as his electric guitars we’d be laughing now.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[losthobos]

Johnny Maugein I too had a thing about Laika and the Cosmonauts and surf guitar in general....first tune I learned on accordion was Telstar
Maybe it's the tremolo that attracts us...
Glenn it's up to you to make the accordion sexy...no one will be laughing at you...
Style it up bro's <EMOJI seq="1f609">?</EMOJI>

 

[maugein96]

Terry,

Only Cosmonauts stuff I wasn't keen on was their takes on the old Surf classics like "Baja" , which was a bit too "heavy" for me.

One day I was browsing in a record shop (remember them?) and the guy was playing "Oahu Luau", one of their Hawaiian type efforts. I bought their album, "Surfs You Right", on the strength of that chance encounter, and I was hooked.

Whilst it was never going to have worldwide appeal, Mikko Lankinen's guitar work on that track is superb (IMHO). I've never heard any other player get the sounds he got out of that battered old Fender Jaguar with what look like 12 gauge strings. Another guy who never played the way they tell you in the books, but that's what sets him apart.

He didn't look as though he had worn that well compared with the other three guys in the line up, which never changed in the 21 years they played. He looked like an even scarier version of Jack Nicholson by then. According to Wiki he's still playing, although there is another pro Finnish guitarist with the same name and they often get them mixed up.

Sorry, I'd better stop waxing on, as this forum is for squeezers and not twangers.